Popular posts from this blog
Having flown from Egypt, we spent two nights at Corfu on the west coast of Greece. We parked at Corfu's airport. Corfu's old town is quite charming. There is a lot of history, including its long centuries as a possession of Venice and the periodic assaults by the Ottoman Turks. This resulted in impressive fortifications. A practical feature of Corfu was that my mobile phone did not work at all. I could not log on to any local mobile phone provider. My own service form Three seems to be very substandard. Today (Sunday) we departed Corfu and flew across the Adriatic to Italy. Here is landfall at Ancona: There was a considerable headwind and we stayed low over Italy, eventually climbing to FL200 (or 20,000 feet) over the Alps. The Alps had some considerable weather and the TKS anti-ice system was put to good use. Here are the Alps, largely cloud-covered....... .... followed by descent in to Switzerl...
Here are a few photos from India. Early morning in Calcutta. Little did we know that we were heading towards the Black Hole of airport bureaucracy. Ben and Peter with Mr Karati of the Indian Customs at Calcutta Airport. I will post at more length about the thievery and obstruction we encountered there, and how it took SEVEN hours before departure to go through ATC briefing, terminal manager approval, customs approval, immigration approval (for a domestic flight), security clearance etc. A certain Mr Bannerjee of the Customs, scowling at us and sporting a very large diamond ring, took it upon himself to create as much mischief as possible; this was not just regarding Customs matters but also raising objections with the Immigration personnel about their processes and complaining constantly about our paperwork and alleged regulatory infractions. A flavour of the issues may be be given by the fact we charged some 70 cents per litre tax on the...
Now it is 13 April, Easter Thursday (aka Maundy Thursday). I flew by Swiss (Swissair) Dublin to Zurich, then I took a train to Basel and then to Rixheim nearby in France. This was to be near the departure airfield at Habheim LFGB. The whole door to door time was more than 10 hours, I should have flown myself in G-RVIB.
ReplyDeleteBryan and Uta in EI-VII very very kindly brought over my oxygen cylinders from Dublin and left them at the aero club. The are staying at Besancon for the weekend, along with Larry & Louise plus Ed & Stewart. Sorry I won't see them all.
The "Choucroute" or Aviatik club had a drinks reception with beer and sausage/cheese bits as a sendoff. Good cheer and actually good food too. One senses that a flight to China is so far beyond the scope of the normal club member's flying that it hardly registers. We might as well be saying we are off to the moon.
Having signed up for Whatsapp a couple of days ago, my night's sleep was interrupted several times by messages arriving and causing my phone to beep loudly. This happened even though I had carefully switched off the app before going to bed. The purveyors of social media don't want us to miss anything! Now I see that it can be muted, maybe that will be better. Peter has arrived in Brisbane, Simon is in Calgary, so we have global timezone coverage.
ReplyDeleteToday at 4.15 pm we finally left Habsheim. The IFR routing took us east along the German-Swiss border, over Austria at 16,000 feet, then down into Portoroz in Slovenia. Following the usual friendly welcome at this agreeable airport, we took a shuttle to the Hotel Piran. There we met by arrangement Jim Thorpe from Gloucester and his friend David from Denham, we went off for beers and a good ,eal by the seafront. This is a very agreeable town.
DeleteGood to hear you are in Chittagong! I only see blog up to April 14 in Portoroz.
ReplyDelete