Tag Archives: C182

Over and out

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Now we can really consider this trip to completed successfully. Our Cessna is well and back in its home hangar and both pilots are alive. Who would have thought that? When we could not complete the approach into Heubach with visual flight rules (there is no instrument approach unfortunately) and decided against landing in Stuttgart, we had to park the Cessna in Friedrichshafen at the Lake of Constance. Today it was time to bring back the bird. When the mission is to get up early on a Sunday and take responsibility for an important task, it is clear that Achim has to step in. Markus was still trying to sober up from yesterday's binge drinking before getting up for his kebap breakfast at 12 o'clock in Stuttgart. Achim boarded the metro at 08:34 and arrived at Friedrichshafen Airport around 11 o'clock where it was still cloudy, unlike in sunny Stuttgart. To great surprise, the airport was vibrating as it recently has become the hub of ski fanatic Brits: three airplanes from London all arriving within one hour!

The flight back was just a short hop of 30 minutes and after takeoff lead us south west over the Lake of Constance, climbing through the clouds to blue skies and on direct course to Heubach. After landing, the Cessna was stored in the hangar and tidied up a bit. The real interesting question is how we are going to get rid of the Sahara sand which was pressed into every corner and wrinkle when we flew back to Greece. 

Flight Planning with Mursi

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You can read it in the press: the Egyptians like to celebrate their revolution in a rather extrovert manner. President Mursi has enacted martial law for 3 Egyptian cities for 30 days, including a curfew at night. Well, our planned date of arrival is about two weeks from now and apart from the fact that one of the martial law cities is on our planned route, our local helper Ahmed, who is responsible for securing the necessary landing and overflight permissions, appears to have disappeared. We surely hope that all is well for him and that he will manage to get us the permissions.

Apart from this little issue, we are making good progress in our preparations. Today our pilot uniforms arrived, which make Achim look like a cheap callboy. Achim did a few traffic patterns yesterday and refreshed his memory of the basic functionality of the Cessna 182. In the meantime, I am reading the user manuals of the autopilot, glass cockpit and FLARM (anti collision monitor) and our feeling is that we are well prepared. Now it's up to Mursi and the weather and of course Ahmed our friendly helper to decide whether we can take off as planned on February 14th.