Born To Fly Page 5
Now we had to harness this support, as well as learning everything else we needed to. I would go to bed every evening knowing a little more about circumnavigating the globe than I had done that morning, whether from someone I had spoken to, something I read or a lesson learned through trial and error. I spent a lot of time every day stressing about the job list that seemed to grow every day and the looming deadlines forever clouded by the chance of failure. Not enough time was spent looking back.
I soon learned some serious life lessons about the differences between knowing how something should go and the reality involved in making it happen. I had to do so much every day that I forgot just how much we had all learned about the ins and outs of the flight. There was no better time to realise this than when complete strangers started asking questions. ‘What will you eat?’ ‘Will you sleep while you’re on autopilot?’ ‘How will you go to the toilet?’ And even, ‘Are you going to stop?’ It took a while to get used to some of these, even though we heard them over and over again. Some questions made me smile, some made me think. Others caused me to stand there wondering what on earth I had gotten myself into.
Ken’s support was phenomenal. Flying around the world was anything but a documented step-by-step process, not even on Google, and he had information that was vital to the flight, information not readily available in books or online. Seeing how much effect Ken had on the flight in the early stages made me realise that I would need to find more people with particular areas of knowledge, with expertise in areas I didn’t know about, whether flying itself or aspects of the planning stage. I put myself out there, admitting my own lack of knowledge and asking for help, and gradually the team grew. Little did I know then how large it would become. Some people were prominent from beginning to end, others would play one-off parts that were all vital to the success of the flight. And they joined the team in unexpected ways, too.
We knew we had the big picture, a broad understanding of where to go and what to look for, what the best case would be and what could possibly be the worst.
More than anything else at this stage, we needed funds. This was an expensive adventure far beyond anything the average family could afford, including mine, but this where the challenge lay. Mum and Dad offered all they could, as did family and friends. They helped wherever possible, including backing me financially to go to the first meetings with potential sponsors, meetings for the website and image and to visit experienced pilots so I could gain further knowledge. These were the meetings where I had nothing behind me except the dream, my family, Ken and Dick Smith. My brother Adam bought the laptop we used to put together the sponsorship proposals and my other brother Chris spent hours on the end of a phone and typing hundreds of personalised letters to potential sponsors.
We wrote letters to every company we could think of, whether to do with aircraft or not, asking for funds or goods and services. We thought the direct approach would work; we’d just sit down with any company that showed an interest or looked promising, we’d tell them what we wanted, they would tell us what they could give and we would sort things out from there. But after we talked to Snap, who had designed our website, we realised we had to be much more structured than that. We needed to have levels of sponsorship – gold, silver, bronze – and outlines of specific costs involved. We had to be able to say exactly what sponsorship money would be used for, how much everything would cost, and outline every return.
We thought $2000 was about right as the minimum figure for having a logo on the aeroplane. With no experience we tossed various ideas around and got as many opinions as possible. And then one day I was walking across the bridge near home and I looked down and saw a brick with a company name etched into it. Great advertising, I thought, what a good idea, and I bet it didn’t cost much either. I mulled this over for a while. I guessed that many of the people who wanted to support my venture probably weren’t especially well off – maybe not wealthy enough, for example, to fork out $2000 for a logo. But what about asking potential sponsors for less money? What could we give them? How could we offer thanks and appreciation to those who wanted to be a part of the flight?
That’s how I came up with the idea for the 500 Club. We said it would cost $500 to have a short message, signature or the name of a school or business written on the flaps of the aeroplane, and also mentioned on the website. This turned out to be a great idea; heaps of people wanted to do this. The first time I spoke to the public at AusFly in Narromine in September 2012, we had people standing up and wanting to contribute straightaway.
The first people who bought a 500 sponsorship, apart from my grandparents, was a company called Avplan. They have an iPad app for aircraft navigation. It turned out that Bevan from AvPlan had always wanted to fly around the world but had never been able to proceed past the planning stage. Having Avplan on the plane was his way of fulfilling his dream.
We worked very hard on the sponsorship proposal, we must have refined it about a million times. Snap printed it up for us, completely changing what we had written. We went from a one-page document to a thirty-page proposal in a folio printed on glossy paper, and tried it out on different people. If someone like, say, the head of an engineering firm said bluntly, ‘Nup, I wouldn’t read that,’ we would go through it all again and change it. We had to learn how to appeal to as many different groups as possible.
I learned a lot about the media at this stage too. The first story about me, as I said, had been in the local paper. It wasn’t what I expected; it had things in it that I hadn’t said and information that was incorrect. But as a result a bloke from a town on the Sapphire Coast contacted me and asked what he could do to help. He said he could do PR. When we met he was persuasive. He told me he could guarantee eighty grand in sponsorship in the first month. He was successful, he’d done well, so I believed him. But for months it was all promises and nothing was happening. This taught me a very important lesson that was verified time and time again: nothing is confirmed until it is in your hand or signed away. We soon parted ways and I continued to look ahead. and I could just see this wasn’t going to work. We spent quite a lot on this guy and ended up with very little in return. It took a while before I managed to find someone who knew media.
It was okay to stand up in front of an audience in Narromine with a globe and explain what route I wanted to follow, but that was the easy bit. Actually plotting the flight path took a long time, and a million things had to be considered. The path had to have legs shorter than the aircraft’s maximum range, it had to take into account political situations in the countries I was planning to visit, questions of Customs and immigration, ‘ports of entry’ into each country, costs to transit each stopover, visas and legal requirements for a visiting pilot and much, much more. We knew that after we had chosen the route we had to find out whether every country, whether on a stopover or being overflown, would issue us a landing clearance. Some countries demanded less paperwork than others although some, such as the USA, wanted you to fill out your name, address, passport number and flight details about 487 times. Ken had recommended a company in the United Kingdom that could take care of organising clearances. This was the only area of the flight planning that was outsourced and not completed within our team.
Sorting all this out took months, countless emails and a headache or seven. Each destination would need to be contacted, Customs organised at the entry and exit of many of the stopovers, fuel availability confirmed and reconfirmed on a regular basis. In some cases fuel would have to be shipped and stored for my arrival. Accommodation and airport transfers would have to be organised; due to my age and lack of a steady income I couldn’t hire a car or own a credit card. Routing would have to be chosen and put into flight logs for each and every leg around the world. Aircraft maintenance with the accompanying paperwork and legal issues needed to be confirmed well before departure.
I had to ensure I was ready to take off and fly east, over water, through endless changes in airspace, over mountains, t
hrough four diverse seasons and into situations I had never seen before. With safety paramount, this was one of the most important areas of planning. I would require an instrument rating to fly IFR, or instrument flight rules, a six-week course to teach a pilot to fly within cloud and weather where visual navigation with the ground is impossible. With such a diverse range of weather and so long being spent in the air it was essential to have the ability to fly through cloud and not have to navigate around it. This also allowed me to fly an aircraft at night, without which the entire plan was impossible. I would have to study for four weeks and pass an exam in order to get this instrument rating. Underwater escape training, emergency survival training and lengthy conversations with very experienced pilots were added to the pre-departure ‘musts’.
Apart from the obvious – an aircraft – the amount of equipment required for the flight was huge. Ferry tank system. Signwriting. Oil. Oil funnel. Fuel filters. Fuel water testing paste. Spare HF radio aerials. Tool kit. Cleaning equipment. Gloves. Fuel water filtration funnel. Headset. Navigation equipment. Emergency location beacons. Life jacket. Cold water immersion suit. Life raft. Portable GPS. Portable VHF. Safety throw bag. Sea dye. Mirror. Strobe light. Emergency heat blanket. Rations. Handheld compass. Hivis clothing. First-aid kit. Survival kit. Sunblock. Insect repellent. Medicine. Tie down kit. Cowl plugs. Aircraft cover.
As the planning progressed items were added to every list. Whether purchased, sponsored or on loan, each and every item was slowly and sometimes painstakingly gathered together.
The ‘big picture’ was proving to be bigger than anything I had ever imagined.
CHAPTER
6
In the good old USA
Although every item on our equipment list was vital in some way, one stood out far beyond the rest. An aircraft.
Not just any aircraft, but one that met a long list of requirements, mostly concerned with safety. Speed, state-of-the-art avionics and navigation systems, aircraft and engine reliability were all absolutely necessary too. One major and nonnegotiable factor was the aircraft’s ability to fly long distances over water. Although the route was not finalised until late in the planning phase we had a rough idea of how I would cross the Pacific Ocean and therefore what the longest leg – Hawaii to the west coast of the United States – would be. With the longest leg spanning over 2000 nautical miles, the aircraft would require roughly three times the usual quantity of fuel. We would take a regular light aircraft – whatever we might choose it to be – and modify the interior to accommodate a large fuel tank and pump system, allowing extra fuel to be transferred to the engine during flight.
By working through our requirements we came up with a list of suitable aircraft types. All were powered by a similar piston engine, all equipped with four seats, all outfitted with state-of-the-art avionics, all boasted a suitable cruise speed. Now we had to work out how to find our perfect plane, and then how to pay for it. The ideal way to source an aircraft would be for an aircraft manufacturer to lend it to us as their form of sponsorship in return for publicity during the flight. A second option would be to source an aircraft privately, whether purchased or on loan. Last but not least we could hire an aircraft, which meant finding someone who was willing to see his or her machine venture on a flight that was nothing if not risky. This was a constant preoccupation for all of us – and it rarely left my mind while I was studying for my instrument rating at Port Macquarie, four hours north of Sydney.
The decision had been made early on to take on the flight as a teenager during 2013 and not in 2014 as originally planned. We then needed to decide on a date, but how? I began to look at an event called AirVenture, the world’s biggest aviation celebration that takes place in the USA in late July. I had always dreamed of flying into AirVenture in the same way I had dreamed of flying around the world. I worked backwards from the show using the rough route we had decided on to determine the departure date from Australia. In the same way I worked from the air show forward to see what date I would arrive back home. With a rough itinerary in hand I went to Ken. We needed to study the weather for all the legs when I planned to undertake them; luckily the itinerary I had put together worked and each crossing of the oceans aligned well with the expected weather. It was decided then that I would plan to depart on 30 June 2013.
Every day that passed without an aircraft, every day that brought us closer to the takeoff date, caused a little more stress. We couldn’t do any detailed flight planning, preparation for the installations of an extra ferry tank in the cockpit of the aircraft or paperwork until we knew what plane I would actually be flying.
We had sent our sponsorship proposals and information about the flight to aircraft manufacturers around the globe. One had gone to Cessna, one of the largest in the world. I happened to be in Townsville, north Queensland, visiting my brother and his partner, and one evening at dinner my phone rang. On the other end was an employee of Cessna in Wichita, Kansas.
It was early December 2012 and Cessna was due to shut down for Christmas, but they sounded really interested in supplying an aircraft for me, and quickly. We exchanged several emails and arranged to talk via Skype later that night Australian time. The 2am Skype meeting gave the strong impression that they wanted something finalised as fast as possible and before the end of their working year, less than forty-eight hours away.
If we managed to pull this off, it would change everything. The project would become a whole lot simpler.
Fighting to remain calm, I set up the computer, ironed a shirt and laid it across the back of the chair. With notes sitting neatly on the keyboard I set my alarm for 1:45am, 1:50am, 1:55am and 2:00am before climbing into bed. I hardly slept. Then I silenced the alarm, and ignoring my brother who was asleep only metres away, I turned on every light in the room. I had a cold shower, cleaned my teeth and got dressed. The best thing about a Skype meeting is that although you require a neat and professionally ironed shirt, the pants are completely optional. With my ironed shirt and pyjama shorts on I sat down, ready to chat with one of the biggest aircraft companies in the world.
I stared at the computer screen willing it to ring, and at a little after 2am it finally did. After the team at Cessna was introduced we began to chat, covering all aspects of Teen World Flight. What? Where? When? Why? We spoke about the work completed so far, and where we had found support. The conversation was fantastic, they were great people who seemed to have a genuine interest in the flight and also in seeing Cessna become a part of what Teen World Flight was trying to achieve. After a conversation lasting around an hour we parted and I pulled off the ironed shirt and crashed back into bed.
Cessna had implied that our partnership would be finalised quickly – we had spoken about all that at length – and so it was with great eagerness that we expected a reply the next day. We didn’t hear from them. But that was okay. We had been too optimistic, thinking things could be resolved so fast. So we turned our attention to other matters connected with Teen World Flight and waited for the end of the Christmas and New Year break.
On the day Cessna began their 2013 working year I sent another email. There was no reply, so I set my alarm for 2am and called Wichita, leaving messages on several different Cessna numbers. Still no response. I was confused. How did we get here after such a positive conversation? Maybe they were all at a convention somewhere. Maybe messages were not getting through.
January was slipping away and I decided to seek advice. I called Dick Smith, an owner of Cessna aircraft himself, to ask his opinion. I had told him about Cessna’s reaction, and like everyone he had been very excited. What should I do now?
Dick’s reply was far from what I had expected. He suggested I buy a suit, a tent and a plane ticket to Kansas. I should set up the tent on the front lawn of one of the biggest aircraft manufacturers in the world, clamber inside wearing my suit and wait until somebody saw me.
My first reaction was: ‘Ha ha ha! Good one!’ But Dick was serious. And as I mulled over wh
at he had said I thought perhaps there was something in it. I floated the idea, and the general opinion was that if Cessna was really as interested as they had seemed, everything would be fine once I saw them. And I was convinced that face to face I stood a better chance of explaining Teen World Flight and making sure they supported us. And so I embarked on two days and nights of solid planning, checking passports, organising transfers and internal flights in the USA, booking accommodation (I had decided the tent probably wasn’t necessary). And I had spoken with Dick on a Thursday. By Saturday morning I was standing in the departure lounge of Sydney’s International airport with an airline ticket in my hand and a new suit neatly folded in my carry-on luggage.
As I waited for the flight, the enormity of what I was actually doing struck home. Oh my. I was trying to stay calm, telling myself that in a few days I would return home with a partnership from Cessna, the flight would progress rapidly and we would be right on track for the departure. Because this plan had been Dick’s idea, I headed to the bookshop intending to buy Dick’s book to read on the plane. Reading his words seemed like a good way to understand more about this man who was doing so much for me and who had supported the flight since the very beginning. Unfortunately they didn’t have a copy and so I looked for something else to read. I looked up and standing right in front of me was Dick Smith, the real Dick Smith, and his wife Pip. I just stood there, trying to convince myself that they were actually looking at me.
Dick, who was travelling overseas too, was just as surprised as I was. ‘Wow, hi!’ he said. ‘You’re actually going to Wichita? That’s great!’