Today I completed an epic world tour in the excellent Black Square Starship.
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Here's the debrief:
- 97,604 nm
- 286 legs
- 342 hours on the Hobbs
- 285 knots average TAS
- 298 calendar days
- 255 flight days
- 43 no-fly days
- Stops in nearly every country on earth with a land-able airport.
- Stops on every continent, including Antarctica.
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The original flight plan came from flightsim.to, with a few tweaks added, including:
- A stop at Reunion Island, because the original flew right past it. Even though it's a French dependency and thus technically redundant, it's right there! How can you not go?
- A leg to Marambio Base in Antarctica. It's not truly a World Tour unless you touch every continent now, is it?
- While in continental France, added a side helicopter trip to Monaco's heliport, as Monaco has no airport that Starship can operate out of. Just for the sake of completeness.
- And finally, I snuck in one of my favorite routes, Kathmandu VNKT to Paro VQPR. The PR888 approach to runway 15 at Paro is quite the adventure.
Original flight plan: https://flightsim.to/addon/93601/around-the-world-flight-plan
With my modifications: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VYLstIuhr0gOvMw1bqsPvL1y2YfP0-xn/view?usp=drive_link
After the first month or so, as I got more comfortable with Starship, I activated failures at a 5X rate. Most subsequent failures were minor in nature; burned out bulbs, etc., but there were a few serious incidents that had me looking for an alternate landing spot. There was one memorable failure approaching Mauritius at night, a generator quit and I probably did not respond to it properly; after several minutes trying to resolve it, a complete electrical failure occurred. While I landed successfully in the dark with no instruments (I even impressed myself with that one), I learned why momma always taught me to keep a clean pair of shorts in the flight bag.
All in all, an amazing adventure. After a few days rest for me and some maintenance time in the hanger for my best girl, it's back to the US for a western mountain loop tour. Just 3100 nm this time around, starting at Brown Field in San Diego and heading north along the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges. Upon reaching Mt. Ranier, I'll head east and then south along the Rocky Mountain range. The westbound legs will include a tour of the Grand Canyon (because it's there, of course) before returning to San Diego.
Side note: flying with me for most of the trip has been SayIntentions, which over the course of the jourmey has advanced by leaps and bounds in its overall feature set, not to mention the core ATC itself. It definitely adds to the immersion, and with the new daily and weekly "passes", is accessible to virtually everyone to at least try once.
In conclusion, hats off to Black Square once again, for creating this incredible machine. So many lessons learned on this journey, but perhaps the most significant to me personally is this: with Starship, I discovered the difference between just flying an aircraft, and really operating it.
Go on, watch Starship's introductory YouTube video again. You know you want to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhTqlOPqHC8
