Isles of Scilly flyout post ppl
10 Sep 2010There was supposed to be two aircraft, with two instructors going, just like the Channel Islands trip earlier, however the weather on the day wasn’t completely perfect, although still flyable, the other person who was due to go decided not to fly, but I was quite keen to go and so was my dad (who was going to sit in the back) so we decided to go for it.
We flew directly down towards the Lands End VOR but as we got near Truro the cloud base seems to get considerably lower, so we had to head out to the north coast where it looked a bit better, we then picked up a track again towards the VOR. Flew right past Lands End airport and saw one of the Islanders taking off, and then followed a radial from the Lands End VOR out towards St Marys.
We were given a choice of runway as the wind was roughly in the middle of both, so having heard about the slightly more interesting runway which has a considerable up-slope on it, I fancied a challenge and opted for that one. The landing was a bit of a bump as I should have flared a little more than I did, given I knew the runway had a slope on it, the angle was a lot more than I was expecting it to be. That said, it wasn’t really too bad.
Once we’d parked up, we walked into town for some lunch and had a bit of walk round the island, before jumping back in and taxiing back down to the bottom of the sloped runway. There’s quite a sheer cliff at the end of it, and I remember my instructor joking, saying “I hope we don’t lose the breaks now!” as we were rolling down towards the edge!
Once we’d turned around (thankfully with the breaks working fine), and were cleared for takeoff, it seemed very slow accelerating up the ‘hill’ but we’d just about got to flying speed as we reached the crest of it, so I just maintained a little back pressure as you always do to unload the nose, and as the runway dropped away, we pretty much kept going up.
The flight to Perranporth was very smooth, the views as we flew away from the islands were stunning, almost looked like the Caribbean. I tracked the Lands End VOR again until we were on top of it, and then followed another radial from it, which took us directly to Perranporth. We flew straight in onto runway 05, I flared a little too much here, and it stalled just above the runway meaning the plane kind of dropped onto the runway, probably overcompensating for not flaring enough at St Marys I think!
We were pretty much the only aircraft at Perranporth and there was almost complete silence once we’d shut the engine down. We went into the clubhouse and had a drink paid the landing fees, and then jumped back in for the flight back to Plymouth. Taking off over the cliff edge at the end of the runway was amazing, just seeing it drop away beneath you. Very smooth flight back to Plymouth, once I’d set heading, I was almost hands-off most of the way back, joined left downwind for 31 and this time landed very smoothly!
A really great day out!