Good Bye New Zealand

Today a very very long leg was planned and should start at Auckland (NZAA) in New Zealand and lead all the way back to Australia to the capital city Canberra (YSCB). Again I started in the dark, in that sense very early in the morning local time. I knew from last time that according the flight plan I would have around 3 hours time for that long distance. GPS calculated 1249 nautical miles which meant around 420 knots average speed. So after quite steep climb I reached cruise altitude FL340. Looking at the PFD I could see that I had very strong crosswinds of more than 50knots/hr. Therefore I decided to try out another flight level. Upwards was not economical, so I initiated a decent with a low rate and finally stopped at FL290 where winds were a lot weaker, but still quite strong with around 40knots. Finally ETE calculated was 30mins less than indicated in the flight plan which gave me enough confidence to leave the plane to the autopilot for a moment (in chat language this means "afk" - when I first saw that I had no idea what that means. Meanwhile I know that this means "away from keyboard" which is in that case quite suitable.... - you never stop learning ;-)
Coming back after a while I could already see the coastline on the GPS and in aviation language I was close to T/D (top of descent). Everything according checklist I changed flight level to FL100 where ATC took over around 55nm out of Canberra. The rest was more or less according book. Unfortunately even though I was flying late that evening I did not made it into local daylight (1. flying westwards, 2. changed back 1hr daylight saving time last weekend). Still, I was glad that I made the whole leg without network connection loss and finally I received a huge amount of VL-Points (almost 400!). 


Happy to be back on the ground ;-)
PT