Flying with a French Connection

I am privileged to have access to fly some private aircraft based at the Royal Navy Airfield Yeovilton and had arranged to use one for a trip to the Chanel Islands. These are somewhat closer to the French coast than the English and appear to operate under 'a flag of convenience' to suit all parties. The Islands are not part of the European Union, they establish their own tax regimes and attract the seriously wealthy to take residence. The mixture of a predominantly English language with a French cultural influence creates a unique lifestyle and attitude to the outside world. The two larger Islands are modern sophisticated centers of Banking; both have airports. The smaller inhabited Islands aim to preserve an almost medieval culture with unmade roads, no cars and no aviation. Last Thursday dawned grey and misty, however my brother in law had booked a Hotel and ferry so four of us headed to Yeovilton to asses the forecast and landing conditions at Guernsey, the nearest airport to the small destination Island of Sark. Conditions were not good with a cloudbase struggling between 500 and 1000feet and drizzle lurking in the air. The best opportunity for flight would be just after mid-day when the temperature would be highest which would dry the air for an hour or two. We boarded the French designed Tabago TB10 touring aircraft and set off to look at the prospect of success and found it was possible to maintain over 1000ft till South of the UK coast where the cool sea brought the cloud lower. With Guernsey offering suitable landing conditions we pressed on clear of cloud and in sight of the surface until the GPS led us to a grey silhouette of land and a climb to join the circuit for an approach. Having secured the aircraft within its protective covers we headed for the taxi and ferry that would take us to Sark. Only 40 minutes on a ferry through some treacherous rock strewn waters and the clock of civilisation turns back through a time warp; there are no cars on the Island and the lack of personal motor transport changes a couple of miles from an insignificant distance to a major obstacle particularly in wet or windy conditions. We traveled to our hotel by horse and carriage on rough unmade tracks and at one point had to dismount to traverse an excessivly exposed col. Having booked a rather expensive cottage in the hotel grounds we were rather shocked to find that our accommodation was in fact a batch some 500 yards up a flint strewn track were we were sent to dress for dinner, ties and jackets gentlemen please! Some heated discussion followed and a transfer was agreed for the following night to quaint if not luxurious rooms across a pretty garden from the main building. By dawn the skies had cleared and a brisk walk along a cliff path led to the small village where we hired bicycles to explore the 5 mile x 2 mile extent of this small rock. Armed with wheels one can cover most vantage points in half a day even at the 19th century pace of the locals. The hotel food is exceptional and so is the bill, its time to return to the modern world where the commercial pressure of competition offers some escape from the sole provider mentality that enables rip-off economics to prevail.

Permitted to Fly

Well against the odds and thanks to my engineering friends I now have a new permit to fly for my VPM16 Gyroplane. The picture shows an engineer of the old school, Gordon Smith who has still got the skill to take a sheet of metal and with no more than simple hand tools create items as diverse as a kettle drum or a cowling for an antique aircraft. Fortunately he also understands gyroplanes and has acted as an inspector for many years before recently retiring to concentrate on model building. For me Gordon has now been replaced by Tony Melody who has vast experience but also a 300mile round trip to service my machine. The CAA office tasked with surveying my aircraft for the issue of a permit is only 15 miles away and was able to provide a prompt service. The inspector arrived in smart suit and shiny shoes only to be faced with Somerset fields awash with weeks of torrential rain. The access to the flying field is a farm track much neglected by the farmers and now only passable with a 4x4 and some determination. Fortunately my hangar, a converted removal lorry, is a perfectly dry oasis (that can't be the right word) amongst all this damp and the machine was seen to be in good order. As is often the case with CAA there was just one thing that stopped permit issue then and there; I was unable to show the weight and balance document that was sent to CAA when the last permit was issued. 'No problem' says I, 'nothing has changed and you have the document or you wouldn't have issued a permit'. Ah, 'well archives can't find it and so we will need you to produce a copy'. So a quick trip to see my engineer of the time and Gordon was able to satisfy their needs; paperwork in order, permit issued, aircraft flying! With only a week or so before I head back to New Zealand I have decided to let a fellow instructor take the machine away and market it on my behalf. He has agreed to address some minor issues and ensure the aircraft is in perfect condition following a 200 mile trailer ride back to his base. Although this will be a sad day for me I have been spoilt by flying modern factory made aircraft and have decided to move on and leave G-YFLY to receive the TLC she needs from an enthusiast. And so it was that today flew the aircraft out of my field and landed where it could be de-rigged and loaded onto a smart trailer for a long journey North and the Tardis stands empty awaiting a new arrival but who knows when! By co-incidence, today a similar container holding three new machines left Germany on route Tauranga, I will be there to welcome it eagerly as these are even better aircraft than the Eagles we know.

Rain Drops are Falling on my Head!

Well I wanted to show some shots of the Microlight fly-in at Popham last weekend but due to the wonders of modern science they were lost in the exchange from camera to computer. So I have been delaying further blogging until I had some more interesting pics. Today I received a couple of pics that got my attention and so I was inspired enough to start typing. Formation flying takes a lot of practice and can have unforeseen consequences. Those air intakes are meant to accept air being forced back to mix with fuel in the correct ratio to drive the jet turbine engines. Shielded by the back of the C130 the intakes may well be starved of air causing the mixture to become too rich and without a clever engine management system the EGTs on those turbines would go over limits - expensive and engine trouble is not called for in flight critical situations! Following my return from Germany the UK weather has been foul, just the sort of summer I used to hate when I was hanging around airfields skydiving, totally unreliable with heavy rain showers interspersed with spells of drying wind and sunshine. You just think its coming good and another trough of low pressure drags half the Atlantic ocean into the heavens and drops it over Somerset. I had booked a PA28 Piper Cherokee for Saturday afternoon to fly into the show at Popham, this event is one of the significant marks on the UK microlight calender and I would have normally taken the VPM gyro if the paperwork had been in order. Typical of the rare occasion that I get round to forward planning I found my aircraft booking canceled by the club due to lack of hours available before scheduled maintenance. As it turned out the tropical storm over Southwest England last Saturday made surface transport a sensible option for travel and I was much happier to accept a two hour drive rather than staring through a steamed up canopy in a ground groping cloud dodging attempt to aviate 'visually'. Popham was blessed with an afternoon spell of sunshine following a downpour in the morning, the turnout of modern gyros was suficiently significant to establish this as the fastest growing sector of light aviation in the UK. Watch this mushroom in the years ahead, economy and versatility are attracting serious flyers to factory made gyroplanes and established microlight schools are adding this type of rotorcraft to their fleets. Great to see and a real reward for those of us who have been banging this drum for years. The stalls were rewarding and I came away withsome of those things that you don't see anywhere else, not big things but some plastic map holders so useful in an open cockpit. The rest of the week has centered around organising my VPM permit renewal, critical to this was a visit from my engineer to sign off an annual inspection prior to a CAA visit scheduled for this Monday. Well that's all done although I now realise I am still short of a scribble in a couple of crucial places. The airfield looks tidy due to some hurried mowing between showers and the Hangar/container is swept and respectable. Watch this space!

Business and Pleasure

To visit the manufacturers of the MTO3 Eagle in Hildersheim is a pilgrimage from my home town in Somerset. The best compromise on paper was to fly from Bristol to Amsterdam with KLM and then on to Hanover and hire a car. This worked well on the outward journey but turned to disaster on the return when we were stuck in Amsterdam overnight when a Focker 50 aircraft went sick. Besides a very short night in a very basic Airport hotel and some lost luggage all was well for us but for those on demanding business schedules KLM was a complete failure. Visiting the Auto-gyro factory always impresses me, the warm welcome was matched with warm weather, some 32C by day and 20C by night. It was pleasing to see the new aircraft for New Zealand were under construction with painted body shells drying courtesy of solar power. Production is approaching one machine per day with 46 staff running two shifts that start at 5.00am and run until 11.00 at night. The teamwork is impressive and the cleanliness and organisation of the factory is a stepping stone on the path to higher approvals within European Aviation Legislation. I was introduced to the slightly modified MT-Sport which is configured to produce less drag and can be fitted with a variable pitch propeller to provide a total performance improvement of twenty percent above the original design. The changes are subtle and when I first flew the aircraft it appeared that it just wanted to operate faster for given power settings. With adjustment of the electrically controlled Ivo-Prop the cruising revs reduced to 4500 while the machine settled at 100mph with less air disturbance around the cockpit. I have recently written about the history of London and the UK and it would be amiss of me to not to mention the glories of Hildesheim and the civilisations that populated this war torn land. The restoration of medieval buildings that were heavily bombed in the Forties is particularly impressive. The town has created an area of cobbled streets which is largly devoid of traffic and allows tourists and locals alike to enjoy peaceful surroundings overshadowed by incredible buildings, some a thousand years old and some only just restored to match.