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Canada know we were arriving so we had to wait an hour in the hot sun for agents to come in person. You are not supposed to open the doors before they arrive but it was open them or die due to heat exhaustion.
After arrival in Goose Bay, we checked the en route weather and the headwinds prevented a straight shot to Iqaluit. I called my trip mentor, Mike Bradford, who’s done the crossing over 400 times as a ferry pilot, and he told me to get going but to go to Kuujjuaq and not try to make Iqaluit in one leg.
On the way to Kuujjuaq the temps were low and I tried avoiding the clouds by initially flying VFR on top, but they kept getting higher so I dropped into the soup and down to 6,000 where the
temps hovered around 0°C. We never had ice accumulate, as the crystals just bounced off the wing, but early on I was prepared to go back to Goose Bay. It was nerve-racking.
We arrived in Kuujjuaq as the sun was setting, we quickly dumped the jerry cans into the wings and took off for Iqaluit. The final leg to Iqaluit took almost three hours over Ungava Bay at night. We departed in the dark and didn’t don our survival suits for the trip, but as soon as we were over water and saw the ice- bergs, we decided that was a mistake.
About halfway there the engine informa- tion on the MFD went out. That had never happened before and after being terri- fied for a minute, I popped the breaker and all was right again. Unfortunately the
fuel usage didn’t reset back but I knew I’d have enough to the destination. We landed at Iqaluit just before midnight with the perpetual beautiful sunset off in the distance. At this point we were at the edge of the Arctic Circle and the summer sun never fully disappeared.
Lesson Learned: The first day ended up being very long. Looking back, the decision to add the extra leg was a good one as there was no way to make it to Iqaluit on a single tank, however I should have overnighted in Goose Bay or Kuujjuaq. I never seemed tired, due to the excitement, but it was still a bad decision. The other poor decision was not putting on the survival suits. We had them and we should have used them.
VOLUME 18, NUMBER 7
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The view flying over Ungava Bay on flight to Iqaluit.
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