2007 Australian Air Tour
In April and May 2007, I spent three weeks touring eastern Australia in a Piper Warrior. I had a small amount of Australian flight experience from my time in Western Australia, but was generally new to aviation down under.
I found a few short web pages with helpful planning information, but mostly had to sort it out for myself. I hope that this ends up being useful to someone else, but while I’ve made every effort to be accurate, it is obviously imperative that you verify all regulations, procedures, charts, &c. for yourself. If you find something to be inaccurate, or have a suggestion for next time, please let me know.
The non-pilots among you, who are just here to see the koalas and the fishes, should probably skip straight to Details.
Acquiring a 90-day licence validation — at least for this American pilot — was fairly straightforward, although beware: the CASA bureaucrat who filed my paperwork, whom I visited specifically to avoid such a blunder, did not make copies of all of the required documentation, even though I gave it all to him. I would have been better off sending it myself.
The moral of the story is to triple-check before you leave the CASA office or drop that envelope into the post, to save yourself the minimum two-week round-trip postal delay when they reject it. After that was sorted out, I received the licence in three or four weeks.
It was only at this point, when I walked into a Jandakot flight school to get checked out and hire a plane, that I learned about the Aviation Security Identification Card (ASIC) — nobody at CASA ever said a word, and the owner of this place was adamant that I have one before I could fly solo. There’s a long version here, but the summary is that nobody seems to know whether GA pilots or foreign pilots operating on licence validations need an ASIC. Between two flight schools, CASA, and AOPA.au, I never got the same opinion twice. As for me, my ID was only checked once during the entire trip, and I forgot to ask what would have happened without it.
If you decide to get one, be prepared to (a) spend AU$143, (b) negotiate with the issuer to accept your non-Australian identity documents, and (c) wait at least six weeks (though I was told that “some cases” are held up indefinitely by the agencies conducting background checks).
If you ask me, the ASIC has unquestionably and significantly damaged general aviation in Australia, for absolutely no benefit. It very nearly scuttled the entire endeavour for me.
January 2008 update: I finally got a straight and official answer from an extremely helpful person in CASA’s licensing division. He made it clear that foreign pilots operating on a Certificate of Validation do not, at least as of January 2008, require an ASIC. (He also apologized for the fact that so many of CASA’s own staff don’t know this.)
The VFR pilot needs a stack of charts about two inches high to make a 6,000-km journey. Most of Australia is covered only by World Aeronautical Charts (WACs, 1:1,000,000), so you’ll need those, plus Visual Navigation Charts (VNCs, equivalent to US sectionals) and Visual Terminal Charts (VTCs, equivalent to US TACs) for the major cities. Unfortunately, WACs are issued very infrequently and without radio information, so you’ll also need low-altitude En-Route Charts (ERCs). I didn’t purchase any Terminal Area Charts, though I can no longer recall why. Perhaps they seemed redundant.
My advice: if you have time to do the detailed planning after you get to Australia, get them from a pilot shop, where you can really look at them and understand what you need before you buy. And then get more than you think you’ll need. If you end up changing your itinerary, and want to make a stop in complicated airspace for which you don’t have a VNC/VTC, you are unlikely to be ATC’s favourite airplane.
Buy an En-Route Supplement Australia (ERSA), which contains a lot of useful information about most but not all aerodromes (equivalent to an American A/FD). There were quite a few times that I found an airport on the WAC that I couldn’t find in the ERSA, or even online. Maybe the AOPA.au airports book has them, although as someone who likes sealed runways, if they’re not in the ERSA, I probably don’t want to land there anyway.
Finally, download the Visual Pilot Guides if you plan to visit a GAAP aerodrome. It’s maddening that the airspace is so complicated as to even require these, but here we are. CASA will also give you a very nice colour laminated version at no cost, perfect for use in the airplane, if you drop by a field office.
As for actually using these charts, I found the WACs to be very helpful for flight planning, and almost useless in most cases for actual navigation. Particularly once you get into the vast deserts, except when you pass the odd town or road, you’re probably going to be relying on your dead reckoning, ADF, and GPS.
Despite what I was led to believe, late April / early May were not dry weeks in eastern Australia.
The next time I make such a trip will be with an instrument rating, but I didn’t have one at the time; in all, 8 of our 22 days were affected in some way by rain! On the other hand, the entire population had been praying for that kind of rain for two years, so I like to think that I did my part.
I was advised that if I flew anti-clockwise, I would probably have a tailwind the entire time. This was one hundred percent accurate, and excellent advice.
First off: we in America are spoiled absolutely rotten by the quality of our weather data.
A good example: if I want information about winds aloft, I can visit a page like this, and get precise numbers — direction, speed, temperature — for a huge number of reporting points (176 across the US), for every 3000 feet of altitude, forecast out more than 24 hours, in an easy-to-parse text page. This is aviation gold.
If you’re a high-altitude Australian pilot you can get more or less the same thing, though not all on one page. If you’re a low-altitude pilot, I hope you like busy PDFs and lat/long conversion.
Airservices Australia are the folks you contact for a pre-flight briefing and to file flight notifications, and I was probably more confused than I needed to be about what that costs. As far as I can tell, if you just call the number, it’s a normal call. But you can also get a Telstra card (more below) that lets you call Airservices for a flat-rate 50-cents per call from a land line — very handy when you’re standing in a Birdsville pay phone.
They were generally very helpful, or at least tried to be, but the outback is huge. By default they’re going to read you information about fronts and storms located relative to towns that you (and probably they) have never heard of, and will have a very hard time finding on a huge map. They’ll convert them to latitude/longitude points for you on request.
At this time, you can access the Bureau of Meteorology aviation products without any special accounts. Just follow the instructions at the top of the page.
To file a flight plan, and maybe even to get a complete online briefing, you’ll need an account on the Airservices briefing page. You’ll need your Aviation Reference Number, which you get as part of your licence validation process, and which is processed immediately; if you call CASA Canberra, you can get them to give it to you over the phone 3 or 4 days after they get your paperwork.
Unsurprisingly, GSM mobile phone service was fairly rare outside of the cities, though I did have coverage in Swan Hill. I already had a Vodafone SIM, and as much as I hate giving money to them, I advised my friend to get a Telstra SIM to expand our options. It came in very handy once, so it was money well-spent.
It’s possible that CDMA coverage is more widespread, though if you’re in a place like Winton or Birdsville you can choose between a satellite phone or a land line. That’s it.
Internet was about equally rare, though the largest of the Australian hotels have finally joined the late 1990s with some form of always-on (note I didn’t say high-speed) internet. Even Birdsville has an internet cafe, though — it doubles as an art gallery and coffee shop — so you can get online briefings and file flight plans in most places.
The Telstra PhoneAway card, to which I alluded earlier, lets you make flat-rate 50-cent calls to Airservices Australia from a land line. Except that it doesn’t. What nobody tells you is that you need a special Airservices PhoneAway card, not a normal PhoneAway card. You may only be able to get these from CASA; I’m not sure if average Telstra outlets sell them.
I got lucky when learning the hard way an important difference between American and Australian search-and-rescue operations.
In summary: if you file an Australian flight plan with a SARTIME, unlike in America, it is an active search-and-rescue plan, even if you never explicitly activate it. If you haven’t explicitly canceled your SARTIME, they’re going to try to find you and your plane — first with a telephone, but then probably with helicopters and search planes. That will make for a bad day.
The best-practices that you maybe don’t always follow at home take on new importance in the outback. Running out of fuel anywhere is always going to be the inflection point of your day, but if you make a forced landing in the desert, you have a lot more excitement ahead of you.
Apart from the majors and the GAAPs, you can’t assume that airports will have avgas — even if the ERSA says they do. Richmond, QLD was entirely sold out of avgas, but Winton had 18,000 litres. Call ahead, and make sure if it’s not self-serve that someone will be there.
Many airports will accept your carnet fuel cards if you have them, but some of the more remote stations will not. Even if they operate under the same brand name, they may be an independent franchise that doesn’t accept carnet. Those outfits usually accept credit cards or EFTPOS, but one or two required cash, so carry plenty.
If I recall correctly, my worst fill-up was at AU$2.70 per litre, or about US$9.20 per gallon, in Birdsville on 10 May 2007. That was a spicy meatball.
Day-by-day below, or by location via the map at the top of this page. All of the maps in all of the pages are GPS data via Google Maps, which you can manipulate in more detail via the links below each map.
Complete photoset
Photoset with map placement
Preflight — A west-coast refresher, in which I visit a large tree
Day 0 — in which a two-year drought is singlehandedly broken
Day 1 — Sydney, NSW (YSBK) to Kempsey, NSW (YKMP)
Days 2-3 — in which sharks make their first appearance
Day 4 — Kempsey, NSW (YKMP) to Gold Coast, QLD (YBCG)
Day 5 — in which primarily sushi is consumed
Day 6 — Gold Coast, QLD (YBCG) to Townsville, QLD (YBTL) via Rockhampton, QLD (YBRK)
Day 7 — in which a long-lost vessel is rediscovered
Day 8 — Townsville, QLD (YBTL) to Cairns, QLD (YBCS)
Days 9-13 — in which the underwater depths are repeatedly plumbed
Day 14 — Cairns, QLD (YBCS) to Winton, QLD (YWTN)
Day 15 — Winton, QLD (YWTN) to Birdsville, QLD (YBDV)
Day 16 — Birdsville, QLD (YBDV) to Adelaide, SA (YPPF) via Broken Hill, NSW (YBHI)
Day 17 — in which football plays a prominent role in modern society
Day 18 — in which our heroes get a little tipsy
Day 19 — Adelaide, SA (YPPF) to Kingscote, Kangaroo Island, SA (YKSC)
Day 20 — in which our gastronomic requirements are satisfied
Day 21 — Kingscote, Kangaroo Island, SA (YKSC) to Swan Hill, VIC (YSWH) via Hopetoun, VIC (YHPN)
Day 22 — Swan Hill, VIC (YSWH) to Sydney, NSW (YSBK)
Epilogue — on hysteria, waste, and impotence (australia edition)
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phik » has it already been two and a half months? said,
August 7, 2007 @ 15:29
[...] I finally got around to finishing the writeup of my Australian adventure. [...]
Stu said,
August 10, 2007 @ 05:49
Fantastic read. I thoroughly enjoyed the series
joe shaw / i really can’t think of a good reason why i didn’t go said,
August 11, 2007 @ 18:56
[...] Schwan wit. Comments? Feel free to trackback to this post or email me directly. This entry (permalink) was posted on at 5:56 pm. « who wants to take bets on whether its renewed after sixmonths Home [...]
phik » Wave Rock said,
March 1, 2008 @ 06:45
[...] I live in the desert that is Perth, I spent a few days last summer in the eastern deserts, but this is the most desolate place I’ve ever been. It looks like the bush was torched and then salted, lest anything ever grow again, which is probably not as far from the truth as it sounds. Farmers are constantly fighting a war on salinity. [...]