We’ve enjoyed another lovely day again today and I’d already decided that I’d use today to get 77ASY all set to go for next week’s flights to Saumur and the UK. So after doing a little bit of shopping this morning, I bought 35€ worth of 98 octane fuel to top up its tanks and a few other bits and pieces that I’d need to complete the task.
But first a little bit of background information. In France, ULMs are registered by département and it wasn’t that long ago that if you bought a used ULM in one département and took it to another, you’d have to re-register it. But that’s stopped now, so my X-Air has its original registration 56NE (56: Morbihan, Bretagne) and my Savannah 77ASY (77: Seine et Marne, Île-de-France).
During my planning for the flight to the UK, I came across the useful information that although OK for use in France, these registrations are not ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation) compliant, presumably because they do not contain a country designation, and it would therefore be illegal to take the Savannah to the UK with just its original registration displayed.
Now it just so happens that when you register your aircraft’s radio here in France, whether it’s a fixed or portable set up, you are allocated a ‘F’ registration that then stays with the aircraft for the whole of its life. I don’t know whether this is intended to be an ICAO compliant registration, but common sense tells you that as no other aircraft will have that same registration, it certainly has the possibility to function as such, as it contains the country designation and is also traceable directly to a unique aircraft and indirectly to an owner/pilot.
In any case, I can’t see anyone raising any kind of question if this ‘registration’ is applied to the aircraft’s fuselage in the required manner, even if the original ‘départementale’ registration is left on the wing in the usual way for France. So that’s one of the jobs that I decided to do today, as well as topping up the tanks, checking the oil and water, giving the aircraft a general clean (even though it was only used for an hour to go to Cavarc and back after the last time) and polishing the screen and side windows with Plexus polycarbonate plastic polish.
I finished late on in the afternoon and here are a couple of shots of the finished registration on the Savannah’s fuselage.
I’d left it far too late to get hold of some proper self-adhesive registrations letters so I had to do the job myself using ‘Pattex Power Tape’ with extra-strong adhesive that I’d picked up earlier from Bricojem in Rouffignac.
It was tricky getting any kind of half-decent job because although I was using large, sharp scissors in an attempt to get clean, square cuts, even after just a couple of cuts, the blades became gummed up with glue and then just ripped at the tape giving a nasty jagged edge. So the final results are hardly appropriate for gracing the flanks of the Savannah, but they don’t look that bad. And at least they should get me into the UK and not barred from entry at Headcorn for not having an ICAO compliant registration displayed on my aircraft 😉