UK Instrument Rated Private Pilot and Instrument Flight Instructor
I planned a long Bank Holiday weekend in Northern Scotland, visiting two different sets of friends near Inverness and Wick. Both were separately happy with the idea of a local flight in return for board and lodging. My wife was interested in coming along too, so I booked our TB20 at Gloucester and kept a close eye on the weather forecast. Both Inverness and Wick require PPR. A call to Wick
Continue readingThe large number of windmills should be a strong indicator that Holland is a country with plenty of wind. In the aftermath of storm Abigail, I flew to the Netherlands from Gloucester for a few days trip. As with many airways IFR GA flights, 90% of the flight was in glorious sunshine with a brief but intensive departure and arrival. The flight achieved two new records for me – the lowest airport elevation
Continue readingFrom our holiday base in Guernsey, we made a day trip across to Jersey to visit some of my wife’s relatives. It’s only a short distance (23 miles) but technically a different jurisdiction – both are UK Crown Dependencies and each have their own Bailiwick. A full flight plan had to be filed but no GAR forms (there is a special mini-flight plan for inter-island flights between Guernsey and Alderney
Continue readingMaking the most of this month’s flight Only one flight this month, flown in the TB20 from Gloucester. The weather looked promising and so I planned for a daytrip to northern France – Rouen seemed like a nice destination to try out. Airborne flight time would be around 1:30 each way and I intended to fly IFR Airways outbound and VFR on the return. One passenger dropped out at a
Continue readingMy co-owner Rich and I agreed to share a daytrip in our TB20 from Gloucester, and were hoping to make this an airways flight to somewhere in Northern France. We settled on Deauville and planned accordingly. Rich brought a work colleague along and flew outbound, leaving me the return flight. The forecast wasn’t good and would certainly have ruled out much VFR flying. The low cloudbase of 1200 to 2000
Continue readingA good start to the year Rich and I agreed to share a flight in our TB20 from Gloucester, ideally with some instrument approaches for practice. We invited Steve along, another PPL/IR member currently working towards his IR(R) at Gloucester. We’d picked a day with poor weather. I’d originally planned to visit Humberside and make a couple of approaches there, but the temperature enroute was too low and gave a
Continue readingThe good news was that our TB20 was back up in the air after having had its engine fully overhauled and zero-timed. Those bits of shredded camshaft that were circulating inside the engine in the summer hadn’t done it any good, but everything had been re-engineering, overhauled or replaced to make it almost as good as new. It is now officially a zero-timed engine and should be good for at
Continue readingThunderstorms and Embedded CBs forecast Our two week break was up and we were scheduled to return home today. We’d enjoyed some great weather, sunshine pretty much every day and very little rain. Overnight however, there was an intense thunderstorm with very loud thunder. Worse thunderstorms and torrential rain were to be found at home, with a SIGMET warning of embedded CBs and hail. Not an ideal day to be
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I confess to getting a bit restless on holiday – I’m not one for sitting on the beach, so we agreed that I would make a flight while the girls sunned themselves at the seaside. The forecast looked great – a high over eastern France – and I thought would be good for any direction. After discounting Belle Isle (only 9 minutes away, and the airport far from anything else),
Continue readingI had a good excuse to fly this week – a business trip to Cambridge. The choice between over 7 hours by car or 42 minutes each way by plane isn’t a difficult one to make, even after adding an hour to get to Gloucester airport. The TB20 was free as it often is during the week, so I booked it up early. Planning A warm front had been causing
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