Bölkow G-EJBI

Andrew, Oscar and myself took a trip to Calais at the begining of November. The restaurant at the airfield has opened again and we enjoyed a pleasant meal there before a walk into Marck. A few bottles of wine from the supermarket and the rebate on the fuel from Customs and Excise always makes this a popular destination of mine.

I had wanted to visit Damyns Hall for quite a while. It is very close to London and until recently didn’t charge a landing fee. The only activity on our visit was a Tiger Club Cub being prepared for flight., the restaurant was closed. The landing fee is now very modest but on our visit as everything was shut and the aircraft deemed interesting enough, there was nothing to pay. I should imagine it is busy at the weekends and with a nice wide and smooth grass runway we shall return next year.

We flew G-EJBI quite a lot in September. A visit to Blackbushe proved good value. now that they have reduced their fees to around £14. The reasonable fuel price was also a good excuse to use my new AirBP card. I took some friends sightseeing to the south coast and popped in to Farley Farm on our return to Blackbushe. G-EJBI also visited Duxford for the 2018 Air UK reunion and this picture of her was taken on a lovely day departing  North Repps airfield by Graham Reeve.

The begining of September and Paola and I visited Old Warden. They were holding their Heritage Airshow and again we enjoyed beautiful weather. We met up with Rolf and Sylvie who had kindly invited us to the Classic Klemm meeting at Eutingen. In the end we were unable to make the trip to Germany but looking at this video it seems we missed a good event.

At the end of August, Andrew and I visited Sywell for the LAA Rally. We just went for the day, on the Friday and spent a few hours looking around the aircraft and trade stands. With an arrival every minute it seems, on paper at least, to be quite a daunting prospect. In reality, arrivals and departures are pretty relaxed, there is little radio and with a couple of runways available they handle the volume of traffic well. Thanks to the many photographers who took pics of G-EJBI and posted on the web.

At the begining of August, after a couple of local flights I took G-EJBI to Felthorpe to meet up with Mike Powell and discuss the annual check. Felthorpe is a lovely small airfield, a little under 500m and within the Norwich circuit. Local Aero Medical Examiner, Peter Bruggemann, has just built a Fokker Triplane there and I have just discovered his pretty cool website www.dreidecker.co.uk

The last leg of our German trip was uneventful. Texel is a bit pricey for fuel so we filled to half tanks and then enjoyed a very pleasant one hour thirty minute direct flight to Tibenham. This last trip was towards the end of June and it was the begining of August before G-EJBI was flown again. I’m not too sure why July was flightless, it was pretty hot and the ventilation is poor, the two cabin air controls are pretty ineffective.

Having run into problems refueling in Hamburg we set off for Texel. We were quite familiar with the field so arriving with around 30 minutes of fuel remaining seemed reasonable. The weather at Hamburg was good and the weather at Texel was good but inbetween we were rarely above 1000 ft and often quite a bit below due to low cloud and rain showers. If you need to fly low, the north of Holland is the place to do it, with much of the land below sea level and few obstructions.

Andrew was not happy and I had to agree as the rain and low cloud increased enroute Bremen so a 180 degree turn was made and a decision to divert to Hamburg. If ATC were unhappy with our choice they hid it reasonably well and we were soon over the threshold at 120 kts ahead of some large jet traffic. A €9.30 landing fee sounds good, however you must add a start fee, emisions fee, parking fee, terminal fee, transport to terminal x2 fee and add some tax. Total, a not wholly unreasonable €61. Your navigation and meteorology fee of around €10 will arrive by e-mail a little later. No fuel available without a BP card or cash, this was a total pain as no cashpoint at GA terminal. I left in a bit of a bad mood having to find another immigration airfield and fuel stop.

Strausberg a few miles north east of Berlin is an excellent choice if visiting the city. €11 landing fee and €7.50 for overnight parking with a train just outside the airfield, it is around 45 minutes to the city centre. After a couple of nights sleeping in a tent it was time for a luxury hotel. We arrived on the day of Germanys first world cup match which was on a large screen, well five screens to be precise, at Brandenburg Gate, much beer was available and consumed. The following day we filled up (fuel at €2.53 per litre) and set off for Bremen to clear immigration. Now Germany has a lot of wind turbines so as the cloud base started to fall and the rain intensified it was time for some fresh ideas.