A Flight full of Diversions

The west coast of Norway is very scenic, lined with fjords, snow-capped mountains of the Kjolen range, steep gorges carved out by the retreating ice over thousands of years and very few roads. The moutainous countryside is certainly not suita...

Alpine Ferry, A Decent Day’s Work

I couldn't refuse an offer the Weather Gods made on the Wednesday evening while I was at a wine tasting party at the Stokelj family vineyard, in Slovenia, just a few minutes drive away from the Pipistrel factory. ​​​​

Spela was...

A short holiday tour was quickly decided upon with a good weather window of 4 days. We went west then north, then east and south for the homebound sector flying over Wales, Scotland, and England.

I get asked very often how do I plan a flying tour so quickly and man...

FATIGUE & FLYING

Flying can be terrifying when the pilot is tired. I recall one very sunny cloudless morning I woke up over the English Channel at 6000 feet over the blue still waters. I cannot recall how long I was asleep at the controls while the Shadow microlight, I...

We have been so unlucky with this untimely and unseasonal weather in our little part of Southeast England. With greater issues of Brexit and Aerosol murders in the news, I am obliged to be distracted into writing about mud and how it can obfuscate safe flying practices...

• INTRODUCTION

I was going to write about flying in the winter and all its pros and cons; then thought better about it because in the UK we normally have mild winters. Generally, it is the poor visibility, low cloud base and wet, windy weather that stops us.

However...

It's boom and bust, all or nothing

Drought and flood, rain and wind

Sun and burn; turbulence and tours.

Too much to tell not enough time.

Adventures to boast about, 

that can't be stomached by Wussies

who sit at home and whinge

about other people's ballsy flying.

What is the w...

Given that it is early February, we had the one single good weather window to fly from London to Middenzeeland and back. Our departure time of midday was unusual to go east, but it was only a two hour flight and we had to wait for the rain to stop and the mist to clear...

The Circular Slide Rule, the Scale Ruler, the Protractor, the China Graph Pencil, the Paper Map are now all relics of the past. They have always been difficult to learn, without constant practice, without guidance from instructors, without spending expensive airtime to...

A few years ago in 2014, the worlds largest aviation map printing company, Jeppesen, announced that they would stop printing paper maps for VFR flights. The reason was most private pilots and many commercial pilots and airlines had started using navigation applications...

Yes, it is another non flying day in the life of a flying instructor. Too much rain, too much thinking about things and not enough time to do everything. My previous blog about flying around Mont Blanc,  drew some questions about the relationship of Indicated Airspeed...

The other day, while on a flight lesson, I gave my ETA to the ATC as 1145 zulu. My student asked me what is zulu time and why is it called that?  I had to raise my left hand in a signal to ask him to listen to the radio conversation rather than interrupt with an intell...

It used to be my fault that I did not teach my ab-intio students to use the aircraft radio from the first lesson.  Because :-

• It is not compulsory to have a radio license along with a pilot license

• There was no radio station or ATC at the grass fields I used to...

One my latest flying tour returning from the Swiss and French Alpine valleys dappled with summer sunshine and strange accents on air traffic control radio, I was very lucky to be faster than a rapidly expanding Cumulo-Nimbus storm cell just north of Paris…..

I was flyin...

Flying from Southern Italy across the Alps into Germany this summer was an unforgetable experience. I have never seen this mountain range with no snow or ice in all my previous flights over and thru the Alpine valleys. The days were very hot, with temperatures of 38 C...