Preparing for Melilla : crosswind exercise

We’re preparing for the UPL-AOPA flyout to Melilla scheduled on May 1st, 2019, which I intend to fly with the Mooney M20J of Limburgse Vleugels. In order to be “well-prepared” with this Mooney, I try to fly it more often nowadays after a forced break last winter due to a license admin issue.

This Sunday afternoon, I invited my nephew and student-pilot for the Melilla fly-out, Franky Coene to join me for a short flight from Genk Zwartberg to Mönchengladbach. A short but intense flight as we have to contact Brussels Info to activate the flight plan, as Beek Tower for a crossing clearance for the Maastricht CTR. Then switch to Langen Info, watch out for intense glider activity and finally prepare for landing at Mönchengladbach. We focused on using the Garmin GTN 750, a really nice tool.

The reason to fly to Mönchengladbach is because they had this Sunday a full (90° degrees ) crosswind blowing, the same crosswind as what Melilla’s airfield is know for. With this Mooney the maximum demonstrated crosswind is only 11 knots, whereas a Cessna 172 can go to a demonstrated crosswind of 15 knots.

It was great and fun exercise

OO-LVT is the call sign of the Mooney 20 J of Limburgse Vleugels

Checkflights

At the beginning of a new flying season, private pilots go for a check-flight with an instructor as the flying clubs we typically rent planes of require this. At Aéro-Sport Luxembourg, I performed such a checkflight. Annoyingly enough, it consisted about making oh so many 360 circles in downwind due to commercial traffic at Luxembourg airport and traffic controlling keeping us waiting and waiting…. Not very inspiring, but always usefull as an exercise

the Cessna 182 of Aéro-Sport

2019 from Blogger to WordPress

From 2010 till the end of 2017, I have been actively blogging about my experiences as a private pilot, using the Google blogger platform. It was easy to use and allowed me to quickly upload posts from my smartphone, whenever I had a minute. However, over time, some of the features changed and as I was looking to have more flexibility in the lay-out, format etc…, I somewhere down the road lost my appetite in the blogger platform and that’s why I stopped foor nearly two years to update my pilot’s blog.

switching to WordPress
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