UK Instrument Rated Private Pilot and Instrument Flight Instructor
August has been a very busy month with constant demand for flight instruction. Nonetheless, I was determined to take at least one flight in my shared TB20. My IR qualified friend Adam was keen to join me on an airways flight somewhere, and we settled on Belfast Aldergrove, staying nearby overnight. It’s the one large airport in Northern Ireland that I hadn’t yet visited and enabled a reasonable but not
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I’ve spent most of my time this summer as a full time flying instructor. The risk is that you stick to the syllabus, fly only to a few nearby airports and almost forget what it’s like to go places. While I have made a couple of day trips in my TB20, today I had blocked out some time to fly with another club member (John) for a sociable landaway. Old
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Today was our last day and the weather again was still favourable for our trip home from Lübeck to Gloucester. I planned a stop in Groningen, Netherlands to clear border control and have our passports stamped. This is quite a friendly regional airport that has a permanent immigration and customs presence. We’d stop there for lunch in the café, which I checked was open until 1300 local, but did not
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Bydgoszcz to Lübeck The sunshine in Bydgoszcz wasn’t matched by the low cloud IFR reported at our planned destination of Lübeck, so we took full advantage of the 12 noon checkout at our hotel and delayed our departure to 1pm. I’d reviewed the route, checked the weather and NOTAMs, and expected this to be a fairly straightforward VFR flight. I filed my flight plan just before checking out. We took
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For non-Polish speakers, it’s pronounced something like ‘Bid-Gosht’, and I hadn’t heard of the place before, but it was a pleasant surprise. Our original plan for today (conceived once we knew Visby was out of bounds) had been to land at Poznan and stay for one or two nights. The weather looked favourable. But once the cost became apparent, I decided to make a fuel stop at Bydgoszcz and then
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With Visby effectively closed for GA during our trip, we had decided instead to route home via Lithuania and Poland. The weather outlook was good and improving so we wouldn’t get boxed into the Baltic countries. Vilnius is another capital with a hideously expensive airport for GA, and so again we considered alternatives. My contact Ivar, in Tartu, again came up trumps with a recommendation to stop at Kaunas, and
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It would be about an hour’s VFR flight from Tartu (Estonia) to Riga (Latvia) – a little longer than a direct flight due to military restricted zones. I looked into which airport to use there. Riga international has a poor reputation from GA pilot reports: it is considered expensive with poor service, long delays and no AVGAS. Spilve is the GA-only airport close to the city centre, but requires careful
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Today we would reach Tartu – our furthest destination after which it would be ‘downhill’ all the way home. It would also add a new country for me, Estonia, which borders Russia. I had researched landing at Tallinn airport, which although a capital city, isn’t particularly busy. Sadly there is a mandatory 500 Euro handling fee which ruled that out. A popular alternative is Parnu to the south west, which
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Another day, another country. The plan today was to fly across to Turku in Finland. The bad weather front was forecast to clear Turku by late afternoon, so I thought that if we stopped en-route to explore another Swedish town, we could arrive later in the day when the bad weather had cleared. I had previously intended to land at Västerås ESOW hoping to meet one of my ‘remote’ students
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Not Norway I spent quite a bit of time the previous evening planning out my flight for today. We wanted to visit Oslo for a couple of days and, as with many capital cities, the main airport is inaccessible for light aircraft. Sandefjord/Torp (ENTO), about 50 miles south of Oslo, is the Ryanair option and has regular bus and train connections to the city. It is available to GA and
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