World Scenic Flights by HeliGraphix

Right before boarding the plane to Australia I was taken aside and told that there was a security problem with our baggage. But no reason to worry, the lady continued, the officers had just opened and resealed it … You can imagine we had a very nice 9.5-hour flight, constantly wondering what Asia Airlines might have done to our baggage and which one of the two boxes (helicopter box or transmitter, power supplies and chargers) had been opened. These guys had been unfriendly at check-in as well; they are Star Alliance member, we're booked on Star Alliance, but they just wouldn't give us the respective conditions (they have to!) but charge us overweight instead. Annoying.

Sydney really is an expensive place; to reduce cost we had prebooked one of the more budget backpacker hotels (and this still costs a lot!). Well, the room is smaller than ever, we do not have electricity (except one light, but no sockets) and we have to share the showers with 200 other people. This minimalistic size of the room is a new record, the only other places that can keep up with this one were at Mount Cook/New Zealand where each of us had to share the bedroom with 7 more people (separate rooms for male/female!) and in France. Below is a shot of our mobile communication platform. :-)



We arrived in Sydney early this morning, and for the first time since this continuous trip has started we rented a car. The main reason is that on Thursday our old friend Andrew Palmer from New Zealand will fly all the way to Sydney to have fun with us for one day. That's true spirit and we very much look forward to seeing him!
For just a few bucks extra we got a sat navi; it's made by Pioneer and the most user-unfriendly device we've ever seen. If you type in a target and drive according to the instructions, how's it possible that the distance to the destination keeps increasing?! Does it lead you the other way around the globe? Also we set it up so it won't be using toll roads. And boom - 10 minutes later we end up in the first toll tunnel without cash booths. Damn, to avoid a toll infringement notice we now have to call the guys and give them our credit card details.

Regarding battery packs, thanks for all your input! Nicolas Kaiser did a lot of research and called today - it seems we'll be co-sponsored by Kokam. That's good in a way that in the past months quite a number of people had written to us anyway and asked how's Kokam compared to Flight Power. It will be interesting to see whether the ballooning is a FP specific problem or a general one.
Jan Henseleit also left us a message and offered his own packs. Ken Yap wrote in and said he would be able to organize AirThunder packs for us. Marc Endres discussed the problem on RC-Line forum, and they came up with the same suspicion we have: The low air pressure during the long distance flights might be the problem for the ballooning. Andrew Palmer called this evening and reported there's no hobby shops in Sydney carrying 12s battery packs.

BTW, we'd like to seize the chance to explicitly thank the Big Boys' Toys crew (manufacturer of the famous MANIAC blades and carbon accessories) who provide the WSF FedEx logistics. Nobody believed this would become such a crucial part to make the WSF project a success. Thank you very much, this is appreciated!

Next problem is that for some reason FedEx sent the two spare 3700 mAh FP packs via United Kingdom to Andrew Palmer in New Zealand (he was supposed to bring the packs to us on Thursday). The time delay is fatal as they will not arrive in NZ before Andrew boards the plane to Sydney. So we're currently trying to reroute the parcel to the location here and to collect the packs when we come back from Ayers Rock, just prior to departure for Hawaii. (How come that always when it seems we could take a quick break something like this happens?!)

As you see the WSF are as exciting as ever and you can actively influence them by leaving comments. This is the project of a big team rather than a handful of people; like mentioned often before, HeliGraphix is "open source". Be part of the new flying era and join us for writing R/C history!