Round the World Flight Route

All circumnavigators face a few route choices. For example, you can cross the Pacific via the Aleutians’ northern route, the classic “middle” route via American Samoa and Hawaii, or the southerly route via Easter Island and Chile. These days, it’s mostly Avgas logistics that determines route choice. For that reason, the middle and southern routes are problematic since there are no longer Avgas at the island airports along the way. I would have chosen the northern route regardless since I like Alaska and wanted to fly via Japan. But still, I had to ship Avgas drums to Adak months in advance in the Aleutians. By the way, that involved finding a supplier in Anchorage who trucked the drums to Seward on the Kenai Peninsula, where a barge delivered it to Adak by sea – a journey of over a week. If that sounds challenging, getting fuel to American Samoa is way more complex, and from all past descriptions, it’s a difficult place to deal with. On top of that, I learned last week that the Pago Pago airport is closed to General Aviation traffic, so even if you got fuel there, you’d be stuck.

I then chose the Westbound route predominantly to allow me to make the Aleutians to Japan flight in the early part of August to give myself the best possible weather window. The local Alaska bush pilots warned me that anything after mid-August becomes increasingly dodgy with poor weather and icing. (Actually, the weather is always poor – but right now, there is less chance of icing 🙂 The downside is that the westbound route is against the prevailing winds. But you fly with the sun, so days are marginally longer – especially on those long over-water stretches.

Then Iceland and Greenland are the regular summer routes across the Atlantic for ferry flights between the US and Europe.

Much of the planning process is just talking to as many people as possible. There are Facebook groups for the Alaska bush pilots, and they helped me make a critical decision to switch from eastbound to westbound so I could get through the Aleutians early in the season. Then, Earthrounders is the site where all the circumnavigators are listed and share their input. All the Earthrounders are very helpful in sharing knowledge. Almost all of them have blogs or books published, and I have read all of them over the past few years. There are formal pilot groups where you can get up-to-date information on global situations – I use ops.group. Finally, I use Peter at Petair in Japan and Mike at White Rose Aviation for my permits and handling.

Of course, plans change. So, already, I chose to skip Chicago to avoid the weather. My route from Japan to Egypt is relatively fixed due to the restrictions on organizing overflight and landing permits. But I expect that in Europe, I will again be free to make choices that suit my interests and where my nose leads me.

Finally, so what makes a recognized circumnavigation? By the FAI rules for a Westbound circumnavigation “the course must be a minimum distance of 27,000km (14,578 nm), the course must cross all meridians, and all control points must be in a westernly succession”. In the past (after Russian opened up and before the Ukraine war) it’s been possible to achieve this by flying through Russia on a much shorter course than what it would take to say fly along the equator like Brian Lloyd did. So the Earthrounders group does make the additional distinction on whether you followed the “short Northern route” through Russia – typically 16,000nm or the more traditional crossings through say Hawaii.

I guess I’m somewhere in the middle – not that these distinctions is very meaningful in the end. I’m doing it for the adventure.