May 18
On Friday 15th May, the government announced that recreational general aviation, where it complies with social distancing (i.e. solo flights or flights with members of your household only), was now allowed. Up until this point, my aircraft (G-AVWT) had sat idle, apart from a single ‘Engine Health’ flight, to protect the engine from corrosion (in …
Dec 27
I’ve recently purchased a PilotAware Classic unit: This is a system based around a Raspberry Pi which acts as a low cost portable traffic awareness device. It uses a software defined radio (actually a unit designed to receive DVB-T) to receive transponder (mode C/S and ADS-B) signals, along with it’s own 869 aiqk745.5Mhz transceiver for …
Aug 15
A brief post to relate a good experience I had last weekend – myself and another pilot from the aero club decided to fly out to Stapleford and back. The straight line route to get there goes straight through London Stansted’s airspace, so our planned routes had appropriate ‘dog legs’ around it, as there is …
Jul 17
A slightly delayed post here as I’ve been very busy with work over the past few weeks, however at the end of June I was fortunate enough to be able to take part in Project Propeller. This is an annual reunion for 150+ WW2 aircrew, which they are flown in to by current volunteer private …
Jan 23
I’ve not posted for a while, as January has turned out to be a rather hectic month for me work wise. I have managed however to find a couple of chances to go flying thus far that are worth documenting… 11th January I went up for a local bimble, with greggj, a student pilot and …
Dec 29
On Saturday a last minute post appeared on the Flyer forums from the person who runs Gloucestershire Staverton airport (Darren), stating that if anybody flew in the next day (which was forecast to be excellent weather wise), he’d do a discounted landing fee and was happy to do tower tours. As such, I gave the …
Dec 22
I’ve now completed both of my dual night circuit lessons – all that’s left to do for the night rating is five solo takeoffs and full stop landings (as they are full stop landings and not touch and go’s, they’ll take a little longer, and thus be spread across two more lesson slots). After lots …
Dec 03
One of the club’s aircraft (G-MEGS) has a G1000 glass cockpit – this means that instead of the ‘analogue’ instruments that most aircraft have, which look a bit like this: It has two big LCD screens on which the information is shown (together with a few standby instruments in case they fail), like this: …
Nov 09
NATS (National Air Traffic Services), who essentially run the UK airspace, along with the towers at the big commercial airports, and several other ATC providers organise “Visit ATC days” to let pilots see things ‘from the other side’ as it were. I signed up to one at the NATS centre at Swanwick – this is …
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