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Caribbean recap
Just got back from a week of flying Caribbean charters in the Pilatus.
We were based at San Juan, PR (SJU) and flew a bunch of trips to St Bart's, St Maarten (the place with all those cool widebody landing photos on Airliners.net) St Croix, Nevis and Mustique. St Bart's and Mustique are tied for trickiest landing - pilots must be certified to land at St Bart's due to the 1600ft usable length when landing runway 10 (crazy winds make this exciting). Rwy 28 approaches over the water and you land right over the beachgoer's heads. Here's runway 10 from near the top of the hill at St Bart's. An overrun puts you in the sand (or water) among the tourists. Not recommended. http://stbartstourist.com/content/im...91/airport.jpg Mustique's runway starts downhill like a ski ramp and requires an immediate turn after liftoff to avoid a hill. Both fields are VFR only and close after sundown. Here's the runway at Mustique. This is where the Jamaican bobsled team trained before the airport was built. G http://www.caribbeanmag.com/images/a...qsairport2.jpg International flying is different, and dealing with 4 different agencies on one flight is interesting. It took a bit to get up to speed on procedures, but VFR rules seem to be fairly universal. The San Juan - Mustique trip (500nm) started with San Juan Approach/ Center, then Juliano (French controllers) then V.C. Bird (Antigua) then Piarco (Trinidad). I swear some of those guys were driving cabs the day before they started working aircraft. At the height of a busy day at St Bart's the tower controller got stressed out & decided to take a break for 45 minutes and left. It's an odd situation, as the controller will assign sequence and make blind traffic callouts, but the pilots decided which runway to land on. Can't wait to go back next season G Thank God for strong brakes and reversing props! |
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