Cumulous Granet

Since returning from South Africa I've been busy learning various flight routes from Nairobi, mainly out to the East and Northeast of Kenya. So busy in fact that this blog has been quiet for a few weeks. Hopefully that is about to change.

I've now completed LOFT (Line Oriented Flight Training) and am now undergoing a couple of weeks of supervised flying where I am the aircraft Captain (P1, Pilot-in-command, guy with the 4 bars on his shoulder) but another MAF pilot comes along for the ride.

My chariot, 5Y-PTL i.e. 'Praise the Lord!'

The two main routes I am flying are MAF's twice-weekly regular shuttle flights to Dadaab (the Dadaab refugee camp in Eastern Kenya) and to Marsabit and the Northeast Frontier district. Basically any mission, Church or aid worker can hop on these shuttle services, or give us freight to take up.

I've done both routes several times now, but the Marsabit flight on Tuesday this week was somewhat memorable on account of the weather. At this time of year Nairobi and the high ground around Mount Kenya and the Aberdare hills sometimes find themselves covered in low cloud and mist. For the larger Caravan aircraft in the MAF fleet this is not a problem as they fly 'IFR' through and on top of the clouds. However single-engine piston aircraft such as the our Cessna 206 pictured above cannot legally fly IFR here, and so yours truly plays around under, over, and through gaps in the weather. So it was on Tuesday.

The key thing is to be able to see well enough ahead and around to know where the high ground is. Unfortunately here in this part of Kenya there is a LOT of it, and some of it is VERY high indeed (17,000ft!) Pilots sometimes refer to this sort of terrain as 'Cumulous Granet'.

Below is the first part of Tuesday's route, via the Northeast departure lane from Nairobi and around the East side of Mount Kenya via Embu and Meru. The purple line is the planned track. However due to the low clouds and high terrain forming the foothills of Mount Kenya, the actual route we took (in orange) was rather more exciting. At times we were a few hundred feet above the terrain, looking for bright spots and glimpses of the horizon. Twice we tried to regain our planned track closer to the mountain but were forced to turn around and retreat to the lower ground and better visibility.

Planned (Purple) and Actual (Orange) Routes

Eventually as we headed further North the clouds lifted and the terrain dropped for us to have a comfortable cruise at around 6500ft. However as we approached Marsabit, which is at 4300ft, the clouds once again descended. We descended to around 4800ft (500ft above the airstrip but maybe 100ft above the surrounding hills) and managed a 'bad weather' circuit to land in Marsabit.

All in all quite a lot of hard work, but I'm very glad for the low-level training we had in the US (see last year's blog entries) and the extra reserve fuel we carry for making these meandering weather detours.