It is arguable that I should not have been so focused on the coast and maybe a few minutes earlier I should have run back looking for something while I still had time and control. If we at the rear had turned about earlier we might have made it back to a power station car park at the other side of the padi on the route we had come. The tailwind would have helped hugely but I think the weather was faster than anything we could do. We were, however, focused on staying together and making that beach.

    Mike was in a better position and did return some way before he put down. One advantage of the high wind was a short landing at relatively low speed. For me, the padi had never been an option, I believed that a landing on a 20 metre by 15-metre patch of water and mud was just not possible. The beach areas held the answer (despite a fierce 90-degree crosswind on some approaches). Events of course have proven me wrong and Mike probably achieved the first safe wet padi landing in the history of Trike flying.

    I had looked north and saw a couple of beaches which were still above the high tide (yes it was high tide) but I believe still that while a run for the north may have given me a better headwind situation I would probably never have made it.

    I have thought whether I should have swung left or right in extremis but that would have put me into a suicidal crosswind position and in one direction I faced houses and trees. When I decided that the padi was where I had to land, it was in fact my only option and it was not much as options go. I would have liked to have glided in on the padi in my own time and but the power lines got in the way. I could have run with the wind and tried for a freer glide slope and used the wind for a slow landing and maybe should have done but did not in the end. I preferred to be near the rest and not miles out in the padi. If something was going to happen to me I wanted people around and a road not too far away.

    In the final analysis and to be quite honest, when I committed to the landing I wanted it to be here and now while I still had the resources to control the aircraft and I really did not have any other ideas.

    Should we have all stayed together? At one time we were strung out maybe three to five miles front to rear but the gap closed up as the forward group wheeled about the landing ground. Usually you stick together in a tighter pattern and stay at the speed of the slowest trike but the headwind, fuel states and the weather made speed and the coast imperative. Everyone was in sight, we were not lost and we had group control almost to the end. There is an interesting example of group dynamics here where people risked themselves to ensure others got down and the group still seemed to be important until the last. Maybe I should have made a clearer decision about the weather much earlier, trusted my premonitions, and just cut and run and abandoned the group, but I did not.

    Mike knows weather better than most of us and he was to have been the forward leader but comms problems at Budiarto reversed leader roles and he took the rear. I believe that he might have seen the weather for what it was much earlier and we might well have returned earlier, i.e. gone back across the padi, the wind would have helped enormously. By the time we acted it was probably too late for those alternatives. Weather in the tropics is a chancy thing. A major lesson learnt for me is that I need to read weather better than I do. I am getting better at seeing the different clouds for what they offer the pilot but nowhere good enough at this point. It is a comment that I think applies to us all.

    Overall, there were a number of lessons we learnt and will start applying. They range from trip organization to weather with several other important areas in between. The positive thing is that we are alive and making sure we stay that way, flying.