Diary of an aviation nut: Cutting the SW Corner

We ended up staying an extra night in Fremantle as Andrew's ZK-LDY required a part to be flown in overnight from the east coast to complete its 50hr check and make sure she was ready for the long trip home across the bottom of Australia and the Tasman.

We'd one a lot of flying which included some long legs in the preceding two weeks and, to be honest, I was starting to feel a bit of accumulative fatigue. The three nights we spent in Fremantle was a welcome relief and enabled us all to recharge.

So far on this trip we've had fantastic flying weather. Clear, blue skies and even tailwinds on most legs. However, we were watching a front with associated rain and poor visibility approaching the SW corner of the continent. That was due to reach the coast about the time we were planning to fly south from Perth and around the SW coast with stops at Margaret River and Albany. As we'd had an unplanned extra day off and with approaching weather, we decided it would be wise to "cut the corner" and fly direct to Esperance leaving early to get in front of the forecast weather. It was disappointing to have to cut the SW corner out of our rote but you always have to leave something for the next trip!

We arrived at Jandakot at 7am and had the aircraft packed and ready for departure quickly. We're getting good at that now.

Even though it was early, the airfield was busy and we spent about 20 mins on the ground taxiing and waiting for departure from one of Jandakot's two parallel runways that were in use.

My aircraft registration is "ZK-VRV" and in New Zealand just the last three letters are used when communicating on the radio. It's not necessary to include the "ZK" prefix that identifies the state of registration. However, when flying in a foreign country you must use the full aircraft registration when making calls on the radio. Using the phonetic alphabet my registration then becomes a tongue twister of "Zulu Kilo Victor Romeo Victor". Usually Andrew and John are close by and making similar radio calls using their full "Zulu Kilo Lima Delta Yankee" registration. It ties the controllers in knots and, departing from Jandakot on this morning, the ground controller got most of his calls to us spectacularly wrong as he gave us instructions to taxi to the runway holding point. You could hear him laughing to himself in the background.

After what seemed to be an interminable delay on the ground we were cleared for takeoff and away. The cold front we were keeping an eye on was clearly visible with darkening skies to the west but presented no problem as we were well ahead of it. In fact the winds associated with the front were in our favour and we enjoyed a 43kt (80 km/hr) tailwind.

After a 2:15hr flight that passed quickly we landed at Esperance in gusty conditions and caught a taxi into town.

We take turns booking motels, and whoever handled Esperance clearly had an off day. We ended up wedged into a tiny 1970s brick bunker painted in battle‑ship grey — the sort of room that gently erodes your will to live. Still, it was only one night, so we sucked it up and looked forward to our departure the next morning.