Flying the Kamchatka to Alaska

After a surprising interesting hotel, the Mega palace in this part of the world. The idea is to get to Alaska today with a quick technical stop in UHPP, Petropavlosk refuel and then fly one of the longest leg of the journey 922 nm to Anadyr, a quick turn around and our exit to Alaska.

We are mentally ready and prepared.

Here is the brief:

A lot of water and cold one I guess

We are losing another hour today

While we are looking at shortcut for our flying, this map is tempting, looks like we can have a couple of them.

How wrong were we, none of them accepted and even with good radar coverage, there was no chance of getting any shortcut.

The assignment of HF frequencies, make me wonder if we needed to pull the sat phone out, but after about 20 nm of a dead VHF zone, where messages were relayed by the other participants we were in good VHF contact the whole way as well as radar.

No much traffic in this part of the world, but still old approaches and NDB fix, amazingly complicated and could be so simple with a GPS overlay...but I guess the Russian cannot admint to be using the american radar constellation for GPS usage....This is one to be kept in the open. We start to see GPS on the western market offering to use both the US and Russian satellite network...Hopefully this one will be less complicated in the future

Even the ILS was an amazing one with 3 NDB as passing point.

Plus the signal was pretty unreliable on the Glide and to top it all after seeing the ground we were aiming at the left runway ( the closed one) before the LOC brought us back to the correct heading.

This is a case where you need to be ready to follow the needles all the way to the decision height or respect the rules and be ready for a miss is you are not on a stabilized approach. We saw the ground at 700 feet AGL

Old Soviet look, the real look of a bygone era.

The be careful notice was a premonition.

Very nice tailwind on this leg , as advertised

Clear sky most of the way

Getting ready for the approach

Captain Louis-Alain, getting ready for the approach with a full brief on the do and don't

Intersting rock formation with a lot of volcanoes in this part of the world

Right on the approach

Mig 25 Foxbat on the ramp and in active readiness

Unique follow me car

The weather report for our arrival in UHMA is not good with thunderstorm over the airport confirm by the handler and a rapid phone call to the office.

With the alternate beyond the range of the Mustang

we decided to pack it for the night and spend our second night in Russia