The Netherlands

Midden Zealand 26 Jun 22

The much-delayed Midden Zealand trip is finally on: Ostend's consistent morning thunderstorms are at last missing from the weather forecast so we'll do VFR flight plan, GAR and Gendec all from the comforting embrace of SkyDemon. Tim Dawson the founder has rightly been awarded an OBE for this wonderful piece of software which actually doesn't do anything other systems do but it does it all from one simple to use interface and you can have it on your iPad and on your phone as well. Coupled with SkyEcho your situational awareness is hugely improved and for international flights it ensures the correct info gets to the correct people at the correct time.

The aircraft has just been to Spain where it's been very hot. There are blue fuel marks around some of the tank seals, I suspect it's been left fully fueled somewhere very hot in Spain and the fuel has forced its way out past the seals. Next time out I will give it a clean.

We need lifejackets, PLB and the liferaft plus a proper marine waterproof bag for my phone, all of which are in the hangar cupboard. Over the years our group have amassed quite a bit of "optional but necessary" kit and it's nice to have it to hand at short notice in an agreed place, rather than having to ring round the group to ask where it is.

Whilst waiting at the hold a DA40 lands, bounces and starts to wheelbarrow. This is a fast way to kill the firewall as the entire weight of the aircraft is on the nosewheel; it takes three cycles before the Instructor finally takes it, throws it away and climbs out. I would have thrown it away earlier, that aircraft needs its firewall checking....

Accelerating down the runway I realise I have once again managed to forget to enrichen the mixture following leaning at the Hold - this is a really nasty habit I must break. I always keep my hand on the mixture control when it's leaned for taxy but even then I seem to get distracted by my take off clearance and a couple of times now I have managed to get half way down the runway with the mixture leaned. Potentially very dangerous.

It's gusty today and although the wind is straight down the runway it would be nice to climb out above the clouds and thus have a smoother ride but annoyingly there are random airways above 5500ft as we head for Cambridge so we're in and out of the clouds at 5,000ft.

Some of the couds have a bit of rain in them and all are bumpy.

Cambridge is not active on the radio but we need to avoid their laser zone so we pass slightly North then swing round for Clacton, thus avoiding the whole North London TMA squeeze I think is so dangerous, especially on a Sunday. Southend is closed but this is a quieter route.

Beyond Cambridge we swap to London Info which we will need for the over-water stretch and as we turn at the Clacton CLN VOR we can make the coasting out call and climb to 5,000ft. I like to tell them everything at that point including the crucial estimate for the FIR boundary so as to give the SAR people as close as possible a location if we do need to ditch.

Out here over the water with no land in sight is a different place and a different mindset where you feel detached from the world with only the power of the radio waves connecting you back to the land. Thomas Dolby has the right mood here: his fascination with steampunk headsets, submarines and "the airwaves" harking back to an earlier era of AM radio, cats whiskers receivers and huge valve transmitters that hummed and occasionally arced.

Nowadays of course it's all FM radio and wind farms with little support craft pushing up against the poles as maintenance people scurry about inside then the shipping lanes, busy here as container vessels and tankers head to and from Rotterdam, ferries across the North Sea and occasional sailing boats hugely outscaled by the commercial traffic tack across the lanes. Theoretically power has to give way to sail but you can't turn these container vessels in less than 3 miles so you stay out of their way, there may be no one on watch anyway.

The "engine out" plan is to land near but not in to the wind turbines, as close to a support vessel as possible or in the shipping lanes a couple of miles ahead of a ferry and off to one side.

The FIR boundary comes up and amazingly London Info is still loud and clear. They must have big aerials on the coast to get as far out as this. They ask us to swap to Amsterdam Info who are just as clear and very welcoming, the whole flight plan and handover thing working well, even on a Sunday.

The shipping lanes give way to more wind farms and the Belgian coast looms on the right hand side, hugely complex military zones and controlled airspace making this a more stress-free route, then I can see the Dutch coast and we can start descending. Once the little SkyDemon circle showing where you can reach in the event of engine failure hits the coastline you can relax.

Swap to Midden Zeeland Radio, join right hand downwind for R27 and then Final and plop on to the smoothest piece of grass I've ever landed on (Compton Abbas, come and take a look maybe?) and park up. Phew.

Why are the Dutch so nice? Because traditionally they had very little other than seaborne trade, and people trade with nice people: people buy from people. This is why I have never met a nasty Dutchman.

The Schengen Immigration is ridiculous: the (armed) Immigration lady comes over to my lunch table, smiles, takes my passport and with two stamps enters me in to, and out of Schengen. I have been officially in The Netherlands for 2 seconds. The bureaucracy and expense of maintaining 2 armed Immigration police to deal with one (yes, I am the only extra-Schengen) person on a Sunday must be unbelievable.

I need to file a return Flight Plan, GAR and Gendec. It is quite hard to keep track of what time to file for as it needs to be Zulu, my watch shows Zulu plus one and locally it's Zulu plus two. I always keep a bit of paper showing all the relevant times so I know where I am, but it can get very confusing.

Are we going to need fuel? We should not have burned sufficient to require any as we started with full tanks, but we can confirm by dipping. We do the fuel calculations twice and we will arrive at Oxford with at least 1 hr of usable fuel in reserve (in the end we arrive with 2hrs reserve).

Alternates are Cambridge if we encounter severe headwinds or Ostend if any mechanical issues.

So let's go. The parachutists are landing to the South of the runway so we can line up and depart, exactly on time as per the flight plan, turn right for noise abatement and then West to climb in to Amsterdam Info's airspace. They reckon we should cruise at FL45 which we can do, and the Dutch coast drops away. The nice smooth ride back in to UK airspace ends at the coast where it's much more thermally than it was this morning but the rain showers have gone.

An uneventful run up to Cambridge then down past Cranfield, and we can swap back to Oxford Radar. We're number three on a left Base for R19 behind a Pitts Special doing an ILS and a DA40 (with a busted firewall?). Their anemometer is broken today so they're estimating the winds but the windsock is straight out and rigid down the runway so they're probably right to guess 190-200 15-20Kts.

Turn Final, gently down the approach but on short final it gets really silly and starts blowing the aircraft about. At one point we're over the grass at the side of the runway. I am about to chuck it away when abruptly it ceases and I can straighten it out and just plop on tidily.

That must have looked interesting from the tower.

Half way down the runway the Tower instructs us to turn left at Foxtrot, the new grass taxy way giving a shortcut back to the ramp. This will help with their flow, that's for sure. They have also added a new AvGas fuel farm, café and PFT office. All change!

Midden Zealand 24 Aug 23

This is a good exercise in multi-crew co-operation and weather handling. It's very important to decide prior to your flight who is in charge and exactly what each member of the crew will be doing. Ann needs to do the pushing and pulling as she's P1 (I'm no longer on the insurance), so she's responsible for pre-flighting the aircraft, fuel planning, speeds, heights etc. I will do the Nav, work the 430W, do the radio, and do the flight planning.

When you have two pilots it's very easy to assume the other person is doing or has done something, and indeed this happens with the NOTAMs: I manage to miss the Clacton Air Show which is only a few miles from our projected route. I have clocked the Red Arrows Wattisham RA(T) but not the Clacton RA(T). Bad planning, which only becomes apparent later. But a really good lesson that probbaly prevents us from losing our licences the following week.....

Whisky Lima is waiting for us on the tarmac, round the corner from the answer to "can you get a 737 down in 1200m?": there is one sitting on the maintenance apron. MS Flight Sim was correct!

Oxford have built 2 new taxyways since last year, and there are new reporting points but at last they have a taxiway up to the North end of R19 so all the jets now don't need to backtrack. This is bound to help with the take-off delays we were seeing last year.

We grab life jackets and liferaft. The life raft in my mind always requires a STOP before you pick it up. There are 2 handles and you don't want to lift it by the wrong handle. You'll only do it once!

We are today testing the new 3 axis autopilot and the new G5s. I've flown with the G5s in the C172 in Spain so they hold no fears for me but it's taken a little while for Ann to get used to them.

Using the Garmin 430W fundamentally changes your flight planning because it doesn't understand VFR waypoints (without serious effort loading Lats and Longs) so you end up using IFR waypoints. EGTK ODVOD KEMPY INLIM XAMAN EHMZ it is.

We depart Oxford manually (the group has decided for safety's sake not to engage the autopilot below 2000ft, following some upsets - another interesting lesson there), set the heading bug to route towards our route and hit HDG on the autopilot. That works, but when we reach our route and select NAV it doesn't do anything.

Huh?

This time it works, and the next few leg changes work perfectly. But quite what the issue was we never do discover. Glad we weren't at 400ft!

The height hold works really well and the radio is easy, except that we lose London Info West and have to change to London Info East. I should have known this. Rusty, see?

We coast out over the docks at Felixstowe and head East.

London Info tell us they have a SIGMET in force for thunderstorms over the Netherlands coast. We already know this and have made the decision based on our own research that the thunderstorms are further up the coast towards Amsterdam, will manifest later in the day than we will be there and if we do encounter anything we don't like the look of we have the fuel and the planning to turn around and come back to the UK.

We deselect HDG, select NAV and this time it works, but when we reach ODVOD it proceeds to circle us round, it won't proceed to the next leg. So we swap back to HDG, delete the flight plan, re-enter it and select NAV.

Amsterdam Info at the FIR boundary say the same thing, but we'll take a look anyway.

The weather in front of us darkens as approach the coast, we descend to remain VFR and eventually we do get a spot of rain as we coast in but it doesn't amount to any more than that and clears away to the North as we head inland.

Ann's spatial awareness is poor, I don't know how she manages on her own finding airfields. I have to coach her gently in to getting in to the right place as per the circuit joining instructions. It's not complex but she appears unable to translate what's written on the map to what she can see below her. In the end I have to resort to "steer 090, turn right 180" and she is well in to downwind before she is sure about the location of the (grass) runway.

However, as ever her landing is perfect (I wish mine were as consistent), we taxy in to the apron and shut down.

We meet a PA-28 leaving for the UK, they have just come from Budapest and think there will be lightning later, but the tower has weather radar and says it's all gone North, nothing will come in his afternoon. And the sun comes out as we have a delicious salad in the restaurant.

The Immigration people are fun: she has an Irish passport so can come and go as she pleases Schengen-wise, and I have a UK passport with Spanish residency so again can come and go, no 90 day limits here. There is little for them to do so they demand a printed version of the Gendec, hoping I hadn't done one. I always keep confirmation E-mails so I have everything they need, E-mail it to the tower and eventually they depart with a printed version.

We've already done our return GAR, Gendec and flight plan so we just have to return to the aircraft and roll exactly on time, head West and we're all organised...

Except we're not: I've forgotten to put the flight plan in to the 430W so I get Ann to climb on 270 while I repair my error. Once XAMAN INLIM KEMPY ODVOD EGTK has been entered (and no, I don't know why the 430W deleted it on power off, I had copied it to a numbered slot) we activate it, deselect HDG and select NAV. And it works perfectly all the way home. Having 2 people on a long trip is actually very useful and we've both learned lots.

We contemplate engine out scenarios over the water and conclude the best one is to aim for one of the wind turbine support boats, they are more likely to be awake than the tanker captains and of course more nimble in the water!

Coasting-in we note the Red Arrows RA(T) at Wattisham and double-check with London Info that the times we have are correct; we are outside the NOTAM time by 5 minutes. It's all too easy to confuse Zulu time with local time and Netherlands time.

Feeling smug, we haven't actually noticed that we are only a few miles North of the Clacton Air Show. Eeek! We are outside their RA(T) but I really should have known.

All is calm until we swap to Oxford Approach at which point all Hell breaks loose. We can't get a word in edgeways for 5 minutes in between jets and ILS training flights. Eventually we manage to transmit, get vectored towards Beckley mast for an orbit and shunted to Tower, which has a horrendous warbling tone in the background. This level of Busy is apparently normal now, they've got 3 training organisations on site and whilst being busier can only be a healthy thing for an airprort it is nerve-twanging after a long flight. Glad I learned here!

One orbit later we join downwind for a left hand circuit and Ann does yet another one of her perfect landings (oh, I do hate her), we swap to Ground (ah, much quieter after all that warbling!), taxy in and shut down. Phew