AOPA Pilot Magazine - October 2011 - 59

our standard VHF radios hundreds of miles from the land-based transmitters. A passing airline pilot on the way from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates to Houston, Texas, checks in to wish us well. He expects to land in about four hours, roughly the same time we anticipate touching down in Greenland. Halfway across the Davis Strait and about 220 nm from our destination, we check in with Iceland Control, and the Scandinavian controller’s clipped English reinforces the reality that we’re closer to Europe now than the United States. We inform him of our position and planned arrival time. It’s critical that we arrive by 4:30 p.m. local time because that’s when the control tower closes, and Greenland officials are known to impose massive fines for landing at “closed” airports. The magenta course line on the moving map shows a distinct curve in our path at this far northern latitude, and the wet compass varies up to 30 degrees. When air traffic controllers speak of headings, they add the words “magnetic” or “true”— a clarification that would be meaningless in the world’s more central latitudes. We think about the air crews who pioneered and built up these routes in the 1930s and 1940s, and the skill and courage it must have taken to navigate such vast, trackless, and lonely expanses with primitive navigation equipment and no reliable weather reporting. The ocean ahead is a mix of deep blue water and snow-covered ice that mirrors the sky in color and texture. I scan the horizon for the first sight of land, and it emerges subtly at a distance of just under 200 nm. At first it is impossible to tell whether the apparition is cloud or ice. But dark shading and rough contours soon confirm that the object on the horizon really is land. And even though we’re traveling at 150 knots toward a place that’s already in sight, our arrival is still more than an hour away. The uniform temperature of the water below us and the air mass we’re flying through is so stable that the air at 7,500 feet remains absolutely placid. The Bonanza is rigged perfectly, and even though it doesn’t contain an autopilot, holding a heading and altitude is simple. We marvel at otherworldly landscape as it comes sharply into focus.

“This doesn’t look like another country,” Eichhorn says. “This looks like another planet.” Crossing the coast we feel the first light chop we’ve experienced in hundreds of miles. The tower at Sonderstrom clears us to land, and we follow the A36 to a smooth touchdown on an expansive runway made for Cold War bombers and jet transports. The facility was known as Bluie West Eight when the U.S. Army founded it in 1941. Later it was renamed Sonderstrom Air Base, and in the early 1990s it was handed over to Greenland and now goes by its Inuit name, Kangerlussuaq (which means “big fjord”). Many of the former Danish names here have been replaced by native titles. To Americans, the only thing the languages have in common is that both are virtually unpronounceable. The airport, one of the largest and best equipped in

“Did you imagine when you learned to fly that you would take a GA airplane somewhere like this?”
Greenland, is far and away the biggest thing going in Kangerlussuaq, a town of fewer than 600 people. We check into the airport hotel and exhaustion allows us to sleep despite sparkling sunshine at midnight. Unforgettable The next two days bring a series of unforgettable photo flights over the ice cap and incomparable, ice-jeweled Disko Bay 150 nm to our north. We overfly the undulating ice cap that contains fissures hundreds of feet wide and perhaps thousands of feet deep. Rivers of meltwater carve plunging paths in, around, and through the ice like liquid cutting torches. Unknowable quantities of perfectly pure water collect in temporary, electric blue lakes atop glaciers. After landing, we tour the Russell Glacier on foot and watch, hear, and feel the colossal impact as ice blocks the size of boulders crash into violent torrents of water that carry them plunging to the coast. The incomprehensible scale of this place and the unfathomable power of the natural forces unleashed here make lasting impressions.

When we retrace our path on the flight home, the weather for our second crossing of the Davis Strait is, if possible, even better than the first. The sight of three Bonanzas in a loose V formation, seemingly stationary while the vastness of the frozen Arctic passes beneath, is a vision that will stay with me, and the rest of our party, a very long time. The places we traveled together are recorded in memory and photos, yet even after the fact, the experience seems somewhat unreal. “Did you ever imagine when you learned to fly that you would take a GA airplane somewhere like this?” Eichhorn says. “I had high hopes and expectations for this trip, but the actual experience far surpasses them.” His certainty that everything would work out well mechanically and logistically turned out to be well founded. All three airplanes performed flawlessly during the roughly 40 hours of flight from beginning to end. There were no blown tires, fouled spark plugs, or broken alternator belts, even though we had done our best to prepare for those kinds of things. The avionics in each airplane performed solidly, and we were able to purchase avgas at each of our planned stops. The weather, our biggest variable, was completely favorable in northern Canada and Greenland (although we encountered plenty of clouds in Maine and southern Canada). “Are we lucky or what?” Eichhorn says after touching down at AOPA’s home base in Frederick, Maryland. I assume he is referring to the factors listed above, but his mind is on bigger issues. “Having the freedom to own our own airplanes and fly them internationally—those are concepts that would be completely unimaginable to most people in the world today. When you realize how capable these airplanes really are, and how many places they put within our reach, you can never look at cross-country flying in quite the same way again. “The only downside to this trip,” he says, “is that it makes me want to do more.” Email the author at dave.hirschman@ aopa.org.
AOPA PILOT • 59 • OCTOBER 2011

AOPA Pilot Magazine - October 2011

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