The flight out of Marathon was normal enough. I swung around to get a look at Kotroni, a small airport on a plateau. The short runway isn't 1,000 feet. The long one is just under 2,000. Picture in hand, we swung around to the southeast, and headed out over the Mediterranean Sea.

The destination this morning is Port Said, an airport on the shores of 'The Med'. Take off was 0630 GMT, a little after sunrise here. The flight should be about 2 and a half hours. The air is calm and clear as we climb out over the deep blue water.

About 90 minutes into the flight, the radio crackles to life. Someone is calling for the blue Cessna. I figure they must mean me and respond. Just as I do, the biggest helicopter I have ever seen pulls up on our left side, maybe a hundred feet away. The voice on the radio tells me I am about to enter restricted airspace, and that I need to divert to the west and follow their instructions precisely. Just as I was about to ask about har far to divert because I didn't want to run out of fuel, the voice tells me that if I was full on leaving Marathon, I will have plenty of fuel to get to Egypt. They seemed to know quite a bit about me, which is only slightly less disturbing than the man with the big machine gun in the helicopter to my left. I let them know I will follow any instructions they give, and change my course to match their directions. We're able to see that it is a US Navy helicopter, so that settles things down a little bit. I figure I must have been heading towards a carrier group, and they don't want that happening. A second helicopter arrives with us, and the first one leaves. The voice on the radio tells me I'm doing a fine job, and that we are almost clear. He vectors me back towards the southeast, and the helicopter backs off, but stays in my field of vision for a few minutes longer. Finally, it too heads back to wherever it came from.

Normally, that'd be enough adventure for me for quite a while. All we wanted to do was get to Cairo, go see the Pyramids and the Sphinx, soak in some of the local culture, and be on our way.

20 minutes after the helicopter had gone, the voice crackles through the radio again. When we land at Port Said, we are to taxi to general aviation parking, and go with the gentlemen in the black 4x4. I radio back that we will do that, not wanting to see if they'd send a missile or something my way if I told them buzz off. Besides, I think anybody that was going to be there waiting for us would probably get us whether we wanted to go or not. It's better off just saying yes, and trying to keep things pleasant.

The Nile Delta was off to our right, and Egypt filled the view below. Port Said was directly in front, and we were number 1 to land. It was as good a landing as I had ever made, and we taxied to general aviation parking. Just as I set the parking break, TWO black 4x4's pulled up, one on either side of us. I opened the door and hopped out, and a man got out of the 4x4 on my side of the plane. I was really kind of nervous at this point, not knowing what to expect. His expresion changed from serious to friendly, and he stuck his hand out. I reached out and shook his hand, and he introduced himself as an employee of the US State Department, based at the US Embassy here in Egypt. He invited us to get into his truck. I asked him about the plane, and he said that the guys in the other 4x4 would take care of everything here while we were gone.

As we drove away from the airport, he told us that they had been monitoring us since our little incident in England. He explained that it was one of their field people that had arranged my release, and another field person who had taken my brother to the pub to lay low for the night. Then he told us it was them who got the parts we needed to fix the plane in Rotterdam. How else would they have gotten there so quickly, he asked. They had also tagged the plane with a special transponder in Rotterdam, and that was the only reason we weren't shot out of the sky earlier this morning. I asked him what they wanted with us, and he said that it wouldn't be safe for us to stay in Egypt. I asked him why, but all he said was that we had to trust him on this one.

We arrived at the embassy about an hour later. We were taken inside, and another couple of people, a man and a woman, joined us in a conference room. I guess the woman was some kind of doctor, because she was asking how we were, if we were drinking enough water, getting enough sleep, and eating enough food. The man started asking about my piloting skills. Wanted to know how many hours I had, what ratings, night flying... things like that. After a few minutes, he took me downstairs. In the basement, they had a full motion simulator, the kinds that a lot of boardwalk-type places have in the arcade. He had me get in, and then he started the thing up. The graphics were ok.. nothing like FS2002, but you could tell that land was land, water was water, and that I was on a runway. He told me to take off, and fly a heading of 120, at an altitude of 300 feet. I did what he said, and after a coupe of minutes, everything went dark. The simulator wasn't off, though. I could feel that I was still flying, it was now just pitch black, except for the glow of the lights on the instrument panel. After a minute, my eyes adjusted, and I could see it wasn't really pitch black, just very dark. The gauge display looked similar to the Caravan, but I couldn't quite figure out what plane it was supposed to be.

I could see the land was rising in front of me, and that my height above the ground was shrinking. I pulled on the stick to get back up to 300 feet up. He asked me if I could see the landing strip off to my left a little bit. I could, but barely. It wasn't lit up at all. Only the reflection of the moonlight off the asphalt distinguished it from the sand around it.

I was told to land on that strip without the lights on. It wasn't a smooth landing, but I was able to get the simulator down without too much trouble. With that, the lights came on and the door opened.

All the while, my brother had been in another room, where someone else was going over reading maps and navigating with him. I half jokingly asked if we were going on some sort of spy mission. No one even acknowledged that I had asked. I sat in the room where my brother had been going over the maps, and the people we had met with so far today all joined us. A new man also joined us, and I could tell by the way everyone acted around him, that he must be the guy in charge.

He answered my spy mission question first, before we even started. No, this wasn't any kind of spy mission. This was all about getting us to where we were going. I started to ask him why they were helping us like this, but he cut me off in mid-question and said we should just listen to what is going to happen and grateful for their help.

"This isn't really a great time for a couple of white-bread American guys like you to be here.", he said. He filled us in on the details of the new flight plan they had written up for us. It would start normally. We would leave Port Said normally, flying southwest towards Cairo. Then, we would fly south, following the Nile, to the city of Luxor. By then, we would be ignored by any controllers. At Luxor, we were to descend and turn east, staying 500 feet off the ground. From there, it would be to a series of coordinates over the Saudi Arabian desert. While it would not be a problem for us to be over Saudi Arabia with the government, they were worried that some extremists might relish a golden opportunity to get a free shot at an American plane. We needed to literally stay off the radar. The Caravan doesn't have enough range to get all the way over Saudi Arabia with the course we were flying, so we were going to land at a strip in the middle of nowhere, where we would be met by more 'friends', who would refuel us and send us on our way to Dubai in the UAE. We got back into the 4x4, and started driving back to Port Said. Everything we would need was loaded into the plane for us, we were told. By the time we were back at the airport, it was dark out. We were given a hand-held radio. They told us that we had to listen to this radio once we got past Luxor. There would be a lot of chatter, but we were to listen to everything between the words New Jersey and California. That would be our status report, and any instructions we were to follow. Our lights, all of our lights, even the cockpit light, were to be turned off once we passed Luxor. All of our normal radios were to be turned off. They gave us a transponder that would allow us to be tracked by an AWACS plane, so that they could keep tabs on us. With everything loaded, they pointed out that they had given us a couple extra gallons of water, 'just in case', and wished us good luck.

We were 4th in a line of 7 planes that all decided to leave at the same time. It was 16:30 GMT. We were finally cleared for departure about 10 minutes later. We climbed to 5,000 feet, and followed the flightplan given to us on the handheld GPS unit. Everything was going great as we flew south towards Luxor. Soon, the radio crackled that it was time for lights out in New Jersey, our cue to go dark and turn east, which we did. The full moon made it a bit easier to see the ground, and then the water as we flew over the Red Sea. We made landfall over Saudi Arabia, and climbed to stay just over the mountains. We were over the desert for a couple of hours when the radio told us to look to our south for a pair of headlights. We could see them, off in the distance. That was our landing strip. I lined us up the best I could, and we made a nice landing and came to a stop about halfway down the runway. I spun the plane around, and taxied back down to the end of the runway where the truck was waiting for us. It was a good thing, too, because the gas tanks were almost empty.

As we pulled up, the driver hopped out and ran over to us and told us to keep the plane running. The passenger in the fuel truck had started refuleing us, and the driver went around to the back of the plane towards the cargo area. He opened the door, and removed 2 metal suitcases. He put them in his truck, and then came back over to us. He told us we were doing great so far, and that it would only be a few more hours until we would be safely in the UAE. The tanks topped off, the truck pulled away, and we were off again. Right after getting off the ground, we turned back towards the east. Once again, the radio they had given us crackled with messages, none of them for us. It seemed like an eternity, but eventually, the sky started brightening, and we could see water ahead of us. We figured that it must be the Persian Gulf.

Once we were over the water for a little while, the radio told us we could turn our lights on and climb to 5,000 feet. We were to contact Sharjah International in the UAE, where we would be cleared to land. The sun was up now, and as we banked left to land on runway 30 at OMSJ, we could see the full moon setting ahead of us. We landed, taxied to general aviation, and were met by another black 4x4. Three people got out as we shut down the engines. Two of them went immediately to the cargo door and removed several boxes, the third met us and congratulated us on a job well done. By then, we were exhausted. I hadn't planned on being in Dubai for another day or two, and my friend here wasn't expecting us til then. The man that met us told us it wasn't a problem, that they would give us a lift to a hotel, and put us up for the next couple of nights. That sounded like a great plan to me. All I wanted was some sleep.

LEG	Start	Start Time	Land	Land Time	Distance	Trip Time	Fuel Used
1	LGMR Marathon, Greece	06:30 GMT	HEPS Port Said, Egypt	09:30 GMT	568 NM	3 hr 0 min	208 gal
2	HEPS Port Said, Egypt	16:30 GMT	OEPI Saudi Arabia	22:00 GMT	672 NM	5 hr 30 min	224 gal
3	OEPI Saudi Arabia	22:30 GMT	OMSJ Dubai, U.A.E.	03:00 GMT	731 NM	5 hr 30 min	264 gal
Day Total					1971 NM	14 hr 0 min	696 gal
Trip Total					6891 NM	51 hr 20 min	2436 gal

Pictures

Kotroni Airport, Greece. You try landing there!	The moon sets in front of us as we come in on final at Sharjah, Dubai

Where we've been so far

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