Unfortunately, our flight to Nome is allowed to commence only at 10:00 AM local time the earliest. Immigration doesn’t find any time for us before that time. This is kind of critical, as we have an approx. 8 hour flight with difficult routing ahead of us (Siberia, a lot of icy water, full survival equipment on, ferry tank in use, over flight of the date line and 4-hour time movement). Airborne in the morning means arrival last night: Takeoff Wednesday morning 10:00 AM in Magadan; arrival Tuesday evening 10:00 PM in Nome.

Weather forecasts are “patchy”, because only 3 METAR/TAFs of airports are given en-route and the satellite coverage is very bad at the North Pole.

About 10:00 AM all formalities are finished to the satisfaction of the Russian authorities. Only our passports are missing. Finally, 30 minutes later Immigration officials show up to close the formal act of immigration. Apart from the first leg segment the weather this time is on our side and better than expected – even forecasted headwinds are hardly to be noticed. Thus, finally we have a punctual landing at Nome airport. Here Mr. Robinson the CBP official is waiting for us with his extremely friendly service. We are very grateful for the special dispatch at 10:00 PM, because otherwise we could not have carried out this difficult segment. Nome is not regularly used as a “Port of Entry”. So CBP has to be noticed and only comes out to see the crew on request. Business hours usually end at 5:00PM. So we would like to thank Mr. Robinson, who efficiently and quickly handled the whole CIQ process in one person way past the official dead line.

24 hours of visible light. It is really difficult to adopt to the day / night rhythm at the midnight sun near the polar circle. The fact that it is midnight can only be noticed, because there is only one restaurant remaining open at this time of the day.

The most demanding 3rd flight segment from Darwin to Nome is completed (ITCZ, fuel, logistics, permissions, languages and restrictions): we believe a good reason to let bang American champagne corks.