Ferry flight post ppl
30 Jan 2010Two flights today, the flying school phoned me up and asked if I’d be available to do a ferry flight, taking G-BJCA up to Exeter for maintenance, and picking up G-BSTO which was already at Exeter, to bring it home.
It had been very cold overnight and had snowed! I got up to the airport for about 11am and by then most of it had melted, but G-CA was parked in the shade, so was still absolutely covered in ice, and The door was pretty much frozen shut.
I managed to get it open and then with the help of one of the instructors, moved it out into the sun. It took nearly an hour for the ice to melt completely, but the aircraft was a little damp, and so the inside misted up pretty badly. My Dad came with me for the trip (to film it!) and so we jumped in with lots of paper towels to wipe the windows and flew up.
It was a pretty straightforward flight, perfect weather - you could see for miles, just a little bumpy underneath the clouds. It was an ok-ish landing at Exeter. We turned off the runway and had what seemed like a very long taxi to the Iscavia maintenance hangar on the north side of the airfield. Parked up, shut down, filled in the tech log and left it in the aircraft.
Then walked over to G-BSTO, which was waiting for us with the key inside, gave it an A check (as it was its first flight that day), filled out the tech log, phoned Exeter’s tower to book out for the flight back to Plymouth. Then we jumped in and started up, dodged the BAE146 and other aircraft which were in bits, as well as the cones and cars as we taxied out to holding point F1 for runway 26.
I did the engine checks and then the tower told us to line up and wait on the runway. Once we had lined up we were given a squawk code, before being cleared for takeoff which I thought was a bit weird, as we must have been holding there on the runway for around a minute in total!
We took off and flew back to Plymouth with no problems. It didn’t require a huge amount of navigation you can just follow the A38 all the way to Ivybrigde, at which point you usually have the airport in sight, and certainly did today, given how clear it was. The landing was definitely not one of my best, but it was ok - it was a very very bumpy approach, right down to crossing the threshold, and I’m putting it down to a combo of that and it being the first time I’d jumped from flying one type to another on the same day.
But it was a great flight, and was nice to have finally been to a different airport for a change. The last time I’d done it was my solo cross country, which was now over 3 years ago!