We spent some time wondering what to do – hoping the problem would somehow answer itself while we phoned home and repacked the cockpit. The control tower's weather reports provided little comfort: there was next to no wind and conditions were not going to change.
We had coffee and croissants with the people in the control tower, and scratched our heads about whether to wait or to go.
In practice we had only two available routes. One would take us along valleys and away from the weather, back down the Neckar valley to the Rhine, where we could turn left to fly south along the lower ground up the river past Strasbourg and up to Freiburg, at which point we would turn south-east to cross the Wurttemburg hills to Lake Constance. Once across Lake Constance to Bregenz we would hope to be out of the weather even though we were within reach of Imst and then of Innsbruck farther on. But this would be a very roundabout route, and would take ages. The other would be to continue south up the Neckar Valley past Stuttgart, Ulm and Memmingen and then follow the motorway and railway routes through the hills as the weather allowed, making straight for Imst from the north via what looked like an alarmingly high and narrow mountain pass.
Or we could wait.
The controller in the tower, a smart and efficient man in a white short-sleeved shirt and epaulettes, showed us the Met reports. There was a slow moving warm front, an area of low cloud and drizzle, sitting right across from the hills at Mosbach south to the mountains of Austria.
"Not good flying weather today, I think!" he said, in a tone of authoritative finality. And with some pride he added: "The German Weather Service chart is 100% accurate, as you can see for yourselves by looking through the window!" as if trying to stop us denying some aspect of its veracity. It was undeniable: thick low cloud was indeed clinging to the tops of the surrounding fir trees, and condensing rather miserably into heavy droplets on the end of each pine needle.
A local fixed-wing pilot in the kind of shiny leather jacket which accomodates an impressive German waistline, had just showed up with an armful of local maps. He set about giving us a grim briefing, concluding authoritatively that no one would be leaving Mosbach airport, otherwise than by road, for the next two days. A couple of other pilots who’d just come up the steep stairs to the tower nodded sagely.
Martin and I exchanged glances. We could see the way this was heading; a mutual dissuasion session, often indulged in by club flyers, to agree amongst themselves that it’s ok to say that today is an in-the-bar day. It’s a good thing for club safety, but it needs resisting if you actually want to go somewhere. I looked out of the window and compared the surrounding hilltops with the hills shown on an aviation chart on the wall.
"I reckon that if we take-off low-level, we can shoot down that valley over there, which would take us down at treetop level to the Neckar valley. That would get us low-level through the hills to Stuttgart, Ulm and Memmingen, from where we can follow the motorway and railway routes going south towards Imst as the weather allows. It's only a problem here in Mosbach because it's so hilly. We’re up in the clouds."
The Germans looked on in astounded silence as Martin checked out the plan. Were these people mad as well as English?
"Let's go", said Martin.
Our instinct, based on experience of flying helicopters in similar cloud conditions in the UK, was that the cloud would stay on the hilltops, leaving the river valleys clear, and if it did not we could either find another local airfield to land at or come back to Mosbach.
We were lucky; conditions turned out to be as we expected, though the day was dominated by cloud and rain.
“They’'re expecting us either to be back in the clubhouse or dead within 10 minutes” muttered Martin, as the water was flung off the rotors as they gathered speed on start-up.
We edged our way over the hedge at the airport boundary, and found the shallow flyable slot above the trees down the hillside, and flew south from Mosbach past Stuttgart and from there to Ulm and beyond. Our next turning points, while we climbed all the time as the cloud permitted, were Memmingen, Kempten and Fussen. From there we followed the railway and road south-east up into the Austrian Alps, turning right to go over the Fern-Pass at about 4000 feet and from there on about 15 miles to Imst.
The weather in the mountains was simply awful. Great walls of rain smashed into us from what seemed like every direction, sending shudders through the fuselage and making us bump shoulders with each other in the turbulence. With slabs of grey cloud wedged in the steep valleys we couldn’t climb to see where we were, so we had to pick our way through the mountain passes by following the roads and railways. The GPS is not much use in this terrain, as it can’t give you enough detail about where the mountains are, so I felt pretty sick from paying the map on my knee so much attention in the turbulence. Martin kept telling me with quiet urgency to look outside for wires draped across the valley whenever he spotted a lone pylon high on a mountainside.
Our fuel stop destination was the International Airport at Innsbruck, located on the narrow valley floor 30 miles East of Imst, in the same range of mountains. Imst, a mountain tourist town, houses the world headquarters of the charity SOS Children's Villages, and happened to be on our route. SOS'’s UK headquarters are in Cambridge, and we’d done a bit of tin-rattling for them in the past.
We circled at a safe height over the town to see if we could identify the Childrens’ Village from the air; but with no permission to land, and short of fuel because of our slow progress through the mountains in the poor weather, we didn't plan to stay long.
I was quite keen to land at the Village and say hello. The only trouble was, we didn’t know where exactly the Village was in Imst. We flew around the town for a few minutes, and found at least six possibilities, which didn’t narrow it down much. We couldn'’t land at all six, and none of them was particularly suitable for landing unannounced anyway.
On the edge of the town we spotted a grand looking alpine hotel set in its own generous grounds, and decided to put it down on its lawn and ask. Feeling rather foolish, I got out while Martin stayed in Uniform Kilo with the rotors running, and tried to make sense of the what the hotel gardener was saying above the noise of the chopper. He had the most amazing local accent, and no teeth, which rather hindered matters.
When you land to ask for directions, it’s very hard to make people say something useful like “head west over that ridge and look for the white building with the grey roof next to the railway”. Quite reasonably, they always give you road directions, and refer you to landmarks like roadsigns that you can’t possibly see from the air. I wasn'’t sure that I’d understood a single word, but he did keep pointing at something. I climbed back into Uniform Kilo and put on my headset to talk to Martin. He says it’s somewhere over there” I said lamely.
I took the controls, having had enough navigating for one day, and headed off. Just as we were circling over what we decided must be the Village, and I was lining up for an approach to what looked rather too much like someone’s private garden, Martin reported quietly: "Low fuel warning light on."
This light is similar to the one you get in your car; the one which suggests that you have at least 50 miles to go, so you’d better stop at your choice of the next three petrol stations. In a helicopter, it's a red light, and it's rather more urgent. I said, "Better head for Innsbruck, then."
The next 30 miles, out of the mountains and over the start of the flat valley floor, seemed to go on for hours. I set max range speed, which is the speed at which the helicopter travels furthest for a given amount of fuel, and headed straight for Innsbruck Airport.
A bit like the way it feels when you go to a party with a spot on your nose, that red light seems to grow brighter by the minute, especially when you haven’t got anywhere flat to land if the engine stops.
In a hurry to get on the ground, I landed heavily on the apron next to an Air Ambulance, having firmly rejected the Air Traffic Controller’s instruction to fly a huge airliner-style circuit round his airport, as I hadn’t fancied gliding in without an engine for the last ten miles.
We landed at Innsbruck with the engine still running, and, it turned out, with about a pint of fuel to spare. Testing the level with the fuel dipstick once we had landed, we reckoned the light had come on at 5 US gallons instead of at 10. The R44 cruises at about 12 US gallons an hour, so an alert at 5 gallons is uncomfortably late, giving not much more than 20 minutes' warning. I called up the tower to apologise for my unconventional arrival at his International Airport, and we parted friends.
With tanks filled up by BP at Innsbruck airport, I had a moment to think back on the trip across the Austrian Alps. We had been flying among mountains rising many thousands of feet on either side of us, dodging pylons and power cables, worried by patchy clouds, shaken by constant rain, and diverted from time to time by snatched glances at fantastic Gothic castles standing on a mountain ledge or by lakes high up in the valleys. Once the agony of head-down navigating and of avoiding the dangers faded away, it would be one of those trips that experience is built on. For the moment it was overshadowed by the prospect of the high Brenner Pass into Italy, which was likely to be every bit as difficult, even if perhaps just as magnificent.
In the airport buildings we met Christina, an athletic young paramedic with lots of fantastic blonde hair, who looked great in her fire-proof flying suit. She was there with a bunch of pilots running twin-engine turbine helicopters as part of the Austrian mountain rescue service. One of them turned out to have had to 2000 hours experience in R22s in South America, where he had been engaged in spotting tuna for the fishing fleets. He, like us, had no doubts at all about the reliability of Robinson machines, but was alarmed and daunted and at the thought of our flying even the larger R44 on a such a long, varied, and under-supported journey as this.
Coffee and cakes were produced, and the group gave us their experience of the mountains into Italy and the local conditions, along with maps, weather wisdom, and weather forecasts. And, bearing in mind the stress involved in these conditions, they suggested the town of Trento as a good target, giving a stage length of around 80 miles, an option which we should not otherwise have gone for; we had had our sights on Rome, about 300 miles farther on.
That morning's journey through low clouds and the hazards of the mountain passes were still in our minds, and the weather forecast for the Brenner Pass was no better. The shorter hop to Trento, recommended with all this cheerful and experienced good will, had a strong appeal, and we settled for it. Rome could wait till tomorrow, and with a bit of luck and some better weather we could reasonably hope to complete the 400 miles from Rome to Brindisi the following day as well.
We left Innsbruck just before 5 o'clock and were soon at 6000 feet above sea level, only about 50 feet above ground, climbing south towards the Brenner Pass, a low point in the huge Italian mountain range which rose like a wall a few miles ahead of us. The weather, forecast to be grey and cloudy, was to start with sunny and fairly clear.
As we flew higher, we saw the fabulous Italian Alps rising on either side to 8000 feet.
We followed the motorway A22, the river, and the railway, all jammed together on a rising plain not more than a couple of hundred yards wide. Soon, though, the steely clouds came down to meet us; and the higher and steeper we climbed, the less likely it seemed that we would clear the top of the pass.
"It looks awfully angry up there," I said, looking at great streaks of snow-laden grey cloud draped over the snow-covered peaks. "And there's no way through, by the look of it". I’m not a great fan of flying in mountains in any case. There's just too much in the way of vertigo.
"Keep your nerve," said Martin, " it's probably just the perspective. As you look up the slope of the pass what you see is the underneath of the cloud above. The pass may go on looking blocked until we are at the same height as the top of the pass."
We climbed higher and higher, following the motorway. Cars were starting to put on their headlights as the visibility worsened. We could now see the old road, long in disuse, and pushed aside by the motorway. There was an ancient track taking an even older and steeper route amongst the boulders and cliffs to the summit. White mountain goats scattered in surprise as we flew low overhead.
We turned what we thought was our last corner before the top of the pass. Ahead of us in the distance was the motorway disappearing into a tunnel, and huge grey clouds still blocking the pass. We slowed down for a moment, cautious about ending up in a turbulent rocky cul-de-sac blocked in by cloud and granite.
Suddenly, to our right, there came into view what mountain flyers like to call a letterbox. It was a slot of brilliant sunshine wedged between the sullen grey of the cloud above and the damp granite of the mountain top, with room for us to post ourselves through it towards the clear view of the lower ground on the far side. On either side of this narrow slot the granite disappeared into the cloud. Martin, with his mountain hang gliding experience to guide him, flew a careful course to the windward side of the letterbox, minimising the risk of the high altitude mountain winds pushing us into the clouds at the other end of the slot and dashing us to pieces on the mountainside.
"We're through the pass. Look, there's the motorway below us coming out of its tunnel and going down into Italy," said Martin, setting the helicopter into the long, slow, ear popping descent.
I gritted my teeth as I looked down at what looked to me like the whole of Italy spread out at what seemed like miles beneath us beyond the mountains. "“Nice"” I said. I really hate extreme heights, and here I was a mile and a half above the ground.
As the ground began to slope south, the valley widened out to a couple of miles or so, and the mountain peaks got lower and more rounded. We passed over the little town of Bolzano and came into Trento airport’s airspace. It turned out we were sharing the airspace with the European Parachuting Championships, with startlingly colourful silk canopies dropping in groups out of quite large aircraft flying not very high. It says a lot for the coolness of the Trento air traffic controllers that they handled us gently and calmly in to land, despite the sky being full of falling humans in lycra jumpsuits.
We booked a room a local hotel, white-washed balconies overlooking olive groves, and after a fantastic Italian meal there of colourful vegetables slow-roasted in olive oil and garlic, we took a wander round Trento to see what the walled town had to offer. "Not much at all," the girl in the control tower had said. "Look in on our party," said the parachutists. "We will," we said.
When we got into town we walked along the narrow streets expecting little real action or entertainment. The whole place seemed to be made of shiny pink marble, including the pavements, which made it feel like a mausoleum.
Turning a dark corner, suddenly from a distance we heard the thud of music. We soon made it out to be the sound of live music from the main square. By what seemed like a spookily co-incidental echo of our day in the mountains, a rock band was playing on a stage draped with SOS Childrens’ Village posters. We had happened upon an SOS Childrens’ Village fund-raising event for Kosovo.
We introduced ourselves to the pretty blond girl who was organizing it all, to wish her well. My Italian is limited to being able to ask for “cinque cento kilo di prosciutto cotto”, which I learned from a teach yourself Italian tape. It translates as “500 kilos of cooked ham please” which doesn’t come up very often.
I managed to explain to her in a mixture of English and German what we were up to. I was pretty sure she couldn’t decide whether she’d misunderstood me or I if I was mad, but she toasted us in grappa. We stayed very late to dance to the music with the young and trendy of Trento, enjoying the lights playing on the fountains and castle walls all around the square.
By the time we got back, the parachutists had all finished their party and gone to bed.
We did the same, shamed by their good flying sense, but knowing the late night was worth it. We could always take it in turns to get some sleep tomorrow in the helicopter.
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