OFF TO THE MALDIVES IN THE INDIAN OCEAN

This is the second shortest flight of the journey, shy of 500 nm a piece of cake.

But with slot on arrival because of a single run way ( a second one is under construction to be open in 2018).

I made changes after the briefing to the pilot and the changes contributed to an additional excess traffic to the airport.

Peter and I left last from Mattala and we were told that we were #10 on the approach , to Hold at ARDIV and expected a landing clearance at 8:23 Z.

After 5 hold circuit , a botched approach ( due to a ballon on the runway......) we landed at 8:54Z

This was a great opportunity for many photos of the magnificent sea surrounding the Maldives.

our flight path

 polka dots from the sky

Male, Maldives

The point of view of Peter on the happenings for our arrival into the Maldives:

All,

We are very excited, today is the day we fly to the Maldives! Known as a little spec of land with an airport on it. The distance from Sri Lanka to Maldives is not terribly long, only a 1 & 1/2 hour flight.  The CJ3 has almost four hours of endurance! But, if you miss the island, or this major runway closes, you better have enough fuel to get back to Sri Lanka or India!! Thoughts of Amelia Earhart danced in our heads!

We really liked Sri Lanka and especially the Amanwella Resort, but the Maldives and 'The One and Only Resort' is what we have been waiting for.

We had the normal pickup at 10:00 from the hotel to the airport. The trip took about an hour and fifteen minutes to drive from the Resort to our plane. You never know how long it will really take in Sri Lanka, because if there are water buffalo grazing along the highway strip or are standing in the middle of the road, all cars, buses, tututs, motorcycles and pedestrians must stop and give way to the animals! Three days prior, on the way to our hotel we had to stop twice, once for five minutes to wait for the animals!!

After arriving at the airport around 11:15 am, we finally cleared customs & immigration, pre-flighted the plane and obtained our IFR clearance to Maldives by straight up noon. 

Our taxi, takeoff and climb were perfect. The cleared us initially to 14,000 feet and once they made radar contact we were cleared to flight level 430, yeah no delay in the climb. About an hour later we asked for lower and we're cleared down to 15,000 feet, but we were also told we had to hold at a waypoint called URDIV. A hold at a waypoint is not unusual, except ours was estimated to be 23 minutes long before they allowed us to land! That is a lot of laps, boring holes in the sky. Also, jets burn vast amounts of fuel at low altitudes. When we got down to our assigned flight level we were treated to beautiful scenery of the Maldives atolls and islands.

We entered our hold at URDIV and flew outbound for two minutes then inbound for two minutes, we did five laps on the racetrack circuit. Every time we did a circuit the brought us down a few thousand feet. 15,000 to 8,000 to 7,000 to 6,000 to 5,000 and finally 4,000, the height we needed to be at for our initial approach fix. (See picture 3) They finally cleared us to land. Inbound on the RNAV approach, autopilot was hooked up and everything was working nicely then we heard the tower scream, yes a very terse loud voice "Singapore 151, STOP WHERE YOU ARE, ABOART TAKEOFF, I REPEAT ABOART TAKEOFF!!", the next sound from tower was "N420CH (me), stop decent, maintain 3,000 feet and turn left to a heading of 090". Oh shit! (See picture 4). Turned out a giant weather balloon got away from the ground crew and was drifting across the runway from west to east! After about 10 more minutes the tower re-cleared us to land, and that landing was uneventful! In these out of the way places, I tend to carry extra fuel and this is exactly why! Between my five turns in the holding pattern and a missed approach I burned an extra 1,050 pounds of fuel. If I only had planned for 1,000 pounds of fuel when I land, like I do at Boeing Field, the jet would have been a sea plane! But only once.