Chapter 26 - Santa Maria, California to Hilo, Hawaii

Some of these Nav Charts will look pretty boring. Most of them are dots in blue, as they are intersection points and not land mass. However, if you find it boring looking at mostly blue for a couple of seconds, then spare a thought for us who will be looking at blue for hours on end, punctuated by a few white caps below and maybe white clouds for some of the time. Hopefully no black ones or towering and turbulent white ones.

This is basically the international airline route from Los Angeles to Hawaii. I have been told that the traffic is heavy as is the shipping below and like guardian angels, the US Coast Guard is ever present in the air and on the water.

The Nav Log is largely self explanatory to pilots, and not too difficult for non aviators, given a little time work out what the abbreviations mean.

The fuel is in US Gallons. Multiply by 6 to get pounds for use with weight and balance. For conversion to litres, multiply by 3.78. It's easy if you fill with 100 US gallons. That equals 378 litres. If you don't have a calculator, it gets more complicated when you have used 13.5 US gallons.

On the first leg, you will notice we ran out of fuel and ditched with around 1200 NM to go. Not really. The built in fuel tanks hold 102 US gallons usable, so the additional fuel is in the temporary fuel bladders strapped in where the middle passenger seats were - right behind the pilot and co-pilot's seats.
The Jeppesen computer program knows that the maximum usable fuel load for VH-EXS is 102 US gallons so it won't load the additional fuel. I can 'force' it to change but the 'Fuel' column will be corrected by hand. For this exercise you can assume that the fuel loaded for the flight will be the Route Total (236) at the bottom of the page plus about 51 US gallons to give about 3 hours extra fuel margin. In the case of the first leg, the fuel loaded will be 236 + 51 = 287 US gallons. The exact amount will be adjusted to keep us at 30% max. overweight.

To give that some perspective, that's roughly equivalent to four (4) 44 gallons drums in the back of the aircraft, in addition to the fuel in the wing tanks.


Hope that makes sense to the non-aviators. It confuses the hell out of me.

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