We managed to break even in Vegas just about which took extreme will power as the place is everything it’s made out to be. We spent a fair bit going to Cirque du Soleil but it was worth it and then spent most of our time going in and out of different Casinos!

This morning we got up at about 7am so that we could get an early start towards Page AZ via the Grand Canyon and avoid most of the midday turbulence. Flying in the Grand Canyon is apparently pretty turbulent once the sun starts causing thermals and wind picks up speed through the vast valleys.

I know of a couple of pilots following this who are wanting to fly over the Grand Canyon so I’ll go into a bit more detail and anyone not interested can probably skip this paragraph! Anyone interested can probably follow along. Leaving Vegas is pretty busy but I got clearance from the ground controller at Vegas to fly through the class B airspace under the final approach and via Henderson International then head east. From there things heat up on the radio as there are lots of tours flying out towards the Hoover Dam; there’s a monitoring frequency and it’s best to just describe the colour and make of your aircraft as that way everyone knows they see the right one. There are various monitoring frequencies for the Canyon and there’s plenty of traffic to make them worthwhile. From the dam heading east there is the special airspace over the Canyon for which you need a Grand Canyon VFR Sectional chart that depicts the corridors you can fly through. I used the Zuni Corridor and programmed the waypoints into my GPS and used VORs to make sure I got the right path. Unfortunately you can only fly over these at 11500ft going Northbound so I bought some boost oxygen cans to make sure hypoxia wasn’t a problem. We cruised at 10000ft most of the way so it came in useful anyway. In terms of weather there are ASOS and ATIS stations at GCN and Page- the Canyon can develop weather fast so I checked them a fair bit. Over the Canyon if the engine gives up hopefully the rim is glide’able but I tuned to Grand Canyon airport on box 2 just so that someone would hear a mayday! I had the aircraft fairly leaned out and it burned about 6.2 GPH with a TAS of 110kts.

Flying over the Grand Canyon was pretty epic. You go from being about 4000ft off the ground (at 11500ft above sea level) to about 8000ft above the ground as you go over the canyon edge. The vast expanse of it is pretty overwhelming, especially when you only have one engine! There are certainly points where if the engine fails it isn’t going to be pretty; we had about five litres of water on board though just in case. After the Canyon we headed towards Page airport and landed facing the Lake which was a pretty cool approach. It was bumpy because of thermals but not too bad!

While we’re here we are probably going to head up to monument valley etc and possibly somewhere in Utah but we’re not sure!

It’s also the first time I’ve actually flown into a new time zone! An hour ahead of California here in Arizona.

Chris