FLIGHT 1- EXETER (EGTE?) TO LIRF
I was due to takeoff at 9:00am. But, due to my best friend Mitchell sleeping in, we left at about 11:45am.
But we were soon underway.......
We had just warmed up the engines, and Mitchell was tending to his cup of coffee when I accidentally knocked it over, pushing our departure time further forward. Soon it was cleaned up....
2 more cups of coffee later, we were going skyward. Mitchell and I had bought along a radio, but the Howard's own engines were music to our ears. Noisy, but nice.
Looking back over Devon, as we were climbing to FL200 and straining to hear the weather report. I heard the words "Lightning" and "Fog".....
.....which began to make me wonder. Landing in a foggy thunderstorm isn't going to be easy.
Look at that beast of an engine. Reminds me of my childhood, when I used to argue with my mother:
"No, Mum, I'm in the window seat!!
Hitting the Alps. Sheesh, that's a lot of instruments there! You can also see a whole lot of clouds. That made Mitchell and I think that the weatherman had got it right this time.
Soon, we had passed a thunderstorm and a huge patch of turbulent air. Then we were told to descend to 5,000ft.....
...into this. It seems that Italy was covered in a huge fog that had a visibility of about 3 feet. Landing didn't seem to be the once easy task that it was..... and I'm glad I was flying IFR, not VFR.
And here we are on a short final.....luckily Mitchell's keen eye spotted the PAPI lights. the gear went down and....
......We landed. We trundled to the parking at LIRF, locked up the plane and found a local hotel. 5 hours on board one of these is tiring!!
Part two coming soon, comments welcome. ;D
