Club expedition to Kerry, Ireland

I’ve organised a few international flyouts with other members of the Bristol Aero Club at Gloucester in recent years, venturing to Sweden and Austria. Last year was a washout due to COVID, and again this year wasn’t looking promising. I spotted that the regulations had relaxed enough to allow those who are double vaccinated free passage to and from Ireland without any tests. The only additional paperwork is an Irish

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Belfast City

Co-owner Nic and I flew our TB20 from Gloucester to Belfast City Airport for a daytrip, visiting the city, docklands and Titanic Exhibition. Daytrips to France are again possible at present despite COVID travel restrictions, but we preferred options for a buddy flight within the UK. We had enjoyed our day to Enniskillen and I proposed Belfast. I hadn’t visited for some 30 years and wondered how life had changed,

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Doncaster

A daytrip to Doncaster in the TB20 from Gloucester, landing at Doncaster Sheffield airport in Yorkshire, voted the UK’s best passenger airport by Which? magazine in 2019. I’m always looking for opportunities to fly to new airports, and there are still a few regional UK airports that I haven’t been to. Adam, a good friend and also an IR pilot, offered to join me and support me as a pilot’s

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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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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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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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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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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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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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