Category: Foreign

Some destinations you can never tire of visiting. I’ve flown across to Le Touquet a fair number of times since my first trip during my PPL training in 2010. On a good weather day, it’s hard to beat. My co-owner Nic and I hadn’t flown together for some time, and both were missing CORB while it had been down for maintenance. He had scheduled a weekend away with family, so

It was a fair distance to fly back home from Carcassonne, but we had the advantage of gaining an hour from the timezone change. The weather looked very good, a warm sunny day throughout. I added one last planned deviation – we thought it worthwhile to fly across to see the Millau bridge – a wonderful feat of engineering – which wasn’t too far out of the way. My preparation

Our flight today was from Albenga (aka Riviera Airport) in Italy, westward to Carcassone in France. With no fuel available at Albenga, I planned a “technical” stop at Cannes (LFMD). The short flight along the coastline looked fairly straightforward, although I read some reports of harsh noise abatement penalties about Cannes that sounded quite severe. There is a mandatory pilot briefing on the airport website which required you to register

The Italian Riviera lies on the coast at the furthest west of Italy, close to the border with Monaco and France. The area was very popular with English nobility towards the end of the 19th century, transforming it from a fishing village and now boasts many Art Nouveau buildings. The airport itself sits deep in a valley surrounded by high terrain. While there is a localiser, you couldn’t really consider

Definitely the highlight of my trip and one for every pilot’s bucket list. Today we flew south west VFR from Ljubljana over the mountains then down the Adriatic coast with great views of Trieste and the Venice lagoon to land on the grass strip at Venice Lido beach. This was the first commercial Italian airport, opening in 1926, and is named Giovanni Nicelli airport in honour of an Italian air

Next stop is Vienna where we planned to visit and stay with friends for a few days. Landing at Vienna’s main airport is possible but expensive. There are several GA airfields in the vicinity, especially Voslau (LOAV) and Wiener Neustadt Ost (LOAN) which seemed most appropriate. LOAN is the home of Diamond Aircraft and might well be worth a visit, but LOAV was closer to where our friends lived. Since

Draw a straight line from Gloucester to Vienna and you will find it passes over the southern tip of the Czech Republic. It was about an hour’s VFR flight today south west from Bamburg towards Vienna, landing at Ceske Budejovice – the regional capital of South Bohemia, about 75 miles south of Prague and most famous for its Budweiser Budvar brewery. My original plan was for an early afternoon departure

The first day of our two week European tour in my TB20, circumnavigating the Alps via Vienna and Venice. This holiday trip evolved from discussion with my wife who wanted to visit friends in Vienna and was also keen to fit in some beach time. I wanted to fly to our destinations by plane and include some more unusual places to stopover. So I spent some time researching the current