Yesterday I’ve made with some friends my first flight in 2015.

On the Canary islands, sometimes we have sand laden and dusty winds blowing from Sahara, also called “calima”. The visibility decreases, the temperature increases and the air is normaly very dry.

So we were flying in these “low visibility conditions”. I was hoping to climb a little bit to get over it, so we could see at least the highest peak with it’s almost 14.000 feet.

Our final cruise level was 9.000 feet and we started to see the blue sky a bit, but I have decided do decend, because it was not clear until which altitude the calima would persist.

So actually we were not able see almost nothing during our 50 minutes long flight. Even to spot the airport before landing was a bit challenge.

A very good help was my ipad with the Airnav Pro application, and also some skills learned during my basic instrument flight module course. It was the day to practice it, but today without the instructor.

I have to admit, that a further training will be good and have ordered a hood to keep practice. You will see in the video, that actually during this flight it was not necessary to wear it 😉

Cruising at 9000 feet

Approaching GCXO

See the video here: