(Click here for Day 4, or here to go back to Day 1)
Day 5: The Plane Remains in Maine…
Message received at Blog HQ from Brian: “Hi, we have another day in Bangor, they still don’t have fuel at Goose Bay today, but hope to have it tomorrow [Tuesday 23 August] so we’re setting off early doors.”
Goose Bay is not just a (theoretically) handy place to fill up on fuel – it also happens to be crucial to Brian and Chris’s plans because from there they will be picking up equipment for the major transatlantic element of their trip. For example, an inflatable lifeboat.
In the meantime, in lieu of more info direct from the pilots, here is a screenshot from Google Maps, giving Google’s suggestion of how long it would take to get from Goose Bay to one of their next destinations, Iqaluit, if they were the type of people who got on commercial flights instead of flying themselves :
(Fun fact from www.theCanadianEncyclopedia.com: In 1987, its residents decided to change the name from Frobisher Bay to Iqaluit, thus reverting to its original Inuktitut name meaning “many fish.”)
Another quick Google search shows that by the time they get to Iqaluit from Goose Bay, they will have flown 1250km, or 776.71 miles:
Helpful suggestion from son-in-law Rob: “If they break the sound barrier they could do that trip in an hour.”
And hang on, what is that in the upper left corner of the map? “Northwestern Passages?”
The famous, semi-mythical Northwest Passages (i.e. a shortcut sea route that went from above North America and linked to Asia), that Europeans spent about 400 years trying to discover, and Sir John Franklin perished trying to find, and that Stan Rogers* wrote a song about?
Brian and Chris will now have the modern experience of finding the Northwest Passage, with none of that 400-year faffing about or (allegedly) resorting to cannibalism. They can just look out of the port side window and say, “Yep, there it is”.
Reminder that when they do get back in the air, these are the places to track their live progress:
https://uk.flightaware.com/live/flight/N21219
https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/n21219
(click the ‘play’ buttons to see a map of each leg of the route).
If you are enjoying Brian and Chris’s adventure or would like to ask them a question, feel free to leave a comment.
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