{"id":1886,"date":"2014-08-29T08:06:35","date_gmt":"2014-08-29T07:06:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fortyfivehours.co.uk\/?p=1886"},"modified":"2014-08-25T22:18:22","modified_gmt":"2014-08-25T21:18:22","slug":"first-trip-to-old-buckenham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.fortyfivehours.co.uk\/?p=1886","title":{"rendered":"First Trip to Old Buckenham"},"content":{"rendered":"

This airfield has been on my ‘want to go’<\/em> list for months, a pretty obvious choice being just 20 minutes flight from Cambridge.\u00a0 It’s fairly irregular circuit had put me off in the early days post getting my license and then other places came up and all the usual stuff got in the way.<\/p>\n

A chance catchup online with a friend meant the right seat would be occupied with a local friend.\u00a0 Now I’ve got quite a few hours post-PPL, it’s great to have friends in the plane to chat with and to steal copies of their photos after.<\/p>\n

No chance of rain…….so why is it raining then?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The weather man had spent the last two days religiously reciting “cloudy, but NO CHANCE of rain.”\u00a0\u00a0 I was a little concerned about the cloud, but being only an 18-20 minute hop by plane, I was pretty sure that worst come to the worst on the cloud we’d be pushed down to 1,500 but we’d get there no worries and maybe it’d cut the return leg short.<\/p>\n

I was not prepared at all to open the door at 8:45am to find it RAINING!<\/p>\n

For the true experience of flying light aircraft, spend two hours drinking coffee at your nearest airfield.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you don’t have an IMC or Instrument Rating then sooner<\/em> or later, you will be spending hours of your day, scheduled for flying, sat around an airfield watching the weather and waiting for the clocks to tick past 20 minutes for the latest METAR update.\u00a0\u00a0 If you don’t like talking planes, looking up at the clouds and anecdotally debating what they’ll do next……don’t bother learning to fly.\u00a0 It’s part of the deal, you’re only buying a few hours a month with the propeller spinning, all of this stuff is free, you have to enjoy it or you’re not going to fully enjoy having a license.\u00a0\u00a0 Suffice to say, most pilots I’ve ever met, LOVE<\/span> talking aeroplanes and what the weather will\/won’t do next.<\/p>\n

On arrival this is all we could do, the cloud base was 1,400ft and at times the visibility was reported as 3Km!\u00a0\u00a0 Yet I had faith in the day coming off, even the chief instructor reckoned it was going to be a nice day and you can usually take such tips to the bank.<\/p>\n

There’s only so long you can wait though and after 2 hours and only the beginnings of improvement in the weather it was time to look at the diary and see what else we could do today.<\/p>\n

Thankfully a solo hire plane was free all day, I couldn’t get MEGS which is the plane I wanted ideally, but one advantage of delaying a few more hours would be that I could then get Whiskey Kilo or Romeo Charlie.<\/p>\n

New plan then:<\/p>\n

Let’s find a pub that’s open, have some lunch, as it’s nearly 11am, then go flying.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Attempt Two :\u00a0 Much Improved weather (Now where did all the instructors go?)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

As predicted the weather did improve, we now had 2,000ft to the clouds and 8-9km visibility and the TAF was for the whole area to keep getting better.\u00a0 Great stuff, lets go then…<\/p>\n

Except even with a license, I still need an instructor to authorize the flight – its still someone else’s aeroplane at the end of the day.\u00a0\u00a0 The only instructor was out having just sent a student solo, hmmm more waiting, but lots of good news:<\/p>\n