Day 7
Riyadh - Muscat
Not a very happy start to the day! Part of the pre-flight planning was to be leaving Riyadh on a Thursday or Friday so that the military ranges to the east are closed and airway A415 to Doha open during the day. We checked this out with ATC before filing the flight plan and all was agreed. However, when we requested start-up we were told to return to flight planning and re-route as A415 is only available to traffic inbound to Doha and they had refused to accept us. You would have thought they could have made an exception..... anyway 45 minutes later we started-up and staggered NORTH East in to a horrible headwind. Just under an hour was added to our planned flight time..anyone know why? For the first couple of hours things looked rather sad, but once we turned the corner around the north of Bahrain the speed picked up and the likelihood of having to divert for fuel became a bad dream.
We flew down the Gulf at 7500, talking to Bahrain, Doha, and UAE, coasted-in at Abu Dhabi and after the Oman FIR routed direct to Muscat, where they really seem to know what VFR means!
Airborne time was 5hrs 35mins, fuel remaining on landing 1hr 10mins. As I have said previously; we are rather well endowed in that department!
Muscat is a planned day off, but it's going to be at least two days as the Pakistan and India clearances have not come through yet, despite being applied for a month ago. We can't really complain since the Muscat Grand Hyatt is certainly comfortable. The wallet is going to take a bit of a bashing though!
I'll post some photos over the next couple of days.