Goin' to Kathmandu. . .

The Plateau of Tibet is a strange landscape, because it is relatively flat, but at very high altitude. I was flying along at FL290, and it was a bit like flying over the eastern US, rolling hills, lots of little lakes-- until I realized that those little, rolling hills were all around 20,000 feet high, as high as Denali in Alaska (Mount McKinley to you gringos), the highest point in North America.

As I got within a hundred nm or so of Kathmandu (Nepal), I thought that I really should visit Mount Everest. I wasn't sure how to find it, because it's not marked on the map in FS09, but I did know that it's over 29,000 feet tall, and on the border between Nepal and Tibet (or China, if you're Chinese).

The GPS system in FS09 does display national borders, so I just flew to the border and followed it east towards the highest mountains I could see. Just to make sure I didn't miss it, I set the AP altitude to 28,900 feet. 😂

Sure enough, after an hour or so of following the border, I came face to face with the biggest mountain on earth: Everest.

Then I had a really stupid idea. . . 😂

Ed

. . . and the stupid idea was:

"I bet I can land this Beechcraft on the peak of Mount Everest!!" 😂

Well, I tried. And tried. And tried again, for a couple of hours. And died, and died, and died. . . you get the picture.

My general plan (if you can call such a stupid idea "a plan") was to approach at the same altitude as the peak, and at the slowest speed that would keep the plane from stalling (about 100 kias at that altitude). I would fly in, decreasing speed as I got closer, and just before I crossed the peak, I'd deploy the spoiler, reverse the props, and stall right onto the top of the highest point on earth. I approached from the south, and followed the ridge from the lower, southern peak, up to the highest peak.

Hey, what could go wrong? 😉

Well, a couple of the things that can go wrong are that you can stall too soon, fall short, and bury the plane up to the tail in the snow on the side of mountain. Or you can come in too high or fast and overshoot, and stall while plummeting down the OTHER side of the mountain. That option was actually preferable, because there was a pretty clean shot down that side, so you could pull in the flaps, hit the throttle, and fly around to try again.

I never did actually manage to land, but I crashed REALLY CLOSE to the peak a couple of times! 😂

And it was an awful lot of fun.

Finally, I gave it up and set a course for Kathmandu, which was only about 60 nm away to the south west. Landing at Tribuhvan International Airport (VNKT) is a challenge in itself, because it is down in a valley. The airport elevation is about 4400', but it is right next to the Himalayas, so you have to descend rather quickly to get in there. I had a to fly the pattern a couple of times to get low enough to land.

But it was a very fun day of flying. 😀

Ed

👏 Fascinating, you have the talent to draw pictures with words, very rare indeed.
I await the next installment with baited (bated) breath (yes my breath is pretty baited (rim shot)).

Thanks, RadarMan. You're too kind.

I didn't hang around Kathmandu too long; I had that darned Bob Seger song running through my head, and just had to get out of there. . . 😂

What Bob Seger song, you ask? I'm glad you asked. THIS Bob Seger song:

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/bob-seger/21915.html

Ed

I should tell you that when I get a song stuck in my head, it can stay for days. And to get rid of it, I always try to give it to someone else. So all of you have now "got" Bob Seger's "Katmandu."

Once I called my sister in Miami, and said "Hey, Snookie, remember "Dominique" by The Singing Nun? It goes like this. . ." 😂

Leaving Kathmandu (and that darned song) behind, I flew east towards Paro in Bhutan. As far as I can tell, Paro (VQPR) is the only airport in Bhutan, at least in FS09.

The tough thing about flying to Paro, is that first you have to find the airport. It's at 7333' elevation, but buried WAY down in a canyon, at the end of a series of very narrow canyons. It's a bit like following the Grand Canyon, and then trying to land on an island in the Colorado River.

There is a VOR/DME on the approach, but if you fly straight to the VOR at pattern altitude for Paro, you'll crash because the VOR is on a mountain peak near the canyon, not down in the canyon. The VOR sort of marks the opening into the canyon where Paro is located.

Then again, from the FS09 map, it's not clear which canyon you should follow when you reach the VOR. If you choose the wrong one (as I did, of course), you'll find yourself boxed in, flying at 9,000' altitude in a canyon with 12,000' walls.

So I climbed out of that canyon at 4000 FPM, dropped into the next canyon, and now I'm 2 nm from Paro, and about 4000' too high. Plummeting like a rock and careening around sheer rock cliffs to get aligned with the runway, I managed to get my wheels down on the runway and stop right before the numbers at the far end.

Apparently, there is some sort of local tradition that when you land at Paro, everybody gets out of the plane and kisses the ground, because that's what all my passengers did. 😂

Ed

Very interesting reading Ed, thanks very much! 👍

jarred_01 wrote:

Very interesting reading Ed, thanks very much! 👍

And thank you, jarred_01.

After enjoying a goatburger and fries in Paro, Bhutan, I got the urge to revisit the Tibetan Plateau. That is like no other terrain on earth, as far as I know-- very high altitude, but sort of flat. There are peaks here and there up around 22,000' or more, but for the most part, the land is rolling hills between 15,000 and 18,000 feet. But there are lots of lakes.

The other interesting thing about the Plateau is that as far as I can tell, there are no airports whatsoever up there. On my National Geographic Map o' the World, there are two cities, Lhasa and Xigaze. But in FS09, neither has an airport. And I have tried just scanning the map in FS09, but I found nada (that's "nothing" in Bhutanese). 😉

So I walked into downtown Paro and visited Bob's New and Used Yaks and Snowmobiles (which also happens to be the local Cessna Dealer), and picked up a slightly used Cessna 208A Amphibian. Bob told me that the previous owner had been a little old lady who only flew it on Sundays, to haul weapons and kidney dialysis supplies into northern Pakistan. 😳

The local ATC was feeling a bit sadistic and made me take off flying up-canyon, so we had to climb like crazy up the mountain side, then when the old plane was about to stall, throw a hard left and coming screaming back down the canyon trying to gain speed and lift. Eventually I gained enough altitude to get out of the canyons and head north towards Tibet.

The service ceiling for the 208A is 20,000', and I managed to coax the old girl up to FL210 so that I could clear most of the terrain, although I had to go around some of the taller peaks.

My destination was a large lake, big enough to be seen on GPS at the 150 nm scale. It was probably only 100 nm away by a straight line, but it took about two hours to get there, with all the detours to avoid mountains. And at that altitude, the Cessna will only make about 90 kias, so it was slow going.

The lake was really large, five or ten miles long, I suspect, and two or three miles wide, plenty big enough to land the 208A. The surface of the lake was at 15,500' above sea level, so I was suprised that it was wasn't frozen. I set the Cessna down with barely a splash, and taxied up onto the beach nearby.

I think I'll camp here for the night, and head back over into China tomorrow.

Ed

Like your narrative. A lot of times I have a imagination deficiency. Maybe the below is why the paint on the acft was changed in mid-tour.

wlkin

"If I'm not mistaken, our esteemed friend "wlkin" visited Murgab during his tour of India, but I didn't know that until after I left. But while I was there, there was talk among the locals about a legendary traveler who had visited a few days before, only stayed a few hours, but promised to marry the mayor's daughter-- and hasn't been heard of since. Wink"

Interesting Ed 😉

👍

wlkin wrote:

Like your narrative. A lot of times I have a imagination deficiency. Maybe the below is why the paint on the acft was changed in mid-tour.

wlkin

"If I'm not mistaken, our esteemed friend "wlkin" visited Murgab during his tour of India, but I didn't know that until after I left. But while I was there, there was talk among the locals about a legendary traveler who had visited a few days before, only stayed a few hours, but promised to marry the mayor's daughter-- and hasn't been heard of since. Wink"

Ah, the old sneak-out-of-town-to-avoid-a-shotgun-wedding trick! Good move. . . 😂

Ed

Whoohoo. Great story so far!

I had to setup a tour of Everest for a management class...the emphasis was on proper planning and setting a schedule and making sure the customer was happy, but I did sneak in some interesting things about Everest.

For instance, at 29,035 ft, the top of Everest is actually IN the jetstream. For the two-three weeks a year that the Jetstream moves north, usually mid-late March, is the only time it is safe to summit. At the summit, wind-speeds in March are between 60-80 knots, at all other times, they exceed 100 knots.

That is why, when you see hundreds of people climbing the mountain in TV specials, it isn't because it's so popular, but everyone has to climb it at the same time!

Along a completely different note, there are clam-shells at the top of Everest. This discovery changed the age of the Himalayas from a billion years old(no clams), to 140 million years old...of course, the book of Genesis tells us that Everest was launched skywards 4,400 years ago.

The altitude of Everest is disputed, in the early 1900's, it was thought to be 29,002 ft, today, with a GPS unit, it was determined to be 29,035. The height can change up to 10 feet with snowfall. Some people believe Everest is still growing.

The Chinese name for the mountain is Qomolangma(Mother of the World).
The Tibeten name for the mountain is Sagarmatha(Goddess of the Sky).
The Mountain was original categorized as XV.

And now you know. 🙂

Thanks, NoWorries, you've pulled together some interesting information.

I had never heard that about the jet stream before, but it certainly makes sense. I had heard about the uncertainty in the elevation of Everest, though-- I had some training as a land surveyor (although I don't work in that job) and read a bit about it-- imagine what a job it would be to measure the height of an object, relative to sea level, if that object is hundreds of miles from the sea, and the peak is totally inaccessible to humans as it was before the 1950's.

One of the reasons I do these rambling tours is that I learn a bit about the world along the way. For instance, a few months ago I finished a book about WWII, and I was thinking about where Germany is relative to France, Poland and Norway, and some of the other nations Hitler "visited" at that time. So I started in Paris, and flew across northern Europe to see for myself. Then I started thinking about the Ukraine, because I was close by, and I knew a really cute Ukrainian girl in high school, so I popped over to Kiev and Odessa for a look. And with all we've heard in the news in recent years about war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, I had only a general idea of where those nations were, how big they are, what the terrain is like. So I headed south to Pakistan, and found out for myself.

And then I got this song about "Kathmandu" stuck in my head. . . 😉

Ed

Very interesting facts NoWorries, Ed is the book you wrote on WWII published?

No, I should have said that I just finished READING a book about WWII. I certainly don't know enough about that subject to write one.

What I was reading was a series of books by Douglas Reeman, all based on the Royal Navy during WWII. "The White Guns" was about the first British gunboats to enter German harbors after the end of the war.

Douglas Reeman wrote a much better known series about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, using the pen name Alexander Kent.

Ed

My bad, I should have thought otherwise! 😂 Sounds like an interesting book, however.

If you want a good interesting climbout from a reasonable airport, fly a 757 or 767 into KJAC (Jackson Hole) in Wyoming. On climb out you have to make a complete circle to get enough alt. to get over the mountains. A bit of fun. In real life, they turn the AC off in the plane so that all the power is in the engines, and not wasted on the other systems.

767 is a little big for KJAC, 757 is the regular AA flight into Jackson Hole.

Have fun flying!

Also, check out the missed approach procedure on the GPS to see the crazy pattern due to mountains.

Cool airport...

http://www.myairplane.com/databases/approach/pdfs/00504R19.PDF

Any airport where you intercept the glideslope at 11,800 ft has to be interesting!

Nice 😉

👍

😳 MSA is 15000 for 25nm. Interesting airport 👍

I think you should explore writing fiction books

MRGPS wrote:

I think you should explore writing fiction books

I do write fiction. Every week I have to write a summary of my accomplishments for my manager, so I really let my imagination run wild! 😂

Just kidding, boss. 😉

No, actually, I've tried writing a few short stories over the years. And I read a lot, enough to recognize a good author when I read one, and enough to know that I'm not one of those. Really good writing is both a craft and an art, and both require years of practice to achieve. What I write may have (air)craft, but not much art. 😂

But I actually get paid a salary to do technical writing, along with other things. It's not my main job, but as an engineer it goes with the territory. I write procedures, reports, design file memos, that sort of thing. So sitting and typing, makin' stuff up, comes easily.

Ed