Wednesday, 13 July 2011 15h00 – Moving on The all-nighters have started as D-day for Sling 4 ATW approaches at the speed of light. Although the prototype ATW Sling 4 won’t be making an appearance at Virginia, the Sling 4 launch at 10h00 on Tuesday 19 July is a fixed date and she’ll leave for

Sunday, 7 August 2011 Jean and James starts the first leg of the adventure In a way it was a blessing to have the delays. We worked so hard and so late every day that all of us were absolutely exhausted. So, early yesterday morning when Jean told James on the phone that we had

Wednesday, 10 August 2011 Email correspondence from Director of Civil Aviation Mauritius Email from the Director of Civil Aviation in Mauritius: We refer to your mail below. We have to inform you that your request cannot be acceded to, as your aircraft is not equipped with communication equipment enabling you to maintain a continuous two

Saturday, 13 August 2011 Looking at the weather for this leg Sias from VFRPlanner.co.za has sent in the following weather forecast for this leg: Working on a 13/8/2011 01:00Z take-off from Colombo to Phuket; I have added the winds to a 105kts cruising speeds which brings us to a 9h08 flight with a nice tail wind

Tuesday, 16 August 2011 Permission woes for James and Jean James & Jean have decided to postpone departure to tomorrow evening at 6pm (SA local time) on the 17th of August due to not having received permission back from Taipei yet. Updates will be given during the course of tomorrow. Tuesday, 16 August 2011 Message from Phuket

Monday, 22 August 2011 Re-planning our route on the hoof Sorry we’ve been a bit slack at keeping our latest news up to date. We’re off to Taipei city centre later today and we’ll see if there’s a good quiet place to do a short video update for a change. First things first – we’ve had

Thursday, 25 August 2011 Procedure for using HF radios when crossing the ocean For those of you who followed the departure from Guam, you might have heard a discussion between ATC and ZU-TAF asking them what com radios they have onboard. Below is a very interesting post by Amateur Radio AB9IL with regards to HF communications.

Sunday, 28 August 2011 Arrived safely in Honolulu Whoa Aloha, we’re here and settling in for a big sleep. After all we’ve been not only awake, but seriously focused for the whole of three of the last 5 nights without any daytime sleeping either.Anyhow, it turns out we’re also boarded and may not budge until we

Friday, 2 September 2011 On the way to the Los Angeles! 2011-09-01 1:17 UTC+2 The guys departed from Honolulu shortly after midnight (SA local time) and took off to Kahului on Maui to refuel. We overheard James say to ATC that they will be there for 45minutes before flying to the mainland. Good luck guys, and

Tuesday, 6 September 2011 Departure from LA delayed OK, my turn to deal with the bureaucracy … although we made application to fly from Torrance to Brown Field where we would exit the USA into Mexico the powers that be seemed to miss that part and issued us flight authorization but not to Brown Field. We