Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe – Abraham Lincoln
The local newspaper ran a story on the flight and the local radio station called for the first interview. AOPA, the Aircraft Owners’ and Pilots’ Association who had awarded me the aviation scholarship in 2010, ran a story in their national magazine. The word was now getting out there. This was no longer just my dream.
Mum, Dad and I packed our bags and took off for Narromine in central New South Wales, the location for the inaugural AusFly fly-in, a celebration that brought all areas of Australian aviation to one central hub. I had been invited to AusFly by its organiser, a guy who heard about my plans on the grapevine. It was a pretty small air show, but as a practice run for public speaking and a place to officially announce the flight to the public, there was nowhere better.
We arrived in Narromine in Dad’s tiny 1965 Cessna 172 on a Saturday morning, parked the plane and tied it down. That night well over two hundred people gathered in a hangar for dinner, the doors were open with two show-winning aircraft nosed in towards the stage. As the sun went down, the aircraft created silhouettes against the dusky sky while the hangar slowly filled with aviators of all kinds.
Public speaking was still not my strong point. I sat at our table eating dinner and feeling incredibly nervous as I looked forward to when this would all be over. The night went on with formalities and awards, then finally David from the Sports Aircraft Association of Australia stood up to introduce me.
I laid out the colour-coded speech on the lectern and began to speak, my voice shaking and my hands holding the wooden stand in a death grip. Slowly I told the story of the journey so far, what had been achieved and what was in store for the future. David stood to the left of me with outstretched arms holding a humungous blow-up globe that Mum had found on Ebay, with the intended flight path joining thirty-odd destinations in a single line. The globe created significant interest as I used it to explain the flight path: departing the east coast of Australia, tracking through Norfolk Island, American Samoa, Kiribati, Hawaii and into mainland USA. Once across the USA the flight path headed north towards the top of the world, across the North Atlantic via Canada, Iceland and then into Scotland. The marker pen had divided Europe, a flight path from Scotland to England, France and Greece before Egypt, Oman, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. A fine line connected Indonesia to the west coast of Australia and across the continent, back to where I had started.
At the end, after asking for help in any form I thanked the crowd for listening. As I backed away, eager to find some form of strong alcoholic beverage, people started to stand up. ‘We will sponsor you,’ one said, ‘And so will we,’ said another. The representative at Bose, the electronics company who had a booth at the show, offered me a headset worth $1200. ‘Take it and see if you like it,’ he said, ‘and if you do I’ll give you a couple to use on your flight.’ The support, the belief and the encouragement were phenomenal. I stood by my table, hardly able to believe my eyes as dozens of people lined up to say hello and to ask about joining Teen World Flight as a sponsor. It was great.
Now we had to harness this support, as well as learning everything else we needed to. I would go to bed every evening knowing a little more about circumnavigating the globe than I had done that morning, whether from someone I had spoken to, something I read or a lesson learned through trial and error. I spent a lot of time every day stressing about the job list that seemed to grow every day and the looming deadlines forever clouded by the chance of failure. Not enough time was spent looking back.
I soon learned some serious life lessons about the differences between knowing how something should go and the reality involved in making it happen. I had to do so much every day that I forgot just how much we had all learned about the ins and outs of the flight. There was no better time to realise this than when complete strangers started asking questions. ‘What will you eat?’ ‘Will you sleep while you’re on autopilot?’ ‘How will you go to the toilet?’ And even, ‘Are you going to stop?’ It took a while to get used to some of these, even though we heard them over and over again. Some questions made me smile, some made me think. Others caused me to stand there wondering what on earth I had gotten myself into.
Ken’s support was phenomenal. Flying around the world was anything but a documented step-by-step process, not even on Google, and he had information that was vital to the flight, information not readily available in books or online. Seeing how much effect Ken had on the flight in the early stages made me realise that I would need to find more people with particular areas of knowledge, with expertise in areas I didn’t know about, whether flying itself or aspects of the planning stage. I put myself out there, admitting my own lack of knowledge and asking for help, and gradually the team grew. Little did I know then how large it would become. Some people were prominent from beginning to end, others would play one-off parts that were all vital to the success of the flight. And they joined the team in unexpected ways, too.
We knew we had the big picture, a broad understanding of where to go and what to look for, what the best case would be and what could possibly be the worst.
More than anything else at this stage, we needed funds. This was an expensive adventure far beyond anything the average family could afford, including mine, but this where the challenge lay. Mum and Dad offered all they could, as did family and friends. They helped wherever possible, including backing me financially to go to the first meetings with potential sponsors, meetings for the website and image and to visit experienced pilots so I could gain further knowledge. These were the meetings where I had nothing behind me except the dream, my family, Ken and Dick Smith. My brother Adam bought the laptop we used to put together the sponsorship proposals and my other brother Chris spent hours on the end of a phone and typing hundreds of personalised letters to potential sponsors.
We wrote letters to every company we could think of, whether to do with aircraft or not, asking for funds or goods and services. We thought the direct approach would work; we’d just sit down with any company that showed an interest or looked promising, we’d tell them what we wanted, they would tell us what they could give and we would sort things out from there. But after we talked to Snap, who had designed our website, we realised we had to be much more structured than that. We needed to have levels of sponsorship – gold, silver, bronze – and outlines of specific costs involved. We had to be able to say exactly what sponsorship money would be used for, how much everything would cost, and outline every return.
We thought $2000 was about right as the minimum figure for having a logo on the aeroplane. With no experience we tossed various ideas around and got as many opinions as possible. And then one day I was walking across the bridge near home and I looked down and saw a brick with a company name etched into it. Great advertising, I thought, what a good idea, and I bet it didn’t cost much either. I mulled this over for a while. I guessed that many of the people who wanted to support my venture probably weren’t especially well off – maybe not wealthy enough, for example, to fork out $2000 for a logo. But what about asking potential sponsors for less money? What could we give them? How could we offer thanks and appreciation to those who wanted to be a part of the flight?
That’s how I came up with the idea for the 500 Club. We said it would cost $500 to have a short message, signature or the name of a school or business written on the flaps of the aeroplane, and also mentioned on the website. This turned out to be a great idea; heaps of people wanted to do this. The first time I spoke to the public at AusFly in Narromine in September 2012, we had people standing up and wanting to contribute straightaway.
The first people who bought a 500 sponsorship, apart from my grandparents, was a company called Avplan. They have an iPad app for aircraft navigation. It turned out that Bevan from AvPlan had always wanted to fly around the world but had never been able to proceed past the planning stage. Having Avplan on the plane was his way of fulfilling his dream.
We worked very hard on the sponsorship proposal, we must have refined it about a million times. Snap printed it up for us, completely changing what we had written. We went from a one-page document to a thirty-page proposal in a folio printed on glossy paper, and tried it out on different people. If someone like, say, the head of an engineering firm said bluntly, ‘Nup, I wouldn’t read that,’ we would go through it all again and change it. We had to learn how to appeal to as many different groups as possible.
I learned a lot about the media at this stage too. The first story about me, as I said, had been in the local paper. It wasn’t what I expected; it had things in it that I hadn’t said and information that was incorrect. But as a result a bloke from a town on the Sapphire Coast contacted me and asked what he could do to help. He said he could do PR. When we met he was persuasive. He told me he could guarantee eighty grand in sponsorship in the first month. He was successful, he’d done well, so I believed him. But for months it was all promises and nothing was happening. This taught me a very important lesson that was verified time and time again: nothing is confirmed until it is in your hand or signed away. We soon parted ways and I continued to look ahead. and I could just see this wasn’t going to work. We spent quite a lot on this guy and ended up with very little in return. It took a while before I managed to find someone who knew media.
It was okay to stand up in front of an audience in Narromine with a globe and explain what route I wanted to follow, but that was the easy bit. Actually plotting the flight path took a long time, and a million things had to be considered. The path had to have legs shorter than the aircraft’s maximum range, it had to take into account political situations in the countries I was planning to visit, questions of Customs and immigration, ‘ports of entry’ into each country, costs to transit each stopover, visas and legal requirements for a visiting pilot and much, much more. We knew that after we had chosen the route we had to find out whether every country, whether on a stopover or being overflown, would issue us a landing clearance. Some countries demanded less paperwork than others although some, such as the USA, wanted you to fill out your name, address, passport number and flight details about 487 times. Ken had recommended a company in the United Kingdom that could take care of organising clearances. This was the only area of the flight planning that was outsourced and not completed within our team.
Sorting all this out took months, countless emails and a headache or seven. Each destination would need to be contacted, Customs organised at the entry and exit of many of the stopovers, fuel availability confirmed and reconfirmed on a regular basis. In some cases fuel would have to be shipped and stored for my arrival. Accommodation and airport transfers would have to be organised; due to my age and lack of a steady income I couldn’t hire a car or own a credit card. Routing would have to be chosen and put into flight logs for each and every leg around the world. Aircraft maintenance with the accompanying paperwork and legal issues needed to be confirmed well before departure.
I had to ensure I was ready to take off and fly east, over water, through endless changes in airspace, over mountains, through four diverse seasons and into situations I had never seen before. With safety paramount, this was one of the most important areas of planning. I would require an instrument rating to fly IFR, or instrument flight rules, a six-week course to teach a pilot to fly within cloud and weather where visual navigation with the ground is impossible. With such a diverse range of weather and so long being spent in the air it was essential to have the ability to fly through cloud and not have to navigate around it. This also allowed me to fly an aircraft at night, without which the entire plan was impossible. I would have to study for four weeks and pass an exam in order to get this instrument rating. Underwater escape training, emergency survival training and lengthy conversations with very experienced pilots were added to the pre-departure ‘musts’.
Apart from the obvious – an aircraft – the amount of equipment required for the flight was huge. Ferry tank system. Signwriting. Oil. Oil funnel. Fuel filters. Fuel water testing paste. Spare HF radio aerials. Tool kit. Cleaning equipment. Gloves. Fuel water filtration funnel. Headset. Navigation equipment. Emergency location beacons. Life jacket. Cold water immersion suit. Life raft. Portable GPS. Portable VHF. Safety throw bag. Sea dye. Mirror. Strobe light. Emergency heat blanket. Rations. Handheld compass. Hivis clothing. First-aid kit. Survival kit. Sunblock. Insect repellent. Medicine. Tie down kit. Cowl plugs. Aircraft cover.
As the planning progressed items were added to every list. Whether purchased, sponsored or on loan, each and every item was slowly and sometimes painstakingly gathered together.
The ‘big picture’ was proving to be bigger than anything I had ever imagined.