56 MAY 2020 ÇPlane&Pilot
Y
ou can breathe a partial sigh of relief when
you depart Henderson Field on the island of
Guadalcanal and point the nose southwest toward
Australia that you have only one semi-short leg to go
to reach the land of Oz. You’d never know it today, but
Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands were the sites
of some of the fiercest fighting of World War II. Most
of that was in defense of the world’s largest island.
These days, the town of Honiara on Guadalcanal is
just another sleepy Pacific fuel stop, the last one you’ll
need if you’re destined for Cairns, Darwin, Brisbane
or Sydney. In a few hours, you’ll have beaten the odds
over five days and 6,000 nm on the trip from California
to the world of koalas, wallabies and kangaroos.
Unlike travel to Europe or even Africa, flying to
Australia in “one of those little planes” requires a cer-
tain power of will, along with a large pile of money and
a tolerance for being alone in a single seat for 14-16
hours at a time.My first trip to Australia was in 1989, flying a Cessna
Skymaster from South Carolina to the giant continent-
country far south of the equator. My ultimate desti-
nation was Mount Magnet in Australia’s far Western
Desert, home of dozens of gold mines and thousands
of wannabe millionaires.
I met my client, Blair Howe of Mount Magnet, in
South Carolina, where he was closing the deal on
the airplane. Howe was a bull of a man, 60 years old,
probably 6’6” tall and 300 pounds, very little of it fat. In
another life, he could’ve been a WWE wrestler. When
I commented that he was a big guy for such a little
airplane, he laughed and said he had a normal-sized
pilot back home who’d be doing all the flying, though
he’d just completed his multi-engine rating (with a
centerline thrust limitation) there in Charleston.
Howe had spent most of his life swinging a pick
in the unforgiving, hardscrabble desert wilderness
between the Great Sando Desert and the Indian Ocean.CROSS-COUNTRY LOG
By Bill CoxMemories Of Australia
Once you’ve been there, you’ll always want to return.