The Long Way Round Part 2

First of six Embraer A-29B Super Tucanos landing in Gran Canaria on a delivery flight for the Philippines Air Force - thortelde

Flying East from Brazil on the way to the Philippines? That's doing it the hard way. I would have expected them to take the wings off of the airplane, but it in a big box and load it on a ship. I mean that's how we did it with fighter aircraft in WW2. But times have changed and there could be any number of reasons to undertake a long flight like this, the primary one being that we don't have a world war going on right now.

Super Tucano Delivery Flight

I picked up a few clues as to the route they are taking and then made some guesses as to where else they might stop after they leave the UAE and plotted the results on the above map. The range of the aircraft (1700 miles) is the first constraint, and then there are political alliances. Some countries can be real persnickety about letting warbirds fly over them, much less touch down. 

The first stop after leaving mainland Brazil is Fernando de Noronha, a place I did not even know existed. You can't even see it on Google Maps unless you are zoomed in on it, and why would you zoom in on a featureless bit of ocean?

Back at the start of WW2, a Boeing 314 flying boat made a similar trip flying the long way around the world to get home from Australia. They crossed the Atlantic around the same place landing at Natal on the coast of Brazil. Fernando de Noronha probably wasn't high on their list of places to stop. It had a prison, but didn't get an airport until 1942, courtesy of the US government.