This was clearly a wrong assumption on our part. We were asked by a customs official to follow him to his office where
 he explained, that we had to go through the process of a temporary import of our Comanche into Brazil first.

There were endless questions, some multi-page forms. Three hours later, we were finally released. Having lost this
amount of time, a night arrival at our destination was now pre-programmed.

On the relatively long flight over the northern part of Brazil from Belem to Recife, I wanted to actually use my ferry tank,
to make sure everything was work­ing the way it should.

On previous long-range flights, I have always used my personal system, to change between all six tanks, plus the
ferry tank, by relying on a constantly updated log on the time, each tank was in use.
I was of course double-checking with my electronic fuel flow system, which gives me very accu­rate usage of the total
fuel burnt. We had no problem whatsoever with the fuel management and felt very confident, for what was ahead for
us - an extremely long leg across the pond.

GSM coverage during most of the time of this flight was good, and we kept sending and receiving SMS messages to and
from our Swiss friends, living in Recife and awaiting our arrival to update them on our progress.

The big hop

HB-PON at Recife International, ready for the long flight accross
the South Atlantic