Here’s the mission…bring a new plane home from Europe!

This will happen soon – starting 18th August with a flight departing Adelaide:

Fly to Stans, Switzerland (the headquarters of Pilatus), this weekend, with my flight instructor (and highly experienced PC-12 pilot who has done this stuff before!)

Ready for pickup

Spend a few days visiting the factory (and Switzerland); inspect, accept, and locally fly my shiny new plane; install a few gadgets; and prepare to fly it back to Adelaide, Australia.

In the photos you see here, it has a swiss registration stuck over the Australian one (VH-TCP). That was done just while it was test flown from the factory as part of the verification and testing flights that are done for all new PC-12’s.

From August 23rd, we start the journey home to Adelaide.

This is where we plan to be at the end of each day on the way home:

• Stans, Switzerland (Start point)
• Crete
• Sharm el-Sheikh (Egypt)
• Muscat (Oman)
• Agra (India)
• Rest day: Visit the Taj Mahal
• Chiang Rai (Thailand)
• Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam)
• Rest day: Ho Chi Minh
• Bali (Indonesia)
• Broome (Australia)
• Adelaide (Home Sweet Home)

The NodePonies can hardly wait to get out of their suitcase and into the passenger seats for the trip home.

I’ve also got one of these cameras with me. I am intending to fit it into the cockpit (and interface it into the aircraft audio system), to try to capture and record a sense of the experience of flying out of and into a new international airport every day in this amazing aircraft.

This will be the first time I’ve ever been to any of these places. What a way to get there!