Latrobe Valley to Mount Gambier

Introduction and Preplanning.

We had taken an aircraft from Latrobe Valley to Central Australia in 1992 andit was time to head off again. We had been discussing for some time when and where. After we had secured an aeroplane the descision was made to go and try to fly around Australia. We immediatly gathered as much information as we could and used a planning chart to plan out a rough route over the telephone as Tony and Graeme were in Latrobe Valley and Darren was in Canberra. We now knew what we were flying and roughly where we were going, we had all put in our leave for 6-8 weeks and we had 4 months to finalise our planning. We all started to think more about where we wanted to visit, where we could land and get fuel and what we would take. Darren had recently gained his PPL and would attempt to get his night VFR rating as well and Graeme started his flying training when the planning got serious. Unfortunately the weather stopped Darren from getting his night VFR, but this was only for emergencies anyway.

We phoned every intended landing place to confirm fuel and when Tony and Darren flew the aircraft from Canberra to Latrobe Valley we were all ready to depart.

Before we departed Latrobe Valley Tony had a PPL with approx 160 hours, Darren also had a PPL with 120 hours and Graeme was a student who had recently gone on his first solo. Other than Tony who had flown us to central Australia we had virtually no experience. What is writen below is an account of what we did, how we did it and what we learnt.

Latrobe Valley - Essendon, 15/4/97.

Once the aeroplane was loaded and fueled we taxied for rwy 27 at Latrobe Valley as the long runway was unusable due to works. Our plan was direct LTV to ATV 10 then onto Essendon. When we contacted approach at ATV 10 they advised us to track direct to albert park lake, after which we joined downwind for runway 17.

We parked the aircraft and immediately went about organising refueling, after a quick phone call the truck soon arrived and we were ready to depart again.

Essendon - Mount Gambier, 15/4/97.

We departed Essendon on Runway 17, overflew the Westgate Bridge and tracked direct to Ocean Grove, onto Cape Otway then coastal onto Warnambool. At the Twelve Apostles we overflew the area for about ten minutes as we had a look, took photo's and shot some video. We continued coastal onto Warrnambool where we landed, had a break and swapped seats. We continued on to Mount Gambier where we had planned to stay overnight. This is where we made our first mistake!

It was decided to leave our accomodation open, as we could either stay in a Motel, Hotel, Rent a Cabin/Caravan or sleep in our tents. On our arrival we found ourselves right in the middle of school holidays and finding accomodation was dificult. After some searching and the help of the taxi driver getting other taxi's checking for us we were booked in and our problems were solved.

The advantage of keeping our accomodation open made our schedule more flexible and we wouldnt be trying to push on to make our planned destination in bad weather. The only problem was we wouldnt be assured of accomodation, luckily this was the only time it happened.