flights with my motor glider

Kevin and I went across to Ypres on Saturday. Kevin was booked to travel to Ypres during the Easter Holidays, but fell victim to the dreaded Lurgy the night before he was due to go, and couldn't make the trip.

We decided that as the weather forecast was so good for this Saturday that we would file a flight plan to Calais, but go via Ypres. We took off from Rochester at 9:00 Saturday morning, crossed the Channel at 3200 feet, before descending to cross the French coast at Dunkerque about 80 minutes after take off. There was a lot of clag from the factory chimneys at Dunkerque, but this was all blowing out to sea, so as soon as we were south of the town the vis improved dramatically. We routed virtually direct to Ypres from Dunkerque, routing just north of Wormhout, then to Poperinge and Ypres. It only took about 30 minutes to cover the 25 Nm from Dunkerque to Ypres, and as we had to stay below 1100 feet to remain clear of controlled airspace, we had a very nice close up view of the French and Belgian villages we were flying over.

Kevin took all the photographs of Ypres and the Menin Gate, as I flew a wide orbit of the town. He is going to let me have a copy of the pictures on disc, so I will post these on the blog at some later date.

The pictures I took are crossing the Channel from Dover to Dunkerque, and then the countryside up to Ypres.

We landed back at Calais 3 hours after taking off from Rochester, had a chat with Stephan who was looking after the airfield for the day, and then walked into Marck for tea. Beautiful cups of tea with sliced lemon floating in them. Degunged the mouth wonderfully.

After we had got back in the falke to return to England, we had to wait stationary in the cockpit for half an hour before we could take off because the airfield was being used for parachuting.  After all the parachutists were back on the ground, we taxied to 06 hold, did the checks, and then had to wait again because an aircraft was carrying out an ILS approach on 24.

Lovely flight back across the Channel, and finished off with tea and a massive lump of coffee cake in the canteen at Rochester. Superb.

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• #1 Comment from rachealcarol 
  24/04/07 20:22 | Permalink

  It's good to see you back up there chasing the clouds Malcolm :)  You've excelled yourself in the search for blue skies, they're fantastic in colour.  Brilliant fog picture, so eerie.
  
  Sorry to hear of the cafe, it's such a shame.
  
  Happy flying, really great to see you owning those skies again. Rache