Our exploration tour to Georgia has been succesfull. Reason enough to start with the planning of setting up a international pilot’s rally to Georgia and the European Caucasus in 2016. Together with Jean Birgen, the plan is to have this rally between Saturday in August 2016. The plan is indeed to bring private pilots from…

August 4, 2015 – evening Our short exploration visit of Georgia comes to an end. The owner of the Tarakhtari airfield, Amiran Manjavidze, who operates Vanilla Sky and Service air warmly invited us for a farewell dinner in his own restaurant. On our way to his place, we took a picture of what once the…

August 4th – afternoon Another excellent experience we got on our exploration tour in Georgia was the contact with the Georgian Civil Aviation Agency. I contacted them some weeks ago via internet and got a prompt response from Leval Karanadze, a young deputy director. I addressed our plan to setup a private pilot rally to…

August 4th , 2015 In preparation of our visit to Georgia, I got confronted with the fact that you cannot just rent a plane in Georgia as elsewhere in the EU, by just showing your flight license. In Georgia, you need to have a local pilot sitting next to you. Although located in Europe, Georgia…

After we returned from beautiful Batumi, our friends Artem and Mike went for having touch and go’s on Tbilisi intl airport while we enjoyed the pool area of the Natkhtari airfield. Hereunder are some nice pictures they’ve made as well as a slow motion movie of our Georgian C182

After taking care of landing formalities at Batumi intl. Airport, we headed for the city’s boulevard. This intl airport is the entrance airport for any small planes coming from Europe. Our plan is to setup in September 2016 the “1st long range tourist rallye to Georgia” and Batumi airport will act as entrance point for…

August 3, 2015 The plan for today was to explore the coastal area of Batumi, in the south eastern part of Georgia in the Adjana province. Early in the morning, we headed from our Tbilisi hotel ( British House) to our Natakhtari hub where we prepared to take off. The weather in Batumi is often…

Aug 2, 2015. Afternoon The airfield of Telavi was absolutely empty…no planes to see. But there’s security and the airfield is secured as well. The airfield is named after Mimino, a georgian bush pilot, who played in a Russian tv series in 1977. The views drom this airfield are absolutely spectacular ( again): you see…

Aug 2, 2015 We presented ourselves early in the morning at the Natakhtari airfield (Vanilla Sky) and were presented to the owners and pilots. The landowner Amiran Manjavidze built this airfield built a unique combination of a winery, an airfield and a hotel and swimming pool for the local youngsters with good music. When we…

August 1, 2015. We landed in the late afternoon at Tblisi airport. The weather was hot, almost 40° celcius is the shade. Our friends Artem and Mike picked us up at the airport. They arrived a day earlier than us and have been flying on this Saturday to Mestia with a local Georgian Pilot. They…