Flying around Hawai'i

Work sent me to Hawai'i in April 2012 to present a paper I wrote for an AIAA conference. I won't make any lame jokes about how hard life is; it was a blast, good business, and good networking. I opted to show up a week early as I'd never been to Hawai'i before. I went to the big island to do some SCUBA, hiking, and flying. All were great fun.

I did the flying in a Cessna 172 by renting an airplane and a local instructor (who was familiar with the area) out of Kona. I plotted a course to go around the entire big island clockwise. This was a course of about 300 miles.

This first picture is shortly after take-off. Things are looking green and lush.

I enjoyed watching the terrain and vegetation change as I went around the island. Trade winds, terrain, and so on lead to good diversity. This picture was taken not too long after the one above and you can see it's looking more like a desert.

And then back to lush green again. The clouds were hanging around on and off throughout the flight. This was a VFR sightseeing flight, so we swung around or under most of them.

This is closer to the north end of the island. You can see that the shoreline has a few cliffs.

And then the cliffs get bigger. This is the famous section of the island that most people take helicopter rides to see. Many of the cliffs have waterfalls streaming down the dark rock with green jungle above them.

As always, pictures never really do it justice. This was prime flying time.

You can see a helicopter in the lower right of this picture. It's fun flying, but it's flying first and sight seeing second.

A decent shot of waterfalls. These were taken with an iPad that I had ForeFlight running on. The iPad took decent images while also being awkward to manage. My co-pilot helped a little.

Nice valley here. Reminds me of Jurassic Park. I think I'd heard somewhere that this might have been part of the movie?

We landed at Hilo International to top off the fuel and wait out some rain. It was an experience to taxi around with big airplanes. Most big airports discourage small airplane traffic on their runways and these folks were no different. They tolerated us better than some other airports I've flown into, but that's not a high bar to get over.

The next big area was flying around Volcanoes National Park. We couldn't see the glow of lava since it was day. However, we saw plenty of steam and black, crusty flows.

I like this next picture because it shows how the lava flow destroyed the highway.

We got socked in by some clouds on our way back to Kona. By the time we dropped out of them, we were minutes from landing. Even with the landing at Hilo, the flight time was only three hours. It was a great three hours of flying, though. I'd love to go back and catch some of the other islands.