Our last day in Hispaniola. Jim from Caribbean Flying Adventures drives us to the airport one last time. He and his wife have been amazing hosts, and we would never have gotten anything done without him.
We are headed north to Santiago Airport to the Go Ministries outfit to pick up a team of medical staff from VA and their gear. Another 8 people and a couple thousand pounds of gear. Luckily, in addition to our two planes, and Glenn who arrived the previous day, we had been able to secure the help of two additional aircraft—a Bonanza and a Cessna 206 (with a lot of hauling capacity).
We get to Santiago, and the efficiency of the ground crew here is night and day compared to El Higuero. (Santiago is technically served by Airline service—as we were arriving, an American Airlines 737 was taking off—so perhaps that explains it.) We quickly get our aircraft refueled, load up and go. Our passenger is flying in a "little plane" for the first time, and is clearly a little apprehensive. And we do our best to lighten the mood, as we try to fly around and over building cloud cover.
However, our communications with Port-au-Prince does not help matters. When we radio in this time around, we actually get a response much to our surprise. We are instructed to give the city and airport of Port-au-Prince a wide birth. Clearly the controller is a bit overwhelmed, and wants to have as little traffic as possible approaching her area. After a few garbled exchanges (where she confused our call sign with a different aircraft 50 miles away), we decide to leave things alone and proceed on our own down to Jacmel avoiding overflying Port-au-Prince.
Aside from the exchange with the Port-au-Prince controller, we arrive in Jacmel for the first time without incident. Our passenger, clearly relieved to be on firm ground, gives us a big hug.
We have a few hours before we have to depart for home, and would dearly have liked to have seen the clinic. But as with most everything else, arranging for transportation into the city of Jacmel takes over an hour, and we quickly give up on that idea.
But, we did pick up an additional passenger who wants to hitch a ride with us back to the States. He is a Canadian aid worker, who had been working in Jacmel for two weeks (almost since immediately after the quake), and he needed to head home to see his wife who had gotten ill. Amazingly, he is an electrician who had been told that there would be a need for his skills at the clinic. But once he got there, of course there was really not much for an electrician to do. So instead, he was conscripted to be a field nurse, doing everything from changing dressings to inserting IVs. e said that he was looking forward to a hot shower and a shave—apparently he had been told not to shave in order to avoid any infections. Such is the state of affairs in that city still.
One minor complication. As the Pilots in Command, we are responsible for filing the appropriate customs and immigration information with Miami Customs, and we are supposed to do this over the internet. But of course, no internet connection in Haiti. Right. So, we have to call Jim in Santo Domingo, and have him process the necessary paper work.
We depart Jacmel around 3pm. Our goal is to refuel once in the Bahams, and get to Florida, then up as far as we can up the east coast that night. We are seeing forecasts of storm activity in the eastern seaboard. If we don't get home by the next day, we won't get home for a few days.
We depart Jacmel, and this time we have no choice but to overfly Port-au-Prince. We get in communication with the Port-au-Prince controller—the same woman that seemed so overwhelmed before. We are trying to get a flight plan activated, but clearly she has little idea what we are talking about. A jet airliner entering her area requests a transponder code (a unique radio identifier code). She responds by calling us on the radio and giving us the transponder code. (Somewhere, someone must have been really confused seeing what is supposed to be a 737 or some such, instead traveling at a pokey 130 knots at 10,000 feet.) As we overfly Port-au-Prince, the destruction is still pretty apparent even from that high up.
As we cross the Hatian Coast, we lose radio contact with Port-au-Prince control. The area immediately outside of Haiti's airspace is controlled by Miami Center. We radio into Miami Center, and are greeted with the crisp professionalism that we have gotten so accustomed to (and spoiled by?). After the controller activates our flight plan, and gives us the proper transponder code, I couldn't resist saying "It's really good to finally talk to someone who knows what they are doing." To which she replied "Yeah, we get that a lot..."
The rest of the flight is uneventful, except for the glorious sunset in the Bahamas. We get into Ft. Lauderdale executive around 8pm. Customs clearance goes off without a hitch. And we stagger into the FBO lobby to get food while our planes are refueled. We had been at that same FBO just three days ago, but that seems like ages ago. We drop off our life rafts (no longer necessary), and bid our passenger good luck. After we recharge on vending machine food (yuck), we get back on the plane to try to make it to Savannah GA.
Exhausted, we arrive in Savanna, GA past 11pm. Of course, the airport is closed. The FBO is closed. We park the planes, and now need to figure out how to get out of the airport. We head towards the one building that still has its lights on—the Gulfstream service center. The reception area is open, but no one is there. We look around, and finally find the guard house. The security guards kindly call us a cab. We end up at a local motel, and crash completely exhausted.
The next morning, we depart bright and early. We have to beat the storm front moving in from the south west. We depart maybe 30 minutes ahead of the cloud buildup. We find ourselves having to file IFR in the air—though given the possibility for icing we would dearly like to avoid flying in the clouds. We do have to fly through a few clouds, but by the time we reach Washington/Maryland the sky has cleared up considerably. And we make it back to NJ early with the help of some tailwinds.
These few days have been utterly exhausting. But I learned a lot about what it means to fly in a completely different system. We in the US are definitely spoiled by an air traffic system that works—with capable controllers and the necessary infrastructure to support them. I learned an immense amount about the importance of proper ADM especially when the support services are less than reliable. And, of course, I learned a great deal about the what is going on in Haiti and the people who are working incredibly hard to bring some semblance of stability and basic medical care to that community. All in all probably the most intense and in many ways mind-blowing week I've spent in a while.
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