As some of you know, a couple of weeks ago, I tried to do a “Touch & Go” at JFK. I figured that due to Covid-19, the skies would be pretty empty and ATC would have plenty of time on their hands. That attempt did not work 🙁 The controller told me “Touch & Gos” were not allowed @ JFK without prior permission from the Port Authority.
So this past week, I decided, I would try to get permission. I didn’t really know who to call. So I started my research by looking up the JFK entry in the FAA Airport Facility Directory. The first line of the comments stated that JFK was a “Part 93 High Density airport”, which means it had special rules. But it didn’t state what the rules were. It did have the phone number of the airport manager. So I just called and asked. He told me to talk the manager at the control tower and gave me that number. When I spoke to the Control tower, they explained that “Touch & Gos” must be authorized by the Port Authority and gave me that number. However, the tower told me something interesting. While “Touch & Gos” require Port Authority permission, full stop landings (with a taxi back) does not require any special permission. He suggested that I do that and also suggested filing a flight plan as that would guarantee a clearance. So that would be my back up plan. But I did want to try to get the authorization.
So I called the Port Authority. They were helpful. But not cooperative. They told me that “Tough & Gos” are no longer permitted at JFK AT ALL 🙁 While I had them on the phone, I asked about landing fees. While most US airports have no landing fee, this was JFK. So the basic landing fee was $25. If you land between 3PM and 11PM, there is an additional $100 surcharge. Plus if you go to the FBO ramp, the FBO charges a ramp fee of ~ $50-100. So I decided I would go in the morning (to avoid the $100 surcharge) and just do a full stop taxi back to avoid the FBO fees …. This would make the fee only the flat $25 🙂
You can see how it went in this video:
Overall, I am glad I did it… because it is sort of a bucket list item. But there really are so many other scenic places to fly that are a lot easier to get to.
Cheers,
== T.J.==
During our stay there, we saw every type of animal that I had hoped to see, including lions, leopards, giraffes, elephants and a whole bunch more! I took over 300 pictures and couldn’t stop shooting… Here are a couple of my favorites:
This lodge really surprised me. Despite being in a very remote area, the lodge was “very comfortable”, as you can see below:
Most of our game drives where in a Land Cruiser and like any civilized game drive, we took breaks along the way:
Now it is time to jump into the planes and head further north to the Okavango Delta:
We had 4 planes in our convoy and we flew in a loose formation the whole way. The lead plane did the radios and planes 2 – 4 followed along visually with a 5 second delay on takeoff and transponders off during the flight. Paul and I were in the 4th plane. Since he was flying the first leg, I had plenty of time to take pictures, like this one of the Hartebeespoort Dam:
While we had a flight plan and plenty of GPS equipment, navigation was as simple as “follow the green plane in front of us”. As you can see below, we did that pretty well:
We remained in formation all the way to Gabarone, Botswana, where we got a group clearance to land. You can see in the picture below that the 2nd plane in our group was turning off the runway, while plane 3 was landing and we were just behind them on short final!
After a quick stop for fuel and customs, we were off on the next leg directly into the Kalahari Desert. I did the flying on this leg and it was the most remote environment I had ever seen! No roads, no lakes, no towns… Basically NOTHING as far as you could see in any direction. But I did get to do my first dirt strip landing! It was the private landing strip of the
We were entirely out of cell phone range and 120 km from the nearest town. But, we were not exactly roughing it 😉
Nick and Christine did an amazing job in preparing a 2 inch prep binder that itemized every detail of the journey including charts, photos, radio freqs, etc. Really, all we have to do is fly! In addition, they also prepared rather thorough survival kits for each of the four airplanes.
As you can see, Bruce was perhaps most impressed by how complete the survival kits were 😉
After he did a great landing, we took a coffee break before heading back. Here we are in front of our plane on the dirt strip:
