Well, made it back. 18-some hours of flying in 2 days. The new engines in the 310 did a great job (I'll write a separate post about the engines). The increase in TAS of around 10-15 kts or so was a big help on a trip that long, as it saved about 2 hours total flight time. When you're doing that much flying, that's significant.
Flying to Belize is simple. The procedures for flying into the country are pretty much the same as for flying into Mexico, so if you've done Mexico, Belize will be familiar. The country is small, and only has one airport with instrument approaches. Since the weather is pretty much VFR or massive storm, that's not a big deal. Customs was easy to deal with. If anyone flies down there, I will gladly recommend the handler that I used. He was polite and efficient - my inbound ground stop was only 30 minutes (including fuel) and outbound was 45 minutes (also including fuel). He gets you to the front of the line and gets all the paperwork filled out rapidly. This is worth every penny, in my opinion. Having done it myself in Cozumel (where you need 4 stamps in triplicate), that process takes about 60-90 minutes if you know what you're doing. The Belize airport folk said you technically don't need a handler for GA flights, but since it requires 5 stamps in quintuplicate (not exaggerating), just pay the couple hundred bucks extra.
According to the civil aviation office, the Placencia strip is about 2100 x 25 ft, although the local commuter airlines (who use Caravans) say it's 1900 ft. It felt wider than that, but maybe I just don't have a good understanding of how wide 25 ft is. The 310 was plenty comfortable with the runway, both coming in and going out. Even with 3 people, 14 cats, 2 dogs, and luggage on a 75 degree morning, we were off the ground pretty quickly with runway to spare. It helps that there are no obstacles on either side. You do need to get permission to land there from the civil aviation office, but that's simple enough. In the civil aviation office, the woman was trying to explain to me how to use a non-towered field. I said "We have those in the States." "Oh! Ok, so you know how to fly into them." "Yep, I'll be fine." They use 122.80 as CTAF.
Then there was the flight home. Belize customs needs their departure tax from you on the way out, as well as more paperwork. Then you're set, and it's back out over the Gulf, passing through Mexico and Cuba before making it to Key West. The customs folks there are friendly and easy to deal with, and didn't waste any time with the understanding that it was warm out, and we had a plane full of animals.
The leg going up to Alabama was a bit challenging. Headwinds turned from a predicted 20 kts into 50 kts, cutting into fuel reserves. There was also icing in the clouds. I requested block altitudes from center to stay above the clouds, but as low as I could still make it to minimize headwinds. At one point towards our destination, center had requested we descend into the clouds for traffic. I responded "Unable due to icing concerns, but if you can descend me below the clouds we can do that" which was greeted with "Stay where you for now - what altitude would you need?" Very helpful.
In the end, I made the call to divert to an airport 30 nm from where we were intending to land. That's perhaps one of the most difficult diversion decisions to make. It was also a good one.
By this point it was night with MVFR ceilings. A short VFR flight over, for which I was happy to have the terrain feature on the 530W as an extra set of eyes to look out. Made it, dropped everyone off, and then it was time for one last leg back home.
I had to climb back through the same icing layer. However, it was only about 3,000-4,000 ft thick. With about 2/3 fuel and just me in the plane, I left the engines at maximum continuous power, and was seeing sustained 2,000 FPM climbs at 160 MPH indicated through the layer. Got through it before there was time to accumulate anything, and was cruising home.
Approaching home, the ceilings were lowish, and our new home base is a 2800 ft strip (still relatively short for a 310) that was going to have a direct gusting crosswind. Plus there was uncertain snow removal. As I got closer, I asked Cincinnati Approach if they had any icing reports in the clouds, and they'd received a report of moderate rime icing about an hour prior.
I considered just doing a look-see at the home airport, but decided I didn't like the option of building up the plane with ice on the descent for a non-precision GPS approach to a short runway that I need to have a slow approach speed for, find out I can't land there anyway (or have black ice and a crosswind that blew me off the runway), then have to slog along in the ice to do the ILS into the neighboring airport, so I decided to just shoot the ILS into the neighboring airport and catch a ride home. Ferried the 310 back to home base today - a beautiful, sunny day.
I can count the number of times I've had to divert on one hand, and two of them were yesterday. But fuel and icing are two things that one is wise to be wary of.
Next time, I want to stay there for longer than dinner and a good night's rest!
