Flights – A Pilot’s Companion

A Weekend Away

It’s never a guarantee that Charlie can be booked out for more than a day at a time unless you’re lucky enough to get two consecutive days falling on a week day and a weekend day (i.e., Friday and Saturday or Sunday and Monday). That’s the way the booking system works and anything different has to go through the syndicate committee. Give them their due, they normally look kindly on such requests unless there’s a good reason not to, and that’s how it was when we asked to take Charlie out over the bank holiday weekend.

As soon as we had the go-ahead for a three-day booking we were making arrangements to stay with friends over in Lincolnshire.

The flight to Wickenby Airfield took about an hour and forty minutes. According to Google Maps it would have taken about three and a quarter hours by road, though seeing all the traffic on the motorways, much of the time at a crawl or standstill, it probably would have taken far longer. Visibility was excellent though the cloud base was fairly low keeping us to an altitude of around 2000ft.

Rutland Water in the distance — Rutland Water

Flying above Rutland Water which, coincidentally, I’d visited about two weeks previously, I got to see how vast this body of water actually is. It’s the largest reservoir in England (by surface area) and is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, a Special Protection Area and a Nature Conservation Review Site. I knew it covered a large area but didn’t really get a feel for its size until I saw it from the air.

An urban view from about 2000ft, with the waterway running around an industrial area and out towards The Wash — Boston, Lincs, with The Haven (tidal river) heading out to The Wash

As we flew further north-east, the towns and villages got more sparse and the land a lot flatter. The fields were a patchwork quilt of different colour blocks, interspersed with waterways and quiet roads. Rivers following straight lines with barely a meander, stretched for miles before eventually spilling out into The Wash (another impressive geological feature where salt marsh, mudflats and tidal inlets join the land to the sea and a three-sided coastline forms a bay around one of Britain’s broadest estuaries). It was all so different from the busy-ness of our local area. Wickenby airfield was very quiet with just one other aircraft parked up!

View of the mud flats and waterways alongside The Wash from about 2000ft — The waterways and mud flats along the coastline of The Wash

Our friends were magnificent hosts and on Saturday, Will took Stav up for a flight to Skegness. In the meantime, Jen and I went into Lincoln, little knowing that it was hosting a Steampunk Festival.

A group of people from the Steampunk Festival, dressed in colourful outfits — Fabulous outfits at the Steampunk Festival

The weather had turned out sunny and warm; the Steampunk outfits were impressive/beautiful/eccentric; I could have spent a fortune in the little independent shops on Steep Hill; and an extended lunch at Bar Unico followed by coffee at the Hilton overlooking the marina was a perfect way to end the day. Dinner that evening was home-made pizza cooked in a piping hot pizza oven in Stav and Jen’s garden. Cooking in that heat took no time at all and the pizzas tasted so much better than from a normal oven – authentic and truly delicious.

After a lazy Sunday morning, it was time to go back to Wickenby and home. The weather had returned to the same as Friday so again, we kept altitude at around 2000ft. We took a slightly different, though similar distance, route but with a tail-wind almost all the way back, we were back on the apron in around an hour and twenty minutes.

view from about 2000ft over the River Welland — Flying over the River Welland

We’ve since learnt that Stav has now made enquiries about flight training. Will has decided that we must get a pizza oven for the garden!

The Squiggle

It was no surprise that as soon as Will had his licence signed off, he was on the syndicate’s booking app looking for Charlie’s next available slot.

Just before lockdown lifted it had been agreed to limit the number of hours each syndicate member could book Charlie out for, so this made it relatively easy to find an afternoon that same week. As it was Will’s first time in years as pilot with a passenger on board (POB in radio-speak), he decided to go somewhere familiar and not too far away so Shobdon it was! The plan was to arrive at the airport by 1pm, ready to take off around an hour later and then get back by 5pm. What we hadn’t planned on was the quick hellos, introductions and other distractions from the friendly people in the flying club, the extra time needed for all the checks and the wait at the fuel pumps.

Our intended hour at Shobdon, where we had been looking forward to a cup of tea and cake, turned into a quick turnaround with just enough time for Will to pay his landing fees. We did get some lovely views over the Black Mountains though and the weather was lovely and calm, albeit with a few dark clouds over the mountains which we had to avoid.

The Black Mountains — View of the Black Mountains from an altitude of around 5,000ft

Having just come out of lockdown and with perfect flying weather, it was inevitable that our home airport would be busy, but just how much became increasingly obvious as we got nearer to it. At about 12 miles out, Will decided to do a couple of circuits around a local landmark – not to have a better look, but to wait for a bit of radio silence so that he could report in. At the 3-mile point when he’d been asked to update, it was almost impossible to get a word in edgeways. It turned out that Covid restrictions had meant that only one person could be in the air-traffic tower at that time and the person whose turn it was, was having to manage both tower and approach.

With multiple aircraft already in the circuit, non-standard instructions and a sudden change in runway just as we were about to line up, I’m sure any pilot would have been challenged. Talk about a steep learning curve, Will must have been sweating once we’d landed! I have to admire the guy in air-traffic too as it must have seemed relentless with everyone trying to get in before the airport closed.

I actually didn’t have a clue of the route we’d had to do coming in so looked at the plot on Flight Radar afterwards. The orange is the Airport Traffic Zone and the blue, which looks like someone’s picked up a crayon and made some random squiggles, is our track coming in from the north-west and landing from the west.