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A typical one day flight
This Friday, We are getting formally married. Kika and I know each other from the mid-’90s, we’re formally engaged since 1999 and our son was born back in 2009. We however never formally married. The Covid-19 crisis with its confinement brought us closer to each other and so we are now marrying this Friday, May 29th. I’m a lucky man as being with Kika made me happier than ever before. She has been flying with me for many years although she is not an aviation enthusiast as I am .
As mentioned in my previous post, I’m speeding up preparations for the UPL-AOPA fly-out to Spanish Melilla in Northern Africa early May. Every weekend , I spent some time on this. This early April 2019 weekend, I booked a flight with Flight Instructor peter Ulenaers in Genk-Zwartberg. Peter suggested me to prepare a flight for Le Touquet.
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
