Thanks Nick, will try hard as life on the ground isn't doin' much for me. Wrote a yarn re my post bad news holiday (see below). When I get better my mission is to fly a helo to YLHI. Cheers mate.
I went to renew my flying medical the other day & the doctor sent me to see a heart surgeon instead. The shock reminded me that the good things of life, such as exercising the privileges of a pilots licence, can sometimes be shorter than you think. I considered this unexpected development & decided I needed a holiday.
Perched in the middle of the deep blue Tasman Sea about four hundred & fifty nautical miles east of Australia is picturesque Lord Howe Island. About five miles long & a mile wide, this speck of formerly volcanic rock was served for thirty years after WWII by a seaplane service (see Bryan Monkton’s book “The Boats I flew”) from Sydney.
These days the coral quay that once hosted everything from Catalina’s to Sunderlands is strictly for snorkeling & the Dash Eight’s use the two thousand nine hundred foot runway laid over the precious bit of level ground mid island. It’s an interesting little airstrip with a 5m highsand dune at one end and a shallow lagoon at the other, both discouraging impediments to any sort of runway over run. To make life even more interesting there is the impressive Mt. Gower to one side of the strip & an enthusiastic sea breeze that barrels across the airfield most days. Gower, as tall as the runway is long, is high enough to make it’s own weather, so throw in some orthographic cloud & rain some days too.Lastly are the airfields windsocks. Apart from the fact that they indicate differently at opposite ends of the strip, the Lord Howe socks are the only ones I’ve seen rotating rapidly around the pole in either direction followed just as quickly by hanging limp or standing erect (as in vertical).
All these factors combine to make the atmosphere in the little terminal building unlike any other I’ve encountered. Instead of being populated by bored airline users & disinterested staff the joint has an electric kind of excitement too it. “He’s coming”, shouted one of the locals as the Dash8 made his turn onto finals & everyone, intending passengers & terminal staff alike, moved for a look. The inbound turboprop was crabbed about thirty degrees into cross wind and, as it passed over the sand dune just before the threshold, a nasty gust ballooned it about thirty feet straight up. The pilots recovered nicely, kicked their machine straight then flared without bounce around mid field before braking firmly for a stop just before the piano keys at the other end of the strip. After the long backtrack taxi a lady with a bucket & mop boarded the aircraft &, not long after, some pale faced ticket holders emerged to start their holidays. All of which goes to show that runways, like life, are sometimes shorter than you think.