I´ll just share with you some images taken during my short flight around Tenerife last week… Tried to mount the gopro on a different place of the plane (horizontal stabilizer) and I simply love the images!!!
At the end you can find a short video of the flight with my friend Dirk as co-pilot as well! He did a great job and we had a great time up in the air!
Come and enjoy the views with me!
Preflight selfie
The Vulcano at Güimar valley
Somewhere over the mountains between Güimar and Arico
Flying along the coast
Chasing the shadow…
Playa de las Américas
Costa los Gigantes from the air
Punta Teno
Punta de Teno & Pico del Teide
Sunshine above the clouds…
Enjoying the views.
Flying along the north coast of Tenerife
Moments before the landing at Tenerife North (TFN)
Recently I’ve made a flight with 2 friends spotters on the Piper from Tenerife North to La Palma and back.
As this was the first time for them on a small plane like this one, they were really enjoying the views from the cockpit and also from the co-pilot seat.
The weather was actually pretty good, almost no wind, no turbulence. Only some cloud layers between 3.000 – 8.000 feet. We were able to climb to get about them and wnjoy the views of the sea of clouds. It feels like to fly a big airliner…
The basic instrument training I´ve done was a great help to maintain the plane on the desired track when descending through the cloud layer. The basic thing is to look inside the cockpit on the instruments and trust your instruments and don’t look outside.
We did one touch and go at La Palma Mazo Airport (GCLA) and returned back to Tenerife North (GCXO). It was a great trip with great views in a great company!
Here I share with you some of the views and of course a short video as well.
Safe landings!
Above the sea of clouds cockpit view
Above the sea of clouds
North of La Palma
Los Llanos
About to touch and go at La Palma airport (GCLA)
Over the sea of clouds at 8.500 feet
About to land at my home airport GCXO (Tenerife North)
Pico del Teide, or Mt. Teide is Spain’s highest Mountain. It is 3.718 mtrs high (= 12.198 feet). It was always my dream to climb with a plane to this altitude to see it from above. As the most dreams come truth ;-), we have decided on the way home from the island El Hierro to climb to 12.500 feet to see some snow left on Teide. With 3 people on board it took almost 50 minutes to climb so high, but it was worth it.
12.500 feet
It was for the first time in my life to fly at FL125 on board of a general aviation plane (Piper Archer2) and to be the pilot in command. We took some awesome pictures, hope you will like them as well! I’ll get definitely back to take some more pics in the future ;-). Enjoy Mt. Teide from bird’s eye view and safe flights!
I have decided to make a short selection of images I’ve made here in Tenerife, and not only during my flights…. Put them all together, edit and publish as a 2 minute long video. Hope you’ll enjoy it: “Beautiful Tenerife not only from the air”…
Here you can see a short clip from my last flight to El Hierro; before reaching our destination I had fun with some cloud surfing. The camera was mounted on the wing tip looking back. I didn’t like the photos very much, but the video is not bad.
Could you recommend some nice videos with cloud surfing?
As I have already mentioned in my previous posts, I have started with a basic instrument traning. This means, that I am flying with no visual references.
I’m doing my course on the neigbour island Gran Canaria, and I’ve realized that after 6,5 hours in the air I haven’t seen anything from the island but the airport… 🙂
Luckily I am recording my flights on a camera, so after each flight I can review how I flew, what can be improved and also see, what I could have seen if I would have been flying without the hood… 🙂 I enjoy the training a lot and here is a short time lapsed video of one of my training flight with a Diamond DA20 Katana.
So these are the views that I am missing during hood flying:
While some sleep, the others are messing with night landings… But why??? 🙂
Actually it was a quite long day and somehow I was thinking it would be better to have a bed on board of the Piper… So I took my first coffee this year (yes, this year, as I don´t drink coffee 🙂 ) and we have started to go through all the preparations with my instructor.
Back to basics – flight preparations…
Due to some bad weather at Tenerife North aiport (GCXO) we had to change our initial plan and we have decided to go to Lanzarote (GCRR). I was actually quite happy about the fact to land there for the first time in my life, but I was concerned as well, as this would be my first flight to this destination without having seen this airport during the day. Nevermind, the instructor is sitted next to me and he knows the airport (and we have Garmin430 and AirnavPro as well 🙂
Checking all the lights during the outside check
We have checked MET, TAF and NOTAMs and went down to the the apron. After the preflight check we were ready to go. I like to record my flights and to see them later, to learn from my own mistakes, but unfortunately I haven’t noticed until the way back that I left the lens cap on my Gopro… Grrrrr! My landing at Lanzarote was not the best one (we all love bounced landings!!! 🙂 ), so I don´t need to have this recorded :-).
We have departed as usual on Runway 03L and after departure we have turned right to the NE point. Under normal circumstances we should fly bellow 1.000 feet, but to be honest in the night I didn´t like the idea, so we have requested to climb to FL 095 immediately after the departure. As there was no traffic, we were authorized by the ATC able to climb at our discretion. We had some nice tailwinds as well which gave us some nice groundspeeds of around 117kts… Lucky!!! 🙂
I mix this course a bit with my basic instrument flight module, therefore my departure was not visual and I was practically flying until reaching our cruising altitude without looking outside the window… At this altitude I have discovered, that even between the islands over the Atlantic Ocean, there are some visual references, which can help to guide me to the destination.
The view from up there is simply beautiful, and I am starting to love the flying at night!
Getting closer to our destination, we have started our descent at 500ft/minute, which made us even faster. Reaching Sierra point at Lanzarote should be at 1.000 feet, but I didn’t like the idea to fly so low over the sea without having some good references nor to have the runway in sight. Therefore we have requested to proceed to the long final, which was authorized by the ATC prior holding over Sierra point at 3.000 feet. This was great, and I used the opportunity to open the window and make some pictures of Playa Blanca at night. The traffic in front of us showed me as well where the airport was, another great help at night! 🙂
Playa Blanca at night
If I wouldn’t have forgotten to take off the lens cap, I would have some nice pictures of the runway at Lanzarote as well, but unfortunately I only have this one made by my phone:
Final RWY 03 at Lanzarote
The approach was very good, but it is still difficult for me to guess the right height of the plane above the runway to start the flare; nevermind, I´ll find it out! After the touch and go we have returned back to Gran Canaria at 6,500 feet to avoid the wind which we had on the way to our destination.
Arriving at our destination I have requested to proceed to long final again, to not to fly at 1.000 feet above the sea. The ATC was nice and maintained our altirude of 5.000 feet until the LPC VOR, where we should hold until cleared of traffic. We were holding there for 4-5 minutes, in the meantime they were vectoring some 737´s bellow us to the airport. Awesome to be hanging over them in the air! 🙂
I have no idea about IFR holding patterns, so we did it together with my instructor. Basically, he was telling how to fly and I had no idea what I was doing… But anyway, it looks nice on the map:
Holding over LPC VOR
I always like to practice something new. After a couple of minutes we were cleared to land on RWY 03L, the wind was 030/14kts, so very good flying conditions at the end.
Final RWY 03L at GCLP
And finaly you can see the only video recorded that night; landing at Gran Canaria´s El Gando airport. Safe flights!
In addition to my basic instrument flying module I have decided to add a night VFR rating. Basically it is complicated to fly night vfr in Spain, you need to request some 10-14 days in advance a permission, which has to be granted and than you are allowed to fly during the night. So basically even if you have the rating, you are not allowed to land after sundown, only if you have a special permission by the authorities… Spain is simply different. Even our first training flight had to be cancelled because the ATC told us that the permission issued by the authorities was not complete… So the FI had one week to clear all the necessary paperwork and it seemed our permission was ok, only there was some misunderstanding… Finally we got to the plane, which was after a regular check, so everything was in perfect state, except the landing light seemed to not be working… It seemed we had to cancel our flight again. But luckily we had the maintenance guy with us, so he was able to fix the problem and we were ready to go.
Getting our landing light fixed
The taxiing was quite easy, there was sufficient light outside.
Taxi via Juliet to the holding point of the RWY 03L
In the cockpit there was of course less light than during the day, so this was already the first difference. Engine run-up, all the checks following the checklist we were cleared to line up and wait on the runway 03L.
Line up and wait 03L, Canavia 71
The things started to get more serious, haha. The big question was: how is going to be once in the air? The clearance for takeoff came from the tower, so the answer on my question was not far away… Full throttle, paramaters in green, speed alive, rotate into the night. Looking more inside on the instruments than outside; for correct speed, climb, altitude… 500 feet, flap 0, fuel pump off, landing light off and following right turn into the dark. Strange thing is, you don’t realize how deep the darkness bellow the plane is… On the top of that, we had to hold over the bay during the first circuit, so I had to watch the instruments to make a couple of 360 degree turns without seeing any light. I thought always, that from the circuit the runway light could be seen, but they are not! The first 2 circuits were a bit more complicated, but after that I started to get to used to it… When turning on base, lights of some villages could be seen which was really a nice feeling to get again some visual references…
Final Rwy 03L (night VFR)
There was a wind from the north between 20-25 knots, which gave us 11 knots crosswind component during the approach and the landing on the RWY 03L. It complicates the practicing of the landings in the night a little bit. Or better said quite complicated… I was hoping to have winds calm as it should be in the night, but it was not the case this time :-). There was also a turbulence bellow 300 feet on final so it was tough work to keep the plane leveled. Crosschecking the instruments, ILS, speed, horizon getting safe on the ground. Hovewer the landings were not so great as I would have expected. Still have 3,5 hours to fly, and I already look forward to it! Finaly I made 12 landings (without counting the bounced ones, lol), and made these with the plane this beautiful drawings on the screen of my ipad:
I was just on holidays in Croatia with my family on the part called Istria. Istria formed eaerlier a part of Italy and you can clearly see the ‘touch’ of the italian architecture on the buildings, cities and villages.
The nature is very green, the sea blue (as it should be 🙂 ) and there are also some nice small islands not far away from the coast which would be nice to see from the air.
Before we went down I made a small investigation on internet about the flying clubs, possibilities, etc. The information found on internet about flying in istria was equal O, or very poor information in croatian, which doesn’t help a lot. If you are not on internet, you doesn’t exist!
It is also a good experience to fly in a different regio than you are normally used to fly to gain more experience and to see how is the world of aviation in other countries.
Let’s get some fresh air inside! 🙂
After arrival we spoke to the owner of the place we were staying at, and he gave me some information about a field from where some local company offers touristic flights… There was some hope that I would be able to fly around and log my first flight with a plane with croatian registration and croatian airports into my logbook.
The field is called Medulin Aerodrome (LDPM) and has a grass strip (RWY 12/30) and a concrete taxiway.
It was very easy to find it, as they have exposed 2 written off planes on the hill, Piper Aztec and Cessna 150. They were from the local flying club which went bancrupcy. So at least somehow they are still serving for aviation purposes as a “decoration”.
Medulin Airport (LDPM)
After we spoke to the owner of the company we were able to make a flight on our discrection. As the hour costs 220€ in a Reims 172, I decided to fly only one hour only.
Our flight path
The one hour was sufficient and really worth of it. Could have been flying for longer, but it was simply to expensive. The owner flew with us as a security pilot and he gave us a lot of interesting information about the area and helped with the communications and navigation as well. The weather conditions and visibilty were outstanding with almost no wind.
I know, that if somebody flies for more than 20 years, that he probably (thinks that he) wouldn’t need a checklist, but I am used to read it and make a engine run-up before the departure and outside check as well. Makes me feel more comfortable and safe. This was not the case. And I know know a guy who had a similar problem on a plane because of ignoring the checklist…
The plane was refueled for approximately 01:20 hours and my question was: where is the reserve? He said, we have 3 airports near by and we are going to fly for one hour only, so it should be sufficient. (Checked the 2 tanks, and the right one was almost empty).
This is probably how they are flying the touristic flights as well… Hm, have my doubts about the correct procedures and the safety of the flight. Was not sure whether to abort the flight or not. Finally I decided to fly anyway and to hope that everything goes fine. (I did fine, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing now this post, lol).
The taxiway was from concrete and exactly as bright as the the Cessna’s landing gear, so I had to look good to stay on it and to not to taxi on the grass. Finally I thought we were going to depart from the grass strip, but following the owner’s instructions, after pulling the throttle to maximum, we were able to take of from the resting taxiway on the 160 meters… Wow! Airborne pretty fast!
Following the coastline we made the approach and low pass to the first field (LDPV), which was pretty impressive as it was situated behind a river on a small cliff. Unfortunately I have discovered that my Gopro turned off ( I had the videos from the previous flight during my holidays), so the most interesting part of the flight is missing…
Pula – sorry for the dirt windshield 🙂
Rovinj from the air
Next we crossed Istria to the west coast, than to the southeast and continued with our 2nd low pass on Pula Airport (LDPL).
Crossing Istria to the East
Somewhere near Hrboki
Flying along the Eastern Coast of Istria
Low pass at Pula Airport (LDPL)
After the low approach we have returned back to the Medulin aerodrome (LPDM) for landing. Approaching at 65 kts with flap 10′ we have landed on the grass strip (RWY 12). Pretty nice experience to land on a grass strip (I am used to land on a concrete runways between 1.800-3.400 mtrs long).
Final RWY 30 at Medulin Airport (LDPM)
I have enjoyed the flight a lot, also the coutryside and the experience. I am sure I would repeat it again and fly over to some othe parts of Croatia. I have to admit that the owner knows very well his plane and the area, and it was a nice flight and experience.
With my brother in law after the flight
Here I share with you a short video from my short field take off at Medulin Aerodrome using the remaining 170 mtrs of concrete taxiway 🙂 Enjoy it!
Fly with Stan - Sharing (not only my) flying experiences... 