By Robbie Culver
Jon Hunt flew his 1977 Piper PA-28 Turbo Arrow III across the Atlantic from the United Kingdom from May 23 to June 1, then continued on to AirVenture with the Cherokees to Oshkosh mass arrival on Monday, July 20. Jon is a former BBC Television reporter who has turned to aviation content creation as The Flying Reporter — he has a YouTube channel — and is making his first trip to Oshkosh.
A Piper PA-28. Across the Atlantic. What an adventure!
“It had been a dream of mine, I think, and it is for many pilots, from the U.K., I suspect, to cross the Atlantic, go to Oshkosh. So I’d been thinking about it for some time. One of my followers suggested I come in with the Cherokees to Oshkosh mass arrival, and I kind of go, yeah, that’ll never happen. You know, it’s kind of one of those things that you know is going to take a lot of work, a lot of planning, and life gets in the way.
“But I don’t know what made me suddenly decide to do it. I just decided I was going to do it. You know, I’m 53 now, and you’re not getting any younger and, you know, everyone has these dreams to do things, but they never do them, do they? Always put them off. My mum was getting sick as well, and it was kind of a moment in life where I thought, I’d given up my job at the BBC, you know, my son was a bit older so didn’t need as much support from me, and I could maybe just go and do something for me.”
Flying a single-engine piston aircraft across the North Atlantic Ocean is no small thing. It required a lot of preparation, planning, training, and equipment to do it safely.
Jon said, “I knew I had to get the instrument rating to safely do it, and I think legally do it as well. It’s very hard to get the instrument rating in the U.K., much harder than the U.S. As far as commitment and time, the process. The whole thing is I had to pass seven exams that are similar to ATP [airline transport pilot] level exams. I pretty much studied half of the ATP syllabus. That’s what the U.K. requires at this time. [They are] looking at changing it, thankfully, but that’s what we had. That took six months of self-study and then … individually taking these exams. I didn’t pass them all first time. And then, you know, I got the rating.”
Preparing to fly a 49-year-old aircraft on the trip required some work as well. “I had to save up money to upgrade the aircraft, get the avionics into a fit state because it was all pretty old. I mean, I was flying it IFR. We can fly IFR on a much more basic instrument rating in the U.K. We have terrible weather over there, don’t you know? And so there’s this rating we can get. So I’ve been flying IFR for a while, shooting approaches, but I didn’t have the full privileges. I couldn’t use it outside the U.K., for one thing. So, yeah, upgraded the aircraft, that cost a lot of money, so that took two years to save up for.”
Jon is also raising money for a charity as part of his adventure. Aerobility is described as “changing lives through the magic of flight.” Jon said, “They are set up to enable disabled people to experience the magic of flight. What we all know as pilots is that flying provides us with a huge escape and wonderful therapy. When you’re flying, you’re detached from the world and all your troubles on the ground. And for disabled people, they experience that in flight, you know, on a magnitude of 10 or more, right? Because for them, they’re very often locked into their world. They might be locked into a wheelchair. They’re constrained on the ground. But when they’re up there in the cockpit, they’re as free as you and me. They’re as free as a bird.” You can donate online at aerobility.com
On to the adventure of an Atlantic crossing! “May 23, I set course from Southern England. I went to Scotland, (then) to Vágar, in the Faroe Islands. Reykjavík in Iceland, Kulusuk in East Greenland, Kangerlussuaq on the west of Greenland. Iqaluit in Northern Canada; Kuujjuaq for a fuel stop, where you buy fuel by the barrel — [it is] 1,000 Canadian dollars for the barrel. And if you don’t use it all, you can’t have them store it. They take it away and they probably use it in their snowmobiles for all I know. So that’s pretty gutting because I only used about half a barrel. It was a very conservative fuel stop, but I was playing this really conservatively.
“And then from there, it was Goose Bay [and then] Bangor, Maine. And then I’d been touring, you know, a little bit in the east and Midwest of the United States and had a bit of a holiday in Florida. Now here in Oshkosh.”
But Jon didn’t just fly into Oshkosh; he joined the Cherokees to Oshkosh mass arrival. Jon said, “They do it really well. They really, really make you a safe formation pilot. They make you come to two weekends of mandatory training. They show you their method, they show you their procedures, and you become a real professional unit by the end of the training.
“That was great fun. And I didn’t think we’d make it here. We didn’t get in [Sunday]. The weather where we were in central Wisconsin was terrible. We wanted 5 miles [visibility] for this ideally. You know, we had some VFR-only pilots on board and you know, 5 miles, 3 miles really is terrible. Anyway, it was 3 miles visibility this morning, but we did it, and it was hard work, really hard work, some low cloud ceilings as well. But we got in, and it was such a great feeling to come in here. I was whooping in the cockpit as we were downwind. For a Brit to get to bring his aircraft all the way from the United Kingdom to Oshkosh and make it here in formation with a great family of Cherokee pilots. They are superb, all camping together.”
Welcome to Oshkosh, Jon!