Group Flight UK Around the World Event

Hello from Belfast, Mark L and Wannabe here. We’re two of around 14 pilots flying on this event, where we are flying an A320 flight sim around the world for charity.

Our first flight was on Wednesday afternoon, with me as captain and Mark as co-pilot flying from Belfast to Frankfurt. We all have around 6 flights each, and 2 other pilots are currently flying from Hong Kong to Jakarta. From there we will route across Australia to Sydney, and then tomorrow morning Mark and I will be back in the cockpit (me as co-pilot this time) to fly from Sydney to Queenstown in New Zealand.

Today was very interesting, our PR day. We’ve had a couple of newspapers come in for photos, and the BBC have been on the phone and have put an article about us on their news website. However, the best was yet to come! Remember Jeremy Spake, from the BBC1 programme ‘Airport’?! He flew in to Stansted from Siberia, then caught an EZY flight across to Belfast, to come and see us in the sim for the day and take part in a flight alongside the BFS MYT base captain.

We had an interesting day with Jeremy flying the sim, and had several detailed chats about aviation. He is currently the CEO of his own airline operating in Siberia, with a fleet of 2 A320’s and 2 Tu204’s. A lot of it is fairly ‘quiet’ stuff, so I shouldn’t say too much more until information is publicly released. There are certain plans which may see the airline coming to Western Europe and London at some point in the future, so as soon as anything is announced you’ll know where it’s coming from!

Couple of pics, first is from the sim. It has been created by Andrew Mcquillan (AndrewM on the forums) and we have all of the main flight controls. Due to a problem with a company not delivering a certain Interface for the system, all of the hard work that went into getting all of the cockpit’s switches etc has been let down, as they wont work 🙁 And therefore have not been installed. Andy will be working on the sim all year until we do the event again next year, and so by next year it should be pretty much spot on and there shall be a proper overhead too.

In the second shot we have some of the group of pilots. Top left is Mark L, I’m just infront of him in the white shirt. Jeremy in the middle, and AndrewM is to the right of him.