Alfons Eigenmann’s description of Altenrhein airfield, as translated by Harald Rauch and edited by Ed Rathje:

The Altenrhein airfield was built in the years 1927-1928 by pumping mud from nearby Lake Constance (Bodensee) onto a swampy area close to the shore line. Almost in the middle of this area a turf runway of 600 x 100 meters was built, laterally marked on both sides by a ditch 240 cm wide and 80 cm deep, which was filled up with yellow gravel from the Jura (the mountain range bordering France in the west of Switzerland). The grass taxiway areas were on both sides of the runway. As the airfield was certified for light single engine aircraft only, it was not capable of heavy bomber aircraft operations.

It doesn’t exactly inspire one with confidence to hear that the airfield is based on mud piled onto swamp! Luckily I’ve been to Altenrhein before and I know it’s a wonderfully simple approach and at 1,500 metres the runway is more than enough for me to feel comfortable.

My quick reference notes:

LSZR St Gallen (Altenrhein)
Date: 16 May 2008
Sunset: 18:54 GMT
Phone Number: +41 71 858 51 65, +41 71 858 51 44
Hours: Montag - Freitag 06.30 - 12.00 / 13.30 - 21.00 Uhr
Samstag 07.30 - 12.00 / 13.30 - 20.00 Uhr
Sonntag 10.00 - 12.00 / 13.30 - 20.00 Uhr
Frequencies: Tower 118.65 MHz (119.7 MHz), ATIS 123.775 MHz
Runway: 10/28 1500m x 30m
Website: Airport St. Gallen - Altenrhein

Note: Do not rely on other people to gather information for you - and for the love of safety don’t rely on my notes being correct for your flight! Always verify all details yourself.

St Gallen actually has live webcams so I’m thinking that I might twitter my estimated time of arrival and see if anyone can spot us coming in!

I don’t know a lot about Lausanne but hopefully that’s about to change. After a bit of a refresher in North Weald, I’ll be braving a border-crossing into Switzerland: flying to Lausanne to meet with some people and hopefully to waste some quality time sitting at the edge of the lake looking at France.

My quick reference notes:

LSGL - Lausanne
Date: 14 May 2008
Sunset: 19:00 GMT
Phone Number: Phone +41 21 646 15 51, Fax +41 21 646 15 91
Hours: 0800 am to 0800 pm
Frequencies: ATIS 118.82, AFIS 123.20
Website: Lausanne airport (moves your browser, ugh!)
Useful: Circuit Details
Runways: 18 / 36

Note: Do not rely on other people to gather information for you - and for the love of safety don’t rely on my notes being correct for your flight! Always verify all details yourself.

One of my favourite bloggers, Plastic Pilot, used to be based in Lausanne. He has a video of the approach on his site so I almost feel as if I’ve been already.

I wondered which runway to expect and he told me the following:

Runway 18 has power lines on short final and a downslope. Be ready to go-around. Runway 36 is a bit tricky as you come in from the lake as the terrain on final slopes up. Preferential for no wind is RWY 36.

I can’t say that I prefer either of those approaches but I’m sure it’ll look less disconcerting when I’m coming in. Well, I hope so anyway.

I’m hoping to end up with some extra time in Lausanne to explore. Plastic Pilot was good enough to send me recommendations and a list of interesting places to fly to including what looks like a somewhat exciting approach at Saanen which he recommends trying out, with an instructor, simply for the experience.

Riss gave me a more down-to-earth recommendation:

The Musee l’Art de Brut is worth it, if strange. It’s not your typical museum.

The Museum is focused on a Japanese exhibition at the moment so I’m really hoping we’ll get a chance to see it.

Hopefully I’ll have interesting photographs (and boring stories about my landing) to share with you all soon!

We’ve got a busy fortnight coming up - I’ve done a quick mock-up of the route we are starting to plan. The plane is parked in North Weald (in Essex) so the flying doesn’t start until we get there (the British Airways flight to Gatwick doesn’t count, that’s just a case of arrive at the airport and stand around feeling frustrated!). Then we’re flying south to Switzerland and navigating our way to Lausanne and then on to St Gallen for the weekend. Then, like some sort of psychotic dot-to-dot, we’ll head north with a vengeance to the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides to pick up the wheelchair we dumped to save on weight on the last flight. Just a day or two there before we dive down towards London again, theoretically going to Shoreham but recent news means that looks iffy. I hope I’m wrong!

Then we’ll load up the plane and head home to Málaga via a quick overnight stop at Bordeaux for refuelling. Whew!

I’ve drawn it on Google Maps but that really just makes it clear how inefficiently we’ve made our plans - great zigzags! View the larger map for a more detailed view of our stops.

View Larger Map

I’m working on an article called Sylvia’s Mother at the moment (er, if you are my editor, read “working on” as “finishing off”. I swear you’ll have it by Friday) and wrote about my thoughts before taking my mom and my son up in the Saratoga.

This is from my initial draft. I can’t help but feel that the family flying magazine that the final article is aimed at would not appreciate this.

Every time I thought about it, I ended up with my heart in my throat. My mother and my son in the back of the light aircraft. If I mess up, it isn’t just me. They are trusting me to fly the plane - this plane that still scares the bejeebus out of me. What if I lose concentration and twiddle the vertical speed knob counter-clockwise instead of clockwise and the plane starts to dive dive dive down into the ground and we end up a fiery inferno on some Tuscan farm, last words of what-the-fuck?

I know this is ludicrous. I have, on one occasion, twiddled that very knob the wrong way. The moment the nose tilted down, I disengaged the auto-pilot and tilted it back up. No drama, we lost no more than fifty feet of height. I know the fear isn’t rational. But still. Are they out of their minds?!

So, it’s cut for now, although I might try to rewrite it in a more gentle fashion and re-insert it. First I need to go find out what a bejeebus actually is!

Everything is ready for the next flight. Cliff will do the first trip IFR. We’ll be flying up the coast of Spain and then across to Menorca for a refuel and last minute check before a long water crossing directly to Rome. Then we’ll continue on IFR (so constantly under watch, which strikes me as a good thing) so we can enter the Class A airspace and go directly to the Roma Urbe airfield.

Roma Urbe on Google maps

Click and then zoom out to see the location. It’s amazing, right on the northern side of Rome! That river is handy too, that’ll make the airfield loads easier to spot.

A few days in Rome (yay!) and then we will bundle my mother into the plane and I’ll fly us to Mannheim. Cliff thinks we can route right over my cousins house in Bavaria on the Austrian border, which will be neat. We’ll be high (argh, Alps!) but if it’s clear weather it should still be some pretty spectacular views.

It’s a three-hour flight, which compares really well to a commercial flight: the time you spend queuing and getting your luggage checked in and yourself through security adds up fast so I suspect we’ll make better time than my mother would have with a Lufthansa flight. Certainly more interesting!

I spent formative years in Mannheim and so although I’ve never landed at the airfield, I don’t think I’ll have any trouble finding the airfield from the sky.

See if you can spot it.

See how Mannheim is nestled in between the Rhein and Neckar? The airfield is just south of the Neckar, which is the lighter, smaller river on the north east. Now you don’t plonk runways in between houses so forget about any built up areas and look for a clear field that could fit an east-west runway.

Found it? Hopefully you’ve zoomed in close and ended up at this lovely airfield.

If you zoomed out and got lost and ended up in Coleman, the US military is likely to want a word with you. So don’t do that. And lets hope that I don’t!

I was watching my log book carefully as I waited for the weather to clear and then, most frustratingly, waited for the plane to be in good working order again. Although I have to admit I was relieved that someone else found the fault rather than leaving it to me.

I then managed to get a flight in just the nick of time: there’s a three-month deadline for taking passengers and, god forgive me, but I still hate the thought of flying that plane solo.

We flew to Angouleme where I made a complete and utter hash of joining the circuit and then overcompensated for the weight of the plane by coming in way too fast. On the bright-side, I have now come up with a cheatsheet of things to review after an extended amount of time without flying. As I get more experienced I’m sure this will become redundant, but at the moment I think it makes a real difference.

• The order of a standard radio call

Silly, but there’s a hideous blank moment the first time I’m asked to pass my message where I think, “I have no idea what to say” and end up stuttering lots. A quick refresher would avoid one stomach cramp per flight, always a good thing.

• Diagram of a standard join

I always end up twisting and turning a plate to work out the angle I need to join the circuit. The problem is that I assume I know what the join will be like and think that one through without considering the other options. I just need to plan in a few minutes of staring at it, test myself on joins in various configurations using both circuit directions and taking into account coming in from an odd angle. I’m just not quick enough to think this through in the air while I’m desperately trying to get the plane to slow the hell down.

• Review emergency procedures on the ground!

It’s all well and good testing myself in the air, quiet moments filled with considerations of what would I do if …. But when I’ve not flown for weeks, it’s a bit of a jump to assume that nothing will go wrong until I’ve achieved radio silence and had a chance to review. I should be testing myself on the ground first.

• Visualise

I learned this in the PPL and somewhere along the line forgot. Visualise the processes needed. Stepping through the planned flight serves as a refresher and more importantly nudges me on the ground about the things that are a bit hazy in my mind.

The Saratoga is sitting in Elstree, we cancelled our flight home when it began to snow. We’ll pick it up in a few weeks — meanwhile I keep saying I want to re-read my coursework from the PPL. No time like the present!

My resolutions.

Short-term:

1) I will get working on Alderney this week and finish it off.
2) I will sort through and post all the millions of photographs gathering virtual dust on my hard-drive.
3) I’ll go back to thinking about this one island at a time rather than get overwhelmed at the total number of islands.

Long-term:

1) I’ll book my travel times and hotels more than 3 days before the day I wish to leave.
2) I’ll do regular updates here aiming for a post a week.
3) I’ll do at least 10 islands this year (don’t panic! One island at a time).
4) I’ll find the perfect fry-up.

Broken down like that, it doesn’t sound so bad…

The Isles of Scilly are said to be the most isolated islands in Britain, which I have a hard time believing — in England maybe, but in Britain? It’s a total of 150 islands (five inhabited) but in line with my other destinations, I’m staying on the chunk of land with the airfield on it.

The Cornwall Wildlife Trust (www.cornwallwildlifetrust.org.uk) do some great PDF pamphlets including “An identification guild to the Carnivores of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly” which I immediately downloaded with excitement. “There are six species of Carnivore found in Cornwall,” is said in the introduction, continuing on to say “None of the Carnivore species are found on the Isles of Scilly.”

Ah well.

There are half a dozen small mammals though, including the “Scilly shrew” which apparently isn’t a reference to the women, and I have a recording form in case I should stumble across one (hopefully not in the hotel room). As far as I know, it’s too late to see puffins but I’d like to go seal watching and maybe even search for orcas. I’ve packed a bathing suit in hopes of experiencing the “sparkling white beaches” and St Mary’s has enough prehistoric sites to keep me occupied for months. And then there’s the intriguing mystery of Lyonesse.
I’m quite looking forward to this!

Finally have confirmed the trip to St Mary’s and the Isles of Scilly for next week. Looking forward to this, especially as I did all the leg-work last month. The flight in looks a bit confusing; I might go a bit of a roundabout route.

I was a bit amused by the local online news, reassuring me that “The proposed strike by air traffic controllers at St Mary’s airport has been averted.”

Well, that’s okay then. :)

What chaos. Isle of Wight is happening as planned, but when it came to Isles of Scilly, we found a definite reluctance to let rooms for 2 nights during high season, when they could get people staying for a week.

So we gave that up and looked at Anglesey instead. Seems there’s a sailing festival happening that weekend and the recommendation of the woman at the B&B we chose was to stay well away until it was over.

Meanwhile, Cliff was looking into Lundy, an island with an airstrip that wasn’t on our original list. It has a 400m runway, “rough ground, rabbit holes.” Not the most heartening of descriptions. He managed to prove that the Saratoga was capable of landing there, not so definitely capable of taking off again. Possibly with an ace pilot. I’m not.

I’m meeting up with my ex-instructor to mess around with some more difficult flying and short-field landings, so we can do a fly-over and take a look at it, but I’m not holding my breath.

Next on the list? Walney Island. Closed weekends. *sigh*

So we decided to give it up for next week, we’ll do Isle of Wight and then drop the plane in Wycombe to get maintenance sorted out and look at options again next week. Perfect flying weather, it’s just the bit on the land that’s a pain. :)