Fukushima to Sendai, our base for the next 7 days

28th May

After checking out from Hamatsu Hotel, we made our 40 minutes drive to Fukushima airport, where we loaded the rest of our stuff. We also did a briefing with the Bonanza pilot to make sure we all understand what to do and when. It has been decided to do two low passes over the airport and then back towards the north for Sendai. Unfortunately today was a windy day and it was quite bumpy flying low with our great DC-3, our poor stomach had to deal with it anyway ! The good thing is that we were able to overfly the airport as planned and do some great photo shots of the rice fields around Koriyama.

Once we landed in Sendai we refueled our airplane directly and Paul repaired an oil temperature connector who failed and gave us an incorrect (or actually no) reading of the left engine oil temperature. An easy way of not having tons of tools in your pocket is to have this little tool, called the « Snoopy Tool » for an obvious reason !

While Paul did his job, I looked at the IFR/VFR procedures to use over the Pacific Ocean in order to comply exactly with the Custom requirements. It is very easily forgotten how much bureaucracy is needed for such flights, especially when you cross a border and you’re flying with an airplane that could maybe not even climb high enough to establish correct communication between ATC and us! So we will have to make sure we are awaited and not shot down over the Pacific ! Here are some flight preparation pictures.

The problem of having a strange sense of humor always puts me into bizarre situations...I was unfortunate enough to be outside today and got hit on finals by an Airbus A300...

Time is to go for dinner now, but before this, a group picture taken with my new selfie stick, what a revolution ;-)

Paul, Francisco, Mr. Isa, our DC-3 and myself!

 29th May

Today is an easy day for me but a busy one for Paul. He has to do some maintenance on the exhausts of our left engine, engine number 1. Some leaks were found from the collector and although this isn’t dangerous at first, if you have a fuel leak from the same place and have very hot gases close to it then it can become a very bad day. So better fix it now while time permits. You can see Paul doing his work

This is the old exhaust, that needs some repair.

When we fly on the tour, we need to make sure everyone can follow us on our daily trips across the World. For that reason, we have a Spot satellite tracking system that we must turn on before each flight, except local flights. This is what it looks like under the blue sky here in Sendai.