Here at Veracity Aviation we are known for not letting anything hold us back to complete the mission whether that happens to be flying on short notice to Mexico or just working from 5am to midnight to help get a student through their training as fast as possible. Along those lines comes our newest adventure where the owner (Derrick Smith) and I (Kevin Mackenzie) will fly a helicopter from Texas to Brazil to deliver to a new customer. We wanted to share the experience with everybody and will be blogging with pics and stories every chance we get so here we go...
Follow us in near real-time with satellite based tracking
So here I am coming up on the big 3-0, that is to say that I am turning 30 at the end of the month (Halloween to be exact) and I must admit that I have not been looking forward to this day. On too many birthday’s, I have ended up going out with friends downtown in Austin. It has always been fun but not as adventurous as I would have liked. In my late teens and early 20s, I was fortunate enough to travel all over the world via airline passes from my dad who has since retired (well kind of). My first overseas trip, in fact, took me to Italy and Egypt where my older brother and I ended up sleeping on the streets more than one night and sharing power bars that we convinced ourselves constituted as lunch and dinner. It was some rough travelling but 25 countries, 6 continents and more stories than people care to listen to (i.e. riding motorcycles through Thailand, climbing mountains in Ecuador, Safaris in Africa), I look back and know that I have seen more than most people ever will.
Getting back to turning 30 – I realized that the latter half of my 20s, I spent very little time travelling internationally. I did some travelling for work around the US but nothing that came close to the adventurous I had when I was younger. For my birthday I had pretty much given up on anything more exciting than another night on 6th until my boss, Derrick, told me that he sold one of our helicopters to a company in Brazil (South of Rio de Janeiro). More importantly, he told me we would be ferrying the helicopter down there ourselves. Sounds like my kind of adventure!
Flight Plan with LOTS of fuel stops
I have always wanted to fly a small aircraft to a cool destination, but this trumps anything I had ever dreamed of. The trip will cover about 5,000 nautical miles through multiple countries (some of which I had not even heard of before) starting here in Texas, then over to Florida, down through the Caribbean, then Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana and finally Brazil. Since helicopters don’t tend to have great range, we will be stopping often on the way down for fuel. I don’t mind though because some of our stops will include Turks and Caicos, Trindiad and Tobago, Rio de Janeiro and more. As luck would have it, not only will we be flying over some of the most beautiful places on earth, but we will also be doing it in style. The Robinson R-44 we will be flying is one of the nicest I have ever seen. It has air conditioning, leather, moving map GPS, Bose headsets and more.
Rio de Janeiro
Grand Turk
Since we will be flying a piston powered single-engine helicopter over open water for extended periods of time there is, of course, some risk involved but we will do our best to minimize that risk by proper preparation and planning as well as taking plenty of emergency equipment. Let’s all just hope that Derrick doesn’t have to use any of his rescue swimming skills he learned in the Navy.
The trip will likely take about two weeks to complete and we hope to post pictures and stories from our trip every night. We will also have a map setup showing our progress in near real time. Check back often to see how we are doing and feel free to leave us comments!
-Kevin
