Friday, December 30, 2011
Flight over active Hawaii volcano
I have just had some 8 mm movies from the 1970's transfered to DVD.
My wife and I were on vacation on Maui when the volcano erupted.
We rented a two-engine Cessna at the Maui airport in order to fly over the volcano at night.
As we flew to the Big Island of Hawaii, the sun set and when we reached the volcano it was total darkness. We began circling the volcano and viewing all the lava flows.
The closer we got to the fire crater, the more the plane was tossed around by the heat currents.
We kept getting lower in altitude as we circled starting about 5,000 ft. down to about 2,000 ft.
The pilot kept trying to stay in contact with any other planes in the area, but there was no visual sighting which kind of shook us up.
In the final circle of the fire crater, the pilot stood the plane over sideways and I was laying on the plane window as I filmed the flames below which were rising to about 500 ft. The pilot could hardly control the plane because of the severe heat currents.
What a fantastic experience!
The next morning the newspaper reported that a sightseeing plane over the volcano had crashed and all aboard were killed. This was undoubtedly the plane which our pilot kept trying to see. All flights over the volcano were immediately stopped, so we were probably the last flight to go.
Lou Hodapp
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