One of the more fun trips I've made was visiting my sister, who lives in France. I lived in Singapore at the time, but was in the Netherlands with my family of five, and our domestic help. I was fortunate enough to find a Cherokee Six, fixed gear, 6-seater dating back to 1964 at 'Singles and Twins' in Lelystad, the Netherlands. A couple of touch-and-goes, and engine out practice (man, this thing comes down without power!), and we were good to go. As I wasn't IFR rated at the time (and still am not in the Netherlands, by the way), this was to be a VFR trip. Since it was summer, this wasn't necessarily a problem, although any 500 mile trip with a return a week later is tricky if you need to have VFR weather!
We were lucky, though, and soon buzzing along at about 2500 feet, below the scattered clouds, enjoying the trip. As I was fairly new to flying such long cross-countries, and very aware that getting stuck above a cloud layer would be a problem, it took me a while to feel comfortable climbing above the clouds. At the border between Belgium and France, I did just that, and flying was smooth and wonderful at about 5000 ft from there on.
France is quite interesting to fly. There are many, many flight training areas, that require you to go climb and descend to stay out of it, or, if you fly through it, to really check for traffic (they fly fast!). I've had no trouble with it, but a few miles to the west of Paris is like the epicenter of these training areas, and I had to go right through it, so it was a little uncomfortable. The other thing is that pilots speak French. No surprise there, but they do it on the radio too! Very little consideration is given to us non-French speakers, which I guess matches the image of the French as being rather snobbish to foreigners, but I was surprised to find that in aviation. Fortunately, I do understand French enough to pick up most position reports and such, but would maintain that it's a safety hazard, especially when approaching an airfield for landing.
After about two-and-a-half hours, we had to leave our lofty 5000ft to come in for landing. And it got bumpy. Bumpy enough to make our poor domestic help throw up in the back, and make the rest of the family decidedly uncomfortable. That's the thing with afternoon arrivals in summer - you can't get around it really. I've had the same but far worse on arrival in Rapid City, and it bums me out to end a wonderful flight in such a bad way, because that's what the passengers remember. Anyway, we arrived safely and had an absolutely wonderful week in France. The only concern was a massive thunderstorm that pummeled the area a few days later, but fortunately the airport where we were parked was not affected (another one just miles away was heavily damaged).
On the way back, feeling a little more confident, I decided to stick it out above the clouds as long as possible, to avoid another stomach upset in the back. As we were approaching the Netherlands, the cloud cover was building to broken, and it was increasingly difficult to find a good gap through it. Radioing the Antwerp controller (there is no 'flight following' in Europe, but like in the US you are advised to stay in contact with a controller even on VFR flights - it's a little less formal and organized than in the US, but it ends up being about the same!), I asked for the weather further ahead, and was told that things were going to overcast in a hurry.
I wasn't really sweating it, as I had plenty of fuel to go back and drop below the clouds there if necessary, but of course would like to avoid that. Now looking intensely fort a decent size hold in the cover, I found one and let the controller know I was going to let down through it. I throttled back to almost idle (no shock cooling in summer? I don't know, but shock cooling wasn't a subject anyone had taught me about at the time), and started a healthy descent of about 1500 fpm. Since this obviously felt and sounded different than our cruise flight, my wife, sitting next to me, woke up to a windscreen filled with the most beautiful puffy white clouds. She described it to me as the most awe-inspiring sight she had ever seen, and I would agree. We slowly spiraled down the hole, and emerged in the below-the-cloud layer with much reduced visibility. Unfortunately, the rapid descent didn't do so well on the ears of my oldest son (remember, 500 fpm is about as much as you should aim for in normal flight with passengers!), and he started crying. Fortunately, it passed quickly, and all was well soon.
As we crossed the Dutch border, the sun was beginning to set, and in the calm evening air the city of Rotterdam, with its massive rivers, bridges and ports glided by port-side against a beautiful red backdrop. A wonderful end to a wonderful flight, and a wonderful week. It did convince me I needed to get an instrument rating if I wanted to do real travel, though, as travel above the clouds really is much much more comfortable than below!
No comments:
Post a Comment