My name’s Mark Christie and I fly a drifter ultralight aircraft out of MKT Airfield near Darwin, the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory. I’ve been flying, filming and taking photographs of remote locations for over a quarter of a century. As the Pilotographer, I take any opportunity I can to find an interesting place to…
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Okay, this is my longest (recorded) and slowest flight yet… At one point off the Eastern end of Indian Island I tracked further east to get a photograph of the entire island’s length, my ground speed was about 15kts. As I turned west to track up the island, suddenly my ground speed was 90 knots.…
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Having given away the interesting aspect of this particular flight through the title, I will describe some of the photographs that I took on my way out to this popular location. With the dry season upon us, sea waters clear up giving great visibility of sea life below as I fly over. This compensates for…
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I don’t know why this video is popular but quite a few people have viewed it on YouTube so I thought that I’d include it here in a short post. It was actually an experiment where I had one GoPro camera mounted underneath the aircraft and another one mounted on the wing. I was using…
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While I Google and try to find out how to use my multimeter to detect a short circuit in my drifter (finding information using CoPilot was quick, but finding the actual short circuit will take longer), I decided to take some time out and share a video of a flight that I took a little…
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Well that’s the million-dollar question. On the weekends when I’m flying my ultralight over the blue waters around Darwin I looked down and see the many fishing vessels dangling a line or maybe dropping a crab pot into the waters hoping at worst a snare meal for the evening and then further up the scale…
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The monsoon is upon us and because I can’t go flying. It gives me an opportunity to reflect on a flight that we did during the wet season a few years ago. A lot of folks think that flying in the Northern Territory especially in the Top End is best done during the dry season.…
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I stumbled upon this yesterday and after reading it felt I had to share it with our piloting community around Darwin who might not make a habit of trawling through the CASA website. This little guide to flying around Darwin is factual, easy to read and has diagrams, maps, airstrips, sample radio calls, and potential…
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Greetings! Today I want to share with you my amazing experience of flying over some of the most stunning and unique landscapes in the Northern Territory. Even though I have flown this lap before, each flight offers a different visual spectacle along with the chance to witness something new or seldom seen. I took a…
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In the dry season, the waters surrounding Darwin turn into a turquoise blue. Although the horizon is hazy with the smoke from bushfires of this time of year, the waters change from an impenetrable jade green into a clear turquoise blue which allows me to see all manner of fish swimming below the surface. During…
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