This was always going to be an interesting airport to arrive at, it’s very busy, perched at 7625 feet above sea level and surrounded by mountains. The weather forecast when I left that morning from Khartoum (Sudan) was for thunderstorms moving up from the south in the afternoon so I needed to get a move on. Apart from a few weather patches I had to go around I was lucky and made it to Addis via Ad Damazin in good time.
Unfortunately I didn’t make a great impression on arrival, I hadn’t appreciated I had gone though a time zone and my GPS was set to local time rather than Zulu so although I was talking to ATC and they could see me on radar I arrived sooner than expected. They cleared me to land runway 07 which was all good until the engine stopped on touch down. I rolled to a holt in the middle of the 3.7 km runway with ATC requesting me to “expedite my taxi”. The engine was flooded and there I sat for 5 minutes trying to restart ! There were two Ethiopian airliners at the hold waiting to depart and one in the air waiting to land. I realised I had probably pissed a few people off so did go to the tower to apologise. I had discussed when planning the trip about leaning on take off when at altitude but not when landing. Live and learn !
