No time to post words. Enjoy the picture.

Originally posted by R.weaver

Oh and on the airline topic, poor chaps in the pas-jet, I think you might just be right

Thanks. I know I’m right.

A couple of years back Mrs Moggy and I took the Colt for a bimble to a fly-in south of Rome.

For reasons far too tedious to describe we found ourselves unexpectedly in the GA parking at Pisa San Giusta, hemmed in by Citations, Lears and Gulfstreams.

The Colt attracted gold-braid by the shed load. Quite a few of the drivers wandered across to ask questions and peer into the cabin. You could see the envy, it was tangible, and for a moment inexplicable.

Then, after thinking about it for a while it becomes clear.

Sandra and I could choose to stay and look at the leaning tower. We could choose to go. What time we left at and in which direction was totally up to us. Once in the air we could changes plans in an instant; with just a twitch of the yoke we could be on our way to completely different adventures. We were truly free.

They were earning a good salary flying high performance aircraft with glass cockpits. But they had no freedom whatsoever. The time and track of their next sector was dictated by the needs of the guy in the back, by eurocontrol, flight levels, airways. They have to follow a preordained route plus or minus a degree or so, plus or minus 100ft.

Not that they couldn’t afford an aircraft like mine on their pay as a hobby. But I did get the sense that for many of them their work was spoiling the vision of flight that had made them become pilots in the first place. The funny little ragwing parked amongst the jets had reminded them of this.

Moggy

Enjoy your XC rw.

Originally posted by Wrenchbender
Moggy. How much are you paying for AV GAS? Or do you use autofuel?

Avgas at 96p / litre (I think – I didn’t really look, just signed for the 30 litres in the wings and the 3 litres on the floor.)

Call it $1.70 at today’s exchange rate. So $6.44 / gal

🙁

Moggy

Very good Moggy, nice pictures aswell, in regard to the IMC rating I could not agree with you more. Getting the basic training in IMC flight is a good thing for the reason you can get a better knowlege of what to do just in case! The IMC is mainly used by pilots who just want a margin of safety and want to know what to do if the weather doe’s tuen whilst they are flying. To be honest if your going to consider doing the IMC you might aswell just do the IFR, whats the point in being IMC restricted to U.K airspace.

Oh and on the airline topic, poor chaps in the pas-jet, I think you might just be right, real pilots navigate beyond the help of NDBS and it in their singles with a map and a crp-1 flying and not autopiloting.

Well im off to Utoxeter via Nantwhich today so wish me luck.

Regards

R.weaver

Safe legal flying

Moggy. How much are you paying for AV GAS? Or do you use autofuel?

I’m impressed you tackled the Mustang Burger Moggy, we’ve all been to scared to try it yet. I’ll look out for your pic on the wall next time I am there.

Post trip report?

Hmm. So different to last time.

There is a certain “Sagging-off school” elation to be had from sneaking away at midday for an aviation break, even when you own the (tiny) company.

It doesn’t matter how many hours I clock-up, each trip to the strip fills me with the same mixture of excitement and nervousness. I keep trying to pin this down, as to why I should be nervous.

It’s not the “Oh my lawd I’m going to die” nervousness of those who aren’t used to light aviation, maybe it’s performance anxiety; I never seem to complete a flight without knowing that there was so much I could have done better.

But nervousness there is.

At the strip the splendid solitude and wildlife of the Sunday flight had been replaced by the bevy of aeromodellers and their regrettably noisy hobby.

But they are all good chaps and welcome on our strip for bringing the added security of more pairs of eyes to our isolated hangar. They all have an intelligent appreciation of flight and will talk sensibly about conditions, met and the flight ahead.

This time, several of them are rigging a B17 only slightly smaller than the ones that operated from this same memory-soaked concrete just sixty years back.

I drag Colt out of shed and log just over 15 minutes from brakes off to brakes on (Not that the parking brake actually works. There’s another on the lengthening snag list for the imminent Star annual)

The sky is virtually cloudless and not too hazy, the runway at Old Buckenham clearly visible from overhead Snetterton as is the Jodel that has just called base.

Lots of lift around today, I had intended to make the trip at 1,000 ft. Once I drag my eyes back into the cockpit I find I’m at 1,500 and climbing steadily.

On the ground I spend a precarious few moments balancing on step ladder at the fuel bowser watching a well known local actor having his Stearman marshalled into the back of my aircraft by helpful incompetent. I manage to slop about three litres of Avgas over the wing in horror, and rush the last bit of the refuel so that we can drag the Colt forward.

Later I spend a few, much better minutes, standing in the gloriously warm sun on the terrace with the same awfully apologetic (needlessly so) actor, who it turns out had managed to slop about 18 litres of Avgas into the open cockpit containing his upturned helmet and has now scrubbed his proposed flight because of the burning sensation on his forhead.

A fellow bimbler who I’d arranged to meet has just arrived in his recently purchased TB20 ‘strip machine’. His previous aircraft, a C421 having been deemed a bit unwieldy and delicate for the short grass of East Anglia.

We order a ‘Mustang’ each from the recently upgraded cafe. This is an ovelarge burger targeted at instantly increasing the proportion of the UKs population deemed to be clinically obese. Nik arrives shortly after the food in order to take our pictures, mid-bite, for evedential display on the walls of the Old Buck Diner.

All too soon I log another 15 minutes back to London Knettishall International.

There just remains some scribbling in the small red notebook kept behind the left hand seat. 0.42 added to the tacho means that £15.12 will be added to my group flying account.

Once more the food and drink bill has outweighed the flight costs. I really must give up eating.

A perfect lunch hour in my estimation.

Have fun Moggy, post us a trip report.

I went up today
Got to Bristol Intl this morning after leaving my village in blue sky, and the cloud was 8/8 and 800ft 🙁 , TAF said BKN 3,000 after 10z so I held out, took off at 11:20 to cloud base of 1,500ft, turned north over Bath, over Yate, and when I reached Stroud the cloud dissipated to leave a beautiful clear day, climbed to FL50 en-route to Evesham via East Cheltenham and it was absolutely stunning, routed south west then to Monmouth and over the Wye Valley to the Severn Bridges and back into Bristol via Portishead, it was so nice I wish I could have stayed up there all day long, but at £115 per hr this wasnt such a good idea lol.
I’ll try and get some piccies posted when my mate emails them to me

Rgds

Dean

ENJOY!!!

ps: got a spare seat!!

richb

Funny you should post this now.

It’s too nice to sit in the office today. I’m off down the strip immediately.

Moggy

I never forget how fortunate I am to be able to fly as and when I want. 🙂

Moggy

I have just read your trip report and seen your pics – what can I say – Im very very Jealous! – and looking outside today and seeing a few puffy white clouds and blue – I want to be up there now!!

you are a very lucky chap indeed.

Oh well – I will have to make do with a trip from EMA to Glasgow in a couple of weeks! not the same as a nice trip in a rather older boeing I was lucky to have last october.

No I don’t have an IMC.

In my opinion a very valuable training course that everybody should have a go at, but leading to a fairly useless, and oft times dangerous rating.

Moggy

Originally posted by Moggy C
Certainly not, Being a VFR pilot I would, of course, have stayed on the ground if it was IMC

Of course, I thought I’d seen you had the rating somewhere.

Was the soup thick enough to be IMC?

Certainly not, Being a VFR pilot I would, of course, have stayed on the ground if it was IMC. In truth forward vision at ground level was about seven kilometres.

.. do you normally make a radio call just after you ‘pop up’ from your strip?

Depends which way I’m headed.

Going off to play in the FIR to the North or East – No.

Going West I’d call for a MATZ penetration.

Going South (When Mildenhall is active) I generally call and offer ‘not above 1,000 ft’ until I’m through the extended centreline.

Moggy

Beautful stuff!
Couple of questions. Was the soup thick enough to be IMC? You mentioned being able to see lakes etc. through it. Also, do you normally make a radio call just after you ‘pop up’ from your strip?

“Everything below me was totally obscured by a milky-white soup”

“Here in the open FIR, the comms set tuned to Lakenheath – totally silent”

Moggy, thanks for sharing

Not quite Richard Bach Moggy, but very evocative all the same and thanks for sharing it with us! It certainly was a glorious evening here at Watton, although we had stopped gliding by then (about 6.30pm). I did comment to a acouple of colleagues that it was a nice evening for bimbling round the skies of Norfolk and obviously I was proved right!!

Spotters!

And not a step-ladder in sight.

Bank Holidays, being what they are tend to fill with other distractions and it is often difficult to steal a few hours for flying.

Having missed Friday, which looked an excellent day for aviation, I had thought of perhaps squeezing-in some time on Saturday. That came to nothing. Sunday was a gardening detail. However, leaning on a spade, staring at the sky, I guessed that as evening fell , it would almost certainly go calm and still. The best time of the day at our isolated strip.

And so it became.

My arrival at the hangar just after six was observed by nobody except a couple of skylarks, annoyed by my intrusion and climbing noisily to FL0.0001 to tell me so. The windsock was hanging limp, not a breath of movement. Only natural sounds reached the field.

Dragging the aircraft out of the Peasant’s Hangar and pre-flighting was done at a leisurely pace. The time on the ground is just as valuable as the time in the air on an evening like this.

As ever, a crowd of spotters gathered around the 26 threshold; an Oystercatcher, three Roe Deer and a ‘March’ Hare with a bad sense of timing. They compared notes as I completed my checks, but none seemed inclined to move. The comings and goings of the little ragwing are just part of their everyday experience

Being relatively cool, and with just me and three hours fuel aboard, the Piper climbed sweetly at around 800 feet each minute, making forward progress at just 78mph. Trimmed out nicely he flew hands-off, giving me a chance to do some photography.

The met was odd. A big, dark, solid bank of cloud over to the West was bringing a premature sunset back on earth. But here in the skies, as we climbed through a fairly solid haze, the dying sun was highlighting the tops of some 4,000 ft cumulus to the East.

I climbed towards them, bursting out into brilliant sunshine and clear air just as I scraped over the tops of the lowest of the fluffies.

Here in the open FIR, the comms set tuned to Lakenheath – totally silent – and with no airspace restrictions to concern me, my course was as erratic as that of a wind-blown butterfly. I had no idea where I was headed, didn’t really care. The freedom to cruise around the brilliantly lit cloudscape was worth every one of those hours in the left-hand seat of a PA38 with a, generally patient, instructor teaching this particularly ham-fisted student the basics of flight.

From around 5,500 the world was an odd place. The solid cloud bank to the West looked for all the world like the first sight of land on a channel crossing, but darker and more impenetrable.

Everything below me was totally obscured by a milky-white soup, with just odd lakes and glasshouses reflecting back light from the sky and returning it to me. The cumulus were looking whiter and more meringue-like than ever.

I had to do it. Carb heat out, throttle right back, trim for as close to 60 mph as I can get to keep the wind noise down, and start a gentle, almost silent descent in a series of swooping arcs towards the solid haze layer. Plenty of time to think. Plenty of time to enjoy the solitude.

It seemed to take forever to reach the haze. But once there the urge to climb back to the clearer, fresher air was incredibly powerful. But the watch, and the dark westerly sky promised a tricky return to the unlit, virtually unmarked strip.

Back to cruise power, and then open up to full as I reefed on a series of 70 degree turns, left, right, left. Down here there was not much in the way of horizon, most of the turns were done with reference to instruments, and the deserved feeling of satisfaction on finding my own turbulence at the 360th degree was, I feel, justified.

Glancing out the left-hand window I could see a familiar shape, the outline of the perimeter track, reduced in width since heavily-loaded B17s used to waddle around it prior to much sadder flights than mine, but still distinctive.

A quick assesment showed I was very, very high on the base leg for the easterly threshold. The opposite direction to take-off, but – who cares? The deer won’t get to award me points for my landing, but they won’t hold that too much against me.

Way, way too high, I extend a little to the West, pull a tight, powered turn to position the mown strip in the bottom left of the screen, change back to main tank, apply carb heat, throttle right down and gently feed in a huge sideslip that has me dropping out the sky like a brick.

I’d like to tell you about the wheels gently kissing the grass at the completion of an immaculate flare.

But I’d be lying. It was a bummer of a landing, everything wasn’t right, the result of far too little stick time over the last few months.

It was so bad that I turned right around, took off and did another full circuit. Deliberately leaving it far too late for the descent. This time the kick-straight and flare were more co-ordinated. Not perfect, but better.

The larks had gone to bed by the time the little Piper was back in its shed, ticking contentedly as it cooled, to the background accompaniment of the gyro whirring, in its distinctive pulsing fashion, to a standstill.

I stood alone in the centre of the strip and thought of nature, Pipers, Boeings. Flights of pleasure and flights of terror.

Overhead in the darkening blue sky the sun caught the contrail of a high-flying passenger jet. Up there two guys are sitting at the controls.

Poor sods.