Along the West Coast

December 15 was a wonderfully sunny and clear day, and Chloe drove me to the airport, and I got myself ready to depart. The most beautiful thing I’ve personally found about WA flying is the contrast between the aqua of the Indian Ocean, right next to the desert red dirt. It’s truly beautiful to see from the sky where all the colours are so bright, running alongside each other as far as I can see- and you have pretty good visibility on a clear day at altitude.

I climbed up along the coast, flying along 80 mile beach, which was an absolute pleasure to view from the air, and tracked towards Port Hedland as my main refuelling point for today’s flying. Whilst I would have liked to costal fly at a lower altitude to get a better view of the beaches, the ocean and the desert all merging into one, I admired it from higher up as a strong (20 knot!) headwind at the lower levels would not have done nice things to my fuel calculations!

Wind was definitely a factor for this flight, and I had quite strong conditions coming in to Port Hedland which resulted in a difficult landing. My main concern, and one that I had identified in the morning was stronger winds in the afternoon, so as I continued my flight to Karratha, I kept myself updated by calling up the AWIS (current conditions for the airport) regularly, prepared to turn back if needed, since Port Hedland had better winds and two runways. Luckily, the crosswind didn’t pick up and I made it into Karratha pretty easily. A huge thank you to Alexa in the tower for all your help, including making sure I could find the parking easy enough!