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This was a great flight, and the weather made it a true bush experience. It took a little more than an hour, almost half of which was winding through mountains with only a few hundred feet between the clouds and the ground at most, leaving no room for error. Here I am at 13:50 on dirt strip 15 at AVSim Base, ready for takeoff:
I took off into the half-mile visibility, rain, and low clouds hanging at about 300, ceiling was at around 1500:
After one minue in the air, I wasat 1800 feet and already above all the clouds...
As I moved off towards Level Island VOR, the clouds took on another layer, and I found myself squeezed between two layers with a long line of land right in front of my nose.
Then...a godsend...
The clouds lifted a tad and I was able to move through without much difficulty. Did scare me for a minute, though. Here I am, with Wrangell just in sight:
I entered the pattern on base at runway 10. Here I am, just before the turn on final.
After a little bit of side-to-side flying, I got myself lined up for landing. Here I am on final:
Here I am on touchdown (couldn't get a shot where the smoke showed, but I promise that this is where I touched down!), BFU's Twin Otter's first visit to Wrangell...
I turned into the very next taxiway (such good STOL), levelled the flaps, and pulled into parking, where I met the 12 miners. I would tell you their names if I remembered all of them. After 10 minutes in parking, everyone was aboard, and I turned around and taxied back to the runway. I turned out on the the middle of the runway, and picked the wheels up off the asphalt...
I turned and started cruising for Bronson Creek, with clouds at 4400. This made things tight:
In front of me I saw about 50 feet of air between the ground and the clouds. I didn't want to go into the clouds, so I decided to try to squeeze through...
WWHHHHHHEEEEEEEEWWWWWW!!!!!! I rolled right through with about 10 feet of air between me and the ground. Just as I got past that, I foud myself in a valley, with clouds meeting the mountains yet again. I realized that if I wanted to stay below the cloud layer, there would be a little bit of snaking to do. Here's one of my closer, but not the closest of, calls:
So I went on, with no navigational aids set, except, of course, for the GPS. I don't like using it, because it makes the flight way too easy, but in this case, it was how I found Bronson Creek. I had been looking for it, not realizing that I was 3500 feet directly above it. The runway that I should have landed on was runway 3, but I saw that it would be incredibly difficult to fly a pattern in the Twin Otter going for that one, so I set up for runway 21. Even on that, there wasn't much room for error. I began my descent, but could not get a good line up for it, so I slammed the throttle up to full thrust and brought the flaps back up some. I went back around, and began my descent again. More waving around tryign to line up, This time, I landed, (WWWHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWW again) but not by much. The vertical speed must have been 600 fpm, and there was a little bounce on touchdown. As you can see, I was halfway across the runway when I touched down. But here I am, after I got the thing on the ground and slowed down:
After getting it down to a safe taxi speed, I turned off and parked it in the grass and shut it down.
Sometime later, I'll fly back to AVSim Base. Hopefully the clouds will not have moved much, so I can experience this flight with this type of weather again, it was the weather for the ideal bush flight...
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