What I learned flying around the world in a four-seater plane

When you organise an enormous homecoming party to celebrate a gruelling 12-week round-the-world navigation it’s fairly crucial that you’re back in time for it.

This was the quandary facing Louis Cole and JP Schulze as they prepared for the last leg of a 25,000-mile journey around the world in a tiny four-seater light aircraft.

The pair were sat in Hawaii, 2,500 miles off the west coast of America, but there was a party happening at Kern Valley, California, and they were the guests of honour.

“We ended up flying through the night to get there, otherwise we’d have missed it,” says Louis, a YouTube travel vlogger, whose Fun For Louis channel has some two million subscribers. 

“If I did it again, I would not set a date to arrive back by. And leave much more time. We could have done the same trip and it could have taken us a year.”

As it was, the pair set a target of 90 days, hopping across 22 countries in a Cessna 210 (JP, a pilot and film-maker, did the flying), each leg covering about 1,400 nautical miles, for a project called Beyond Borders. Financed through a crowd-funding drive, they plan to turn the journey into a feature-length film.

“JP dreamt up the plan,” says Louis. “It was more demanding that I imagined, but we were so passionate about capturing everything we could to create this film. It pushed me massively out of my comfort zone, in getting very little sleep and the challenge of flying so much.”

Louis says the trip was about exploring the different cultures and identities wherever the plane landed, showcasing a world where no one is as different as they seem from thousands of miles away.

But the mode of transport gave it that edge of excitement.

“We met and talked about the idea in 2015, and from then we have been planning ways to do it,” says Louis. “In April 2015 we did a test flight, taking a plane and scooting around Namibia and the Skeleton Coast, and that was when we had to gauge is this something we could do?

“We plotted out a rough route after talking to a few people, and we explored the limits. The fuel tank of the plane had a 600-700 nautical mile range so we equipped it with a new tank for 1,200 miles.

“The final leg from Hawaii to California, with no land, no where to go if there was an emergency, that was one of the riskier legs.”

Louis recorded much of the trip, posting segments on YouTube, while using Instagram (he has 1.5 million followers) to meet people in various locations and find places to sleep.

“In Cairo, this guy who had learnt about us from his sister who watched our videos spent the whole day showing us around, then we had a meal with his friends and family,” says Louis. “Almost every place we stopped in, we found something last minute by just posting something on Instagram.”

But a journey of such complexity required careful organisation when it came to the flight details. The pair would plan a few airports ahead, each destination allowing only a little leeway in arrival and departure slots. A strict schedule meant plenty of early starts.

Then there were the travails of flying for hours in an aircraft no bigger than a family car.

Louis explains, for example, that unlike larger, commercial aircraft, the tiny Cessna could not fly above weather systems.

“Commercial planes can go through turbulence, but for us it could have been deadly. We were flying at 11,000 feet trying to avoid big clouds and storms,” he says.

“South-east Asia was one of the trickiest areas to navigate through. But one of the hairiest situations was when the instruments in the plane cut out, over the Atlantic.

weird ways to travel the world

“What I didn’t realise before we set off, because I don’t have an aviation background, is that we don’t have live weather updates in the cockpit, so we had to get all the weather information beforehand. Some of these flights were 10 hours and in that the time the weather would completely change, and we were texting people and getting weather updates.

“It definitely made you feel on edge. It was a completely different experience to flying commercially. It was like going in a car, but the car had wings. It really did feel like a road trip with wings.

The proximity of the plane to the ground resulted in the pair being able to take staggering photos of the ground below, with the sight of Greenland a highlight of the trip. But it also meant that the cabin was not pressurised so the pair were without the comfort of regulated temperature. Over Iceland, they froze; over the Middle East, they sweltered.

But it was here, the pair had their most enlightening experience.

“Pakistan,” says Louis. “Originally not one of the countries we were going to stop in, but when we said we would people were warning us saying the place is dangerous.

“But we found the opposite. Everyone we met, the people that hosted us, every was just so incredible. I’ve never felt that level of hospitality.

“It really stuck out that there’s quite often a negative image of Pakistan in the media, but in terms of the experience we had, it was quite amazing.

“A lot of division in the world is caused by a fear or misunderstanding of people and cultures, and something I was hoping to do was share their stories from a personal perspective, and hearing a bit more about what makes them humans, and hearing their struggles and dreams no matter their country or religion.”