In 1976 my Father bought a V-Tail bonanza with tip tanks-with full fuel the plane carried 120 gallons. The range was huge: at 45% power the plane flew at 130 knots and burned only 10 gallons an hour providing a range of almost 1800 miles non-stop!We naturally started thinking about where such a plane could take us. It wasn't long before we decided that we should fly to from Burlington, VT (where I lived) to Scotland and back. We finally made the trip, after much planning (I also had to get an instrument rating-it's required to be Pilot-in-Command on a trans-Atlantic flight) in 1978.
Below are pictures from the trip. It only took us 7 days to fly the round trip. Part of the reason the trip was flown so quickly is that we found that staying over-night in Narssarssuaq, Greenland (which we had planned to do) would require a $300US "airport opening fee" (in 1978 dollars!) for us to take off the next day. We already had paid the same fee to land and that fee kept the airport "open" for several hours-plenty of time to go through customs, check the weather, and get fuel but not long enough to get any sleep. So, on both the leaving and returning legs we flew all the way from Goose Bay, Canada to Reykjavik, Iceland on the same day (stopping in Narssarssuaq for fuel). That's actually about 2/3rds of the whole trip! Those legs made for long days but since we went during the first week of summer the daylight lasted for the entire leg.
Click on any thumbnail below to see a larger version
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