Exactly how accurately did I fly the 5 000 kilometer boarder? How much fuel did i use?
How much did this whole trip cost? What were the highs what were the lows, the good points the bad
points? I put out on instagram and asked you what questions you would like to know and wow what a
response i didn't realize you'd be so interested in this trip so thank you so much for all the
questions i'm going to try answering as many of your questions as i can and at the same time
let's go through the gps track as an overlay so we can see just how accurately i did fly the border
now if you haven't watched the previous videos then spoilers are going to be ahead
so maybe click on the link down below in the description to watch episodes one two and three
if you have already watched those thank you very much i do appreciate the support and let's start
at the start pretty uneventful take off as you would have seen on the videos around the coastline
i was worried about controlled airspace in the end controlled airspace wasn't really a problem at all
as we flew around this first part of the bay came through avalon back out of their airspace around
here at port arlington and that's when we started to make our way down the coast now the first
question that leads me to was from duck quacking who said what did you do for flight notification
and saw time well i did actually file a flight plan for each of the flights i did
obviously i couldn't put in every single gps waypoint around the coast but i put in the remarks
tracing the outline of the border of victoria so if anyone from air traffic control was looking
and wondering what i was doing why i was flying like this at least in the remarks they knew what
the objective of the flight was came down the coastline here to cape otway and you can see look
this part i didn't really include very much in in the videos i put out when you zoom in a little
bit more what you can see you can see the sort of style of flying i was doing i was really picking
a headland here picking a headland here and when it was a small bay i was quite often just flying
across i wasn't being accurate enough going across here on the larger bays you can see my track was
more curved coming out to the headland at this point down here at lawn but generally i felt like
i was kind of hopping from headland to headland more than trying to accurately go in and out of
the coastline if you zoom out it looks pretty good so maybe i'll maybe i'll zoom out maybe i won't
zoom in very much it looks better this part i'll be honest it wasn't too difficult it's all like
keep the c on your left keep the land on your right nice relatively easy start but it was only
easy for a short period of time because the next question yeah from sqmi photography what was the
most stressful part of the process well actually the most stressful part and probably the hardest
bit of flying i did on the whole trip came on that very first day which was when we got here
to portland and if you remember from the videos this is when we had really low cloud i think the
cloud would have been about 1100 1200 feet above ground level at some point so i was ducking down
underneath it at around 800 feet low down over the water it's not a place that i like to be in
a plane but in terms of the most stressful part well we can just measure this here it doesn't
look too long but from this headland to this one i mean that's still 15 and a half kilometers so nine
miles so probably three or four minutes worth of flying in between these two headlands over
the water low level and if anything happened with the engine over water at that point it was it's
going to be a ditching for sure like bongbong i didn't see that before it's cool name then this
was the turn inland to do that big straight line which you would have seen in the series i'll just
measure this again because i'm actually looking back at it i'm fairly happy with this 500 say
half a kilometer offline now this was all done without gps this was just done with timings i
knew that this town of nelson here i had about a minute of flying before i had to turn right and to
only be a half a kilometer out just by doing that visually i was actually pretty happy with that
and that leads me to the next question from slidesdale's underscore mac which was what was the
biggest thing you may have overlooked about taking this on i'm doing all this navigating manually
using the old techniques and i think the biggest thing i overlooked was that i've forgotten a lot
of that by flying with gps and all the tech in the plane all the time and you can see with my drift
correction i was quite a long way off the line at some points in fact the biggest deviation couple
of kilometers there yeah almost three kilometers off where i should have been but here we go this
is where i needed to turn back uh to the east and start tracking down the murray river and i didn't
actually show this in the original video but this is where i needed to turn and this is where i
actually did turn so this was actually quite a bit of a navigation mistake i just turned too early
6.9 kilometers too early i was visually trying to spot the river and i think i saw the river here
and i mistook that for this part of the river here because it's just so bendy and there's nothing
else really on the ground to identify it so i just turned too early i was hoping to turn because this
would have been fun i was hoping to turn from victoria uh into south australia into new south
wales and back into victoria again because it turns out i was just in victoria all the time
down the murray river all the way to our first stop at the end of the day which was
of course mildura hector courtney asked do you have any regrets from the trip no regrets from an
aviation point of view but one little regret from a filmmaking point of view and that's that i don't
think i did enough filming in the places i stopped at when i was on the ground i think there's a
lot of things that i can still learn about making better content for youtube when i'm exploring the
places that i'm visiting but you know what they say a good pilot is always learning and that's
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for making it possible for me to make content like this now we're leaving mildura and this is
where my track starts to get well this is where it really starts to fall apart took off from mildura
to the south then made a left turn and already you can see what i've done here is by taking off
to the south and having come in uh i think it was runway zero nine the day before all of this part
of the murray river i've completely missed down the river this is beautiful this was a really nice
calm clear morning really just enjoying flying low level 2500 following the murray river i was
following the loddon river for a while there as opposed to the murray river i think i said in
the video i forgot that australia has more than one river and everything was pretty
straightforward for our first landing then of the day and the refueling stop at etchuka
that only took about 20 minutes but then here you go this was echuca this is after i took off and
this was the part where i made my big actually i'm just going to jump into google maps instead
i probably should have used this from the start the satellite image on here is a lot better
this was the area that i was avoiding and if we just zoom in a little bit more you can see
it's that's just woods and you don't want to be flying low level in an aircraft over that
well to be honest i didn't i made the conscious decision not to so yes i could have followed the
murray river on this dotted line around here but instead i made a conscious decision to
avoid that this was the point that i was just chatting to you i think about don't be a hero and
fly on a nice weather day and then i completely missed out the river at this point and here this
is the town yeah this is the town of hao long which is a vfr reporting point for albury because
this is when we were going to go into controlled airspace now the reason there's this big s turn
that you can see around here is because at this point i was at five and a half thousand feet and
they wanted me at three and a half to go through controlled airspace i just did a quick s turn to
descend down to three thousand five hundred robul says i said how did atc let you do this
i asked them and they said yes i will be honest with avalon and albury that we're about to fly
through i did send them both an email beforehand just letting them know what i was doing so they
had my plans already but when you're on the radio you confidently say what you want to
do and the awesome people in air traffic control said yes so this was great this was fun actually
flying three and a half thousand feet through all bury and then down the lakes i mean there
was a bit going on there was other traffic i was just making sure i was in the right place but
flying along these lakes i think i said it in the video was just beautiful the closest i've actually
flown my aircraft to mount kosciuszko and this was where i was supposed to make my turn which again i
covered in the videos but we can just have another look here it's about yeah four four kilometers
too early now i've talked about the deviations here the one thing i didn't show you in the
original videos was this part this was where i was dealing with all of this low cloud if
you'll remember there was a low overcast layer that i was above at the time i saw a gap over
malakuta so i made a quick right turn and ducked under the clouds at that point but it did mean
and i never showed you this on the original video it did mean uh we were well let's be honest
it's about 20 kilometers away from where i should have been so i turned 20 kilometers too early
i would have loved to have got this track all the way down here but weather deviations they're part
of aviation i don't regret doing that it just it just looks a bit ugly cutting the corner off in
that way but anyway along this beautiful coastline and of course into bairnsdale to end the second
day ascot thank you very much for asking how was my stay in bernsdale i had a lovely stay thank you
i had a very nice vegan pizza at the earth and soul pizzeria oh and the airport was fantastic
really secure airport for overnight parking if you haven't been to bandsaw and you fly around
the same areas that i do check it out then on the final day took off from bands down again flew out
to the coast i'm a little bit disappointed in myself that i didn't actually connect
the two points where i flew into bensdale and out again on the coast so i did miss out a little bit
now these islands that you would have seen i made that decision to fly closer to land than
out to sea i'm still happy with that decision when you zoom out a little bit it does kind of
make it look like i've already cut out a big past the land but a lot of these are islands that's my
justification and actually the mainland border would be somewhere along there but then around
the bay here of corner inlet around this is just stunning flying around wilson's promontory
national park someone did mention in the comments that i incorrectly identified the southernmost
point of victoria i think i had it as wilson's promontory light station this is what i showed
on screen saying australia's southernmost point it's not the southernmost point is actually here
i think this is south point yeah so thanks for pointing out my stupid mistakes in the comments
i always really like it when you do that up through wilson's promontory around the base
here back round the heads of course i've talked about this big circle back into moorabbin airport
and this was the point right here where is it between reckless lane and black knight street
where the two paths crossed over and i completed that loop of victoria now if you zoom out it
actually looks pretty good i'm quite happy with with how that all looks of course there are things
that i would have liked to have done better but at the end of the day you can always improve i
think that's kind of the moral of the story here now a few questions then you wanted to ask about
fuel usage and cost so let's go through some of those how much fuel did you burn
mildura was 216 liters that was 472 dollars worth of fuel oh god flying's not cheap is it
echuca was 77 liters that's 159 dollars of fuel benzdale was 171 liters and i haven't
finally got the cost for moravian but i've got the amount so it's 133 liters total would be 1294.47
for me i'll be honest with the accommodation with the other expenses on top i would say that this
whole trip probably would have cost in the region of around 2 000 australian dollars so exactly how
accurately did i fly the border two ways to work this out one is your opinion i personally think
b-plus the second way and slightly more scientific way of doing it is by taking the entire distance
of the coastline the entire distance that i flew and working out one as a percentage
of the other so we can do that the entire distance around the coastline of victoria
is 5053 kilometers i flew three legs of 600 nautical miles 653 nautical miles and 335
nautical miles that's 1588 nautical miles convert that to kilometers that's 2941 kilometers so
2941 as a percentage of 5.053 that's 58 now aviation exams the pass mark is normally 70
so 58 that's a solid fail but at the end of the day the experience was brilliant i really enjoyed
doing it i loved sharing it with you as well here on youtube and i love getting all your feedback
and questions on the trip so thank you very much if you did submit a question
if you have any others let me know in the comments below i'll be online for the first
few hours of this video going live i'll do my best to answer them otherwise what's next
i'm not doing the coastline of australia i'm just putting it out there now it's not happening
it will be fun