Simulator

Flying into OshKosh virtually with PilotEdge SimVenture

Around 10,000 aircraft fly into the AirVenture, the world’s largest annual GA event, held at Oshkosh in Wisconsin USA and attended by 600,000 people in 2018. Special procedures apply to achieve such a high volume of continuous arrivals and departures, with dedicated controllers, a 50 page NOTAM and dispensation from specific FAA regulations. Even if I had wanted to attend, COVID restrictions would prevent that this year, and the challenge

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Landaways

Rochester

I had a spare day of not instructing and the TB20 at Gloucester was available. Given only short notice and with fairly poor weather visibility, my co-owners were unavailable or preferred to not join me, so I flew a solo landaway. Although it’s much more sociable to fly with others, it can be quite refreshing to have some solo time as a change from the busy dual instruction of recent

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IFR Flights / Landaways

Enniskillen via airways

A day trip to Northern Ireland in the TB20 from Gloucester. Our second new group shareholder had missed out on flying the aircraft during lockdown and after completing his differences training was keen to see what it could do. Nic already had extensive experience of flying around Europe but mostly VFR in smaller/lighter aircraft. So we agreed on a day trip together and after some discussion selected Enniskillen, a VFR

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Other

Ramp check at Gloucester

Ramp checks are common in commercial aviation but relatively rare in the wider General Aviation world, so it was a surprise to see six CAA inspectors arrive by minibus at Gloucester Airport. I was instructing at the club and somehow managed to miss their attention, but they did check another co-owner of my shared TB20 and also one of the other instructors at the club. The team were courteous, polite

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Landaways

East Midlands

One of the new shareholders in G-CORB, my TB20, asked to join me for a day of buddy flying. Various options were considered but we ended up agreeing on a four leg route involving Tatenhill (near Nottingham), East Midlands, Sywell and back to base at Gloucester. One of my bucket-list airports has been East Midlands, a regional airport and a fairly important freight hub – the runway is long enough

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IFR Flights

Oban to Gloucester via airways

Today was the day to return home. We had enjoyed our extra couple of nights away and awoke to a lovely sunny day, with a good forecast for weather for our trip. We had a leisurely breakfast, strolled back to the airport, paid the landing fee and prepped the aicraft. I had filed an IFR flight plan using Autorouter for 10am local time and we were almost exactly on time.

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Landaways

Oban

I had planned to fly home directly from Glenforsa today, but the weather forecast for down south looked terrible with both strong turbulence and icing risks. So rather than sit in a washing machine for a couple of hours, we decided to extend our holiday by at least one night, enjoy some of the better weather here, and (depending on the weather) my wife would have the option to take

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Landaways

Glenforsa and the Isle of Mull

One of the primary goals of this trip was to visit Iona. It’s not a terribly easy place to get to, so being able to land on Mull is a great advantage. We had stayed at the Glenforsa Hotel before but not explored the island, so we allowed a few days to do that. You could potentially visit Iona by bus and ferry but there is only one possible timeslot

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Landaways

Plockton

Plockton is a small harbour village on the west coast of Scotland, close to the Skye bridge. It’s one of the most scenic airfields I have visited with an enjoyable walk down to the picturesque seafront. I’ve been wanting to visit for years but each time I’ve tried in the past, the weather has been terrible. The airfield is owned by the Highland Council and operated by PDG helicopters. The

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