Diary of an aviation nut: Beautiful islands, a large military base and en-route weather

Starting the day with a good hearty breakfast at the The Hangar Café & Bar

Today’s flight from Shute Harbour to Mareeba (just to the west of Cairns) had a bit of everything. Beautiful islands, landing at a large military base and en-route weather to contend with.

The day started with a nice breakfast at The Hangar Café & Bar at the Shute Harbour Airpark where we watched some of the tourist flights come and go.

Taking off to the south we entered Hamilton Island’s airspace and overflew the Whitsunday Islands. The well-known Whitehaven Beach that you see in all the Whitsunday Islands tourist brochures looked beautiful from the air and there were some very large and expensive looking boats parked just off the beach. The Hamilton Island airspace was surprisingly quiet for such a busy tourist area and we had no trouble getting a clearance to where we wanted to go.

Leaving the Whitsundays, we tracked back to the coast and NW to Townsville.

Townsville airport is a large military base with prescribed VFR routes which must be flown to enter and exit their airspace. The airport serves a steady volume of civilian commercial traffic and is the base for the Australian Airforce’s Chinook helicopters. We requested clearance into Townsville well before their airspace boundary and had no difficulty following the Clevedon VFR route to join left base for Rwy 01. There was a 17kt crosswind which had me working hard but, I’m pleased to say my landing was quite respectable considering that during much of the approach it felt like I was looking at the runway out of the side window.

Leaving Townsville after re-fuelling, we exited the area using the Rollingstone VFR route and set heading for Mareeba.

Mareeba airport sits on the Atherton Tableland which surrounds Cairns. I’d chosen to fly to Mareeba rather than Cairns as I’d heard that busy Cairns airport isn’t particularly friendly toward light aircraft and the overnight parking charges are steep. As we planned to stay two nights at Trinity Beach north of Cairns, we opted to land at Mareeba and get a rental car for the 62km journey to where we were staying and our use while staying in Cairns.

75nm out from Mareeba we could see the 3000 – 4000’ Tablelands rising in front of us and … covered in low cloud. Uh oh. The SE winds that had pushed us along nicely since leaving Brisbane were lifting moist coastal air and forming cloud and light rain on the edge of the Tablelands. There was no way we were going to be able to follow our planned track to Mareeba.

It was brighter and clearer to the NW so I tracked in that direction in the hope the cloud was a bank forming on the southern edge of the Tablelands and we could get around behind it. It was a tense 20 mins or so as we tracked NW at 500 – 700’ above the ground under an overcast with misty forward visibility. Bruce and Rob said after we landed that it got very quiet.

A couple of pilots leaving Mareeba confirmed the conditions there were good and, although it seemed like an eternity it wasn’t long before we could make a large sweeping turn N and NE to find Mareeba airport.

We’ve picked up our rental car, made our way to our very nice accommodation at Trinity Beach. Coincidentally good friends Val Kennedy & Graeme Boatman who introduced me to flying in Australia were in Cairns so we caught up for dinner with them and swapped flying stories.

Leg Summary
Shute Harbour (YSHR) - Townsville (YBTL)
Distance: 183nm (338km)
Time: 1.5hrs
Alt: 2,000 - 4500ft

Townsville (YBTL) - Mareeba (YMBA)
Planned distance: 155nm (287km)
Time: 1.4hrs
Alt: 4,500ft