I suspect the “2.5 years” is due to delay caused by the last year and a half… A year seems reasonable…
skydriller wrote:
there was a “hiccup” last week
skydriller wrote:
a few legs from Ireland to North Africa and back (more N-S than W-E) to “make up the miles”.
Obviously the “hiccup” was reported by a service provider and only shows one side of the story.
However, unfortunately there seems to be a quite consistent story: It is not the story of a young and ambitious who is in the fortunate situation that he can fulfill a dream of his life, but rather that of a big team (of “adults”) that is driving their idea and the young guy is more the puppet they need to fulfill their dream.
It’s definitely more about the record than to actually fly around the world.
These heavily supported adventures seem to frequently go the same way.
We had a thread here about another one, where there was a huge bustup between that “team” and a “flight support guy”. It was funny how the same names keep popping up, just in different places. And sometimes they pop up in accidents, which was also predictable, for the same reasons.
It is probably a challenging management exercise to keep everybody working together while keeping the sponsorship money flowing in. Also while dealing with a bunch of “large characters” who are in it to a) make money and b) get media coverage so they can get into future adventures.
@loco did a round the world trip by himself, quietly, in a TBM 
There was an American magazine article about a doctor beating old point-to-point records, either cities very close together or between obscure towns in the middle of nowhere. Whilst it’s a good reason to fly, 3 hours in a SR22 in 2020 is incomparable with a day in a Curtiss Jenny in 1920.
It can go badly wrong even with overflight agents: the Info-pilote reporter was detained on the ramp for a week by the Indonesian military because of a UTC calculation error.
Peter wrote:
These heavily supported adventures seem to frequently go the same way.
I would expect, that at some point in time the record keeping organizations might substantially change their rules for some of such records.
Not discussion how big the achievement really is these days to round the world, but it is obvious that a solo round trip today is completely different from what it was 30 or even more so 50 years ago. With GPS, sat phone, etc. and an operation center that is in contact with you 24×7 the word “solo” has a different meaning.
Esp. when it is about the “youngest solo pilot” it is something completely different, if he is really on his own over unknown territory and has to take the decision to try to get through weather or land before it or has an online voice connection to a whole team of weather professionals with high res sat imaging that can advise him what to do. The whole notion of “solo” doesn’t make much sense here.
And when the rounding is much more a team effort than an individual achievement in these “youngest” categories it should actually be relevant who is the oldest member of the team rather than the (more or less random) pilot.
Underlying the sad message from Egyptian support organisation is a strong whiff of arrogance on the part of the pilot’s group. In a time of Covid such arrogance is not going to end well at all. He will find himself badly stuck somewhere sooner or later.
Whoops! My arrogance and stupidity. Apolgies. Just opened the Daily Mail and he has already done the trip and made it home! A crew card and a set of epaulettes on the shoulder must really keep a lot of bureaucracy at bay.
Chapeau Travis
It’s actually quite amazing: If you can get Russia sorted out (read: have a service provider that sorts out Russia for you), you only need to land in 8 countries to do an SEP round the world (US, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, UK, NED/GER/DEN/(something in Central Europe), Poland, Russia). If you have a longer range SEP, you could even leave out Poland and eventually Canada.
Again, except for Russia, even avgas is not really a challenge in all of these countries.
So if it’s just about technically getting the “round the world stamp”, it’s not that difficult any more…
While I like to believe it’s an easy achievement to “round the world”, after all it’s just money & time and will that any pilot can do it, but not many actually do ;)
Malibuflyer wrote:
you only need to land in 8 countries to do an SEP round the world
Whoa I wasn’t aware of that, is there a flyable route? But that could be done by anyone!
I can easily teach a 16 y/o boy to fly a plane following the GPS route. This is like a computer game. Aged 14 you can fly a glider solo, even cross-country, and you have to know a lot more things to keep the glider in the air than to put the autopilot on a route which someone enters in the computer.
What’s the use of this?
You can also show him what to do in several special circumstances. If all the travelling stuff like visa and so on are clarified, then this is a non-issue. So, we will definitely see the next “youngest guy” thing. Will see “youngest girl” too. This will get increasingly interesting, when laws are the limit. Like obtaining the pilots licence on the day of 18th birthday and leaving the same day, then it depends on the plane’s performance. Could you do an integrated class to hold, on the day of the 18th birthday, even the IR?
