Quest for Adventure

by Chris Bonington

  They reached Shanghai on 28 April, but their bureaucratic troubles were now increasing. Brian had been unable to get advance permission for the flight from either Japan or Russia, though it was not for want of trying. In Japan, which has 2,500 microlight pilots, no microlight is allowed to fly beyond one mile of its home airport. This was going to make it difficult to fly the length of the country.

  While their home base wrestled with the Japanese authorities, Brian and Keith flew from Shanghai over the Yellow Sea, in thick cloud as usual, to Cheju, an island off the southern tip of South Korea, hoping to enter Japan. The Japanese relented, but were going to charge them $1,200 for every landing. Brian could see his funds draining away. Nonetheless, they were getting plenty of interest, being feted by the press and local microlight pilots in Korea and then in Japan as they flew up to Sapporo and their next crisis.

  They were expecting two vital parcels, one containing spare passports with visas for Russia, and the other a replacement GPS for one that had broken down (they had been using their handheld Garmin to find the way across China and japan). The visas had been sent to Shanghai, but rather than lose time waiting for them to arrive, Brian had decided to fly on and let them catch up with him and Keith at Sapporo. Neither parcel had arrived. The GPS was stuck in Japanese Customs and, more worrying, the passports with the Russian visas were still in Chinese Customs. They were marooned in Sapporo in an expensive hotel for eight days until at last the GPS and visas arrived but they still did not have clearance to fly through Siberia. They were now forty-nine days into the flight. It was going to be difficult completing it in just thirty days.

  Brian wanted to take off anyway and argue their way through once they had reached Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, while Keith was more cautious, saying that he wasn’t prepared to risk his life for the flight. It was a tighter from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk which had shot down the Korean Boeing 747 that had strayed into Russian air space. Brian was relying on an organisation called the East-West Association to smooth their journey across Siberia and at last on 13 May their representative, Valeri, phoned to say permission had been granted. The following morning they set out for the flight over Hokkaido and the thirty-mile leap across La Perouse Strait to Sakhalin Island. As they approached the northern coast of Japan they got in touch with the Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk air traffic control only to be told that they did not have permission to land after all and must return to Sapporo. That day Keith had the controls and Brian sat in the back in a state of rage and misery, thinking out what his next step should be, when the radio from Sapporo came on again to say that they had permission after all. They swung round jubilant, and headed for Russia.

  As they landed and taxied in past rusting helicopters and big transport aircraft, Brian could not but notice the contrast with the tidiness and wealth of Japan. But the officials were welcoming, though food at the Sapporo Hotel was expensive with steaks at $18 a time. Both pilots were also impressed by the big blonde girls with long legs and broad smiles who seemed to inhabit the town. They were going to get to know them and the officials all too well before escaping. But that night they were full of hope. It was just a few days flight up Sakhalin and along the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk and they would be poised to cross the Bering Strait and then, whatever the physical challenges, their struggles with bureaucracy would be over.

  However, the next morning they were told that the military authorities would not allow them to fly any further into Russia. It was to be a long drawn out war of attrition that eventually destroyed the already shaky partnership between Brian and Keith. They were to be stuck in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk for more than a fortnight. Brian battled with bureaucracy both on the phone to London and Moscow and locally through Valeri, while Keith watched television. Both found some solace with the local girls, Keith proceeding to fall in love with one of them. But the tension between the two men grew with inaction and Brian was faced with ever-mounting bills. Keith was asking for more money once his originally contracted time had run out, and he was also threatening to leave for home if their visas, which were about to expire, were not renewed.

  They discussed many options, one of which was for GT Global to be escorted across Siberia by a Russian chase plane. The cost however could have been around $100,000. With Keith talking of returning to Britain, Brian came up with a cheaper option, trying to persuade a Russian navigator to fly in the spare seat across Siberia. And then their visas were extended, but by this time Brian had decided that taking a Russian navigator was the only option. He told Keith to take a scheduled flight to Alaska and wait for him at Nome on the other side of the Bering Strait.

  As if he hadn’t troubles enough, he now learnt that Liechtenstein Global Trust, his sponsor, was being taken over and his one good friend and ally in the company was going to be out of a job. At least in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk he had managed to obtain the services of senior navigator Peter Kusmich Petrov for a mere $245 a day. The next leg of the journey was on.

  It was at this point he learnt that Keith had decided to drop out of the flight altogether and was preparing to fly home from Alaska. The plot developed with Brian being told that Keith would consider remaining on the flight provided he could fly the craft solo from Nome to Anchorage, in other words placing Brian in the same position as himself, of having missed out part of the flight and, in the process, invalidating the entire record should they complete the circumnavigation. Brian dismissed the suggestion and Keith flew home to England. It must have been particularly tough for Brian, on his own in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk with this series of phone calls from London and Anchorage from people whom, on the whole, he didn’t trust. It says a lot for his single-mindedness of purpose that he didn’t give up.

  It was 2 June, day seventy-one, when at last Brian and Peter Kusmich Petrov started flying up Sakhalin Island and then tracking the coast over the frozen Sea of Okhotsk. It was the most desolate, empty yet beautiful country that Brian had ever seen. He felt comfortable with his passenger who even enjoyed taking photographs and operating the wing cameras. Keith’s lack of co-operation in this department had always been a source of tension. But it was a serious place to fly, with uninhabited mountains and some big storm clouds building up. They were heading for Magadan on the northern shore of the Sea of Okhotsk. It didn’t look as if they could make it to their destination before being caught by the storm so Brian decided to land on one of the roads they could now see below them. It was a rough landing that ended with the craft’s front wheel dropping into a hole, breaking the landing lights and then being flipped over on its side by the wind, but there didn’t seem any serious structural damage. Peter, however, was not keen to get back in the air before the craft had been checked by experts, though where he was going to find any in the middle of the Siberian steppe was not at all obvious.

  Brian volunteered to fly GT Global on to Magadan by himself. After a shaky take-off he was airborne, only to find that the damage was greater than he had anticipated, with the trike pointing in a different direction from the wing. But he was not unduly concerned since he had encountered the same problem on other occasions. His vertigo had vanished, driven away by all the other traumas of the flight. It took Peter a full day to catch up with him in Magadan and then they went on together.

  They reached Provideniya, just south of the Bering Strait, on the evening of day seventy-nine. In terms of distance, Brian had covered 12,848 miles and still had 10,054 to go; he had come just over halfway round the world in eighty days. But 200 nautical miles to the east was Nome and America. Whatever the challenges that might be ahead, he would at last be among people who spoke his own language and in the familiar western culture. Just 200 miles to go!

  He had made sea crossings of similar length before, but there was something about the dark cold sea dotted with ice floes that was particularly threatening – the feeling of flying over the jaws of a trap. The djinn of his earlier travels was just waiting to pounce. About a hundred miles out the cloud began to build up in layers. He decided to try to climb over i
t, plunging into the featureless white mist and clawing his way up to a height of 5,400 feet. Peter suddenly shouted in his ear: ‘Ice.’ Brian had been concentrating so hard on keeping their craft level and on course with the GPS, he hadn’t noticed that they were coated in ice-their clothes, wing, flying wires and his visor, clouding his vision even further. At least they were now in contact with Anchorage air traffic control who promptly declared an emergency. Brian dropped height, weaved his way in and out of the cloud, and at last saw the coast ahead. He had made it to America. A little more flying and he bounced GT Global down on the runway at Nome. At last he could relax. ‘America was bliss after Russia: toilets with seats, sinks with plugs, taps marked hot water which told the truth, shops and cafes open late in the evening, where food was served cheerfully and not as if a huge favour was being done.’

  But he still had a long way to go, and he wasn’t even taking the fastest route, for Phileas Fogg had flown via San Francisco. Brian had to think positively. He had by this point lost thirty-three days grounded for bureaucratic reasons but if he could not go round the world in a total of eighty days, he reckoned he could still make the flight in eighty days’ flying time. He was short of money, had just enough from the original sponsorship payment to complete the flight and pay off Peter, but not enough to market the venture, which he needed to do to help promote his book sales and the film he had made at his own cost.

  And Brian was now on his own, though in many ways this made everything that much simpler. ‘I trusted me. My arguments with myself were fair-minded and self-interested.’

  There was some challenging flying on his way across Alaska with the engine overheating once again, but he solved the problems, kept the djinn at bay, and continued flying down through Canada and into the States. At San Francisco he learnt that Amvesco, who had bought Liechtenstein Global Trust, had finally decided to withdraw their sponsorship. Brian had a final flirtation with Virgin before deciding to go it alone. With a renewed sense of freedom he flew on along Route 80, beside the railroad followed by Phileas Fogg, past Chicago and New York, pausing to do a photo call by the Statue of Liberty, and then back into the wilderness as he picked his way over the forests of New York State and north-east Canada.

  The Atlantic had been crossed by microlight in 1990 by a Dutch pilot named Eppo Newman, travelling from east to west, but he had taken more than a year organising the flight, wrestling with red tape and waiting for the right weather. Brian wanted to complete his flight quickly, and pushed the limits throughout this last leg, flying over pathless mountains and tundra to reach Kuujjuaq on the shores of Ungava Bay, and then across the Hudson Strait to Baffin Island with its jagged granite peaks and sheer rock walls. Brian felt a euphoria:

  ‘As the canyon narrowed I circled close to the mountain walls, surging with joy. Instead of racing in a straight line, I roller-coastered over the sky, diving and climbing and turning, so overcome by the terrific scenery I felt blithe and spiritual. At the same time a small voice kept saying, “Don’t take chances now, you are so close”.’ He was unaware that these granite walls were the playground of extreme climbers or how similar to his were their motivation and feelings.

  He landed on Broughton Island for his next sea crossing which was to Greenland. This was his most northerly point, just a few degrees north of the Arctic Circle. There was yet another bureaucratic delay while the Danish flight authorities, with whom he had been negotiating since the previous September, raised some last ditch objections. However, after three days he was at last given the green light and took off over the empty seas of the Davis Strait to reach the west coast of Greenland. The biggest hurdle of all, the Greenland Ice Cap, was ahead. Reaching 9,000 feet in height and some 384 miles across on the flight path Brian was planning to take, local pilots doubted it could be crossed without flying to 10,000 feet.

  When Brian set out from Sondrestrom the following morning, he had been warned of a front coming in and, as he reached the permanent snows of the ice cap, the white piling clouds were already merging with the white of the snow. Caution prevailed and he turned back while there was still time to find his way to the safety of Sondrestrom. Another day’s wait, and on the morning of 13 July with the forecast better, Brian set out once again.

  At first it was clear and he reached a height of 8,500 feet. It was bitterly cold and then his radio failed. He felt a sense of total isolation. True, he had the emergency radio, but he would have had to take his gloves off to rummage for the back-up system and it was much too cold for that. He flew on, briefly reassured by a sighting of the small unmanned emergency weather station in the middle of the ice cap. He could at least land there in the event of an emergency, but a thin layer of cloud slipped in between him and the featureless white of the ice cap. He decided to keep above it, was forced up to 10,000 feet, then 12,000 feet, higher than he had ever flown before.

  The air was getting thin and he was gasping for breath. It was also bitterly cold with ice forming on his visor threatening once more to impede his vision. The cloud below was so thick that he could see nothing of the ice cap. Had the engine failed his chances of survival were minimal. He flew in this white limbo for five hours until at last he became conscious of a change in the far distance from white to blue and slowly the shapes of mountain peaks and deep cut fjords emerged. He had crossed his high hurdle and as he lost height and it became warmer, he was able to dig out his emergency radio and make contact with air traffic control, firstly back at Sondrestrom and then at Kulusuk on a little island off the east coast of Greenland.

  He was now faced by his longest ocean crossing, 450 miles to Reykjavik, capital of Iceland, though he had a slightly shorter option of flying into Dagverdhara, an airstrip on a peninsula that jutted out towards Greenland. He couldn’t help being apprehensive. It was going to take his fuel capacity to the limit and the prevailing wind tended to be an easterly which would be against him. He had already learnt to his cost how much even a light headwind slowed him down and increased his fuel consumption. That morning there was a westerly at the airstrip, but how long would it last? He decided to set out, thinking he could always turn back.

  At first all went well. He had a ground speed, checked out by his GPS, of fifty knots. This would take him to Dagverdhara in six and a half hours, but as he flew over the empty ocean, nursing the engine to keep the revs down, he noticed the speed steadily dropping. The wind had changed direction and he was battling into a head wind. He dropped to forty-three knots, but still kept going. It was a similar problem to that of a climber going for the summit of Everest. There is a turn back time to enable you get back safely before dark and a temptation to ignore it as you get closer to the summit. In this instance Brian, who still had a long way to go, swung the craft round and headed back for Kulusuk at a galloping speed of sixty-one knots, a clear sign of just how strong had been the head wind and how right his decision.

  And yet, on getting back to Kulusuk and checking his fuel he was surprised to find how little he had used. Perhaps he could have made it after all? He resolved to go for it, come what may. Next morning the weather forecast was ambiguous but he decided to set out nonetheless. At first it went well with a good fast ground speed of sixty-five knots. He had a following wind that he hadn’t expected which lasted for a couple of hours. Then came a change in the weather that was almost imperceptible, a thin haze that gradually thickened. He was now nearly four hours from the start and had crossed the point of no return when the front hit him.

  ‘I came to a wall of heavy rain across my path, and as it approached and I could feel it engulf me, I tried to find anywhere as a refuge. It looked slightly clearer over to the left so I turned and flew that way and found my way round the thickest and most opaque sheets of falling water. This happened time and again. I tried to find the clearest patches and the darker areas of low cloud that showed the bottom limits of where I could fly and still see where I was going. I was thrown up and down, rearing up to 800 feet in the dynamic lift, or falling to
450 feet, constantly wiping the water from my visor, peering at the GPSs to see what they told me. At one time I was making eleven knots and the estimate for getting to Reykjavik had climbed to eighteen hours. Seeing twenty-two knots was commonplace; it meant I was heading too far north into the teeth of the Atlantic gale. My course was erratic anyway because of the way I was being thrown around.’

  He didn’t have time to be afraid and was even elated by the struggle, commenting:

  ‘There are moments beyond fear, as I had expected, where life is so fulfilling you cannot believe it and you want to go back and live it again and again. I was carried back constantly into that experience by the frontal gale, but each time I got a little closer to Iceland.’

  He fought the winds and turbulence for a further three hours before reaching the lee of Iceland. The wind fell, the sky began to clear and he was able to see the high glacier that marked Dagverdhara, but he elected to push on to Reykjavik, where his film crew were waiting for him and he could truly celebrate his longest and most challenging ocean crossing.

  But the flight wasn’t over. He was forced to turn back on his first attempt to cross from eastern Iceland to the Faroes and it took him two days to get through the Scottish Highlands, which gave their worst of rain and storm.

  At last, on 21 July with an escort of microlights, he flew into Brooklands, 121 days after he had set out on his momentous round-the-world adventure. It was a remarkable achievement. He had flown altogether seventy-one days and had lost thirty-five to bureaucratic hassles. Almost half the journey he had flown by himself and arguably he would have been better off had he been on his own all the way. Certainly his finest moments had been the pure elation of battling alone with the elements over the Greenland Ice Cap and across the storm-wracked seas between Greenland and Iceland.