Month: August 2024

It’s been a slow job but I’ve at last managed to complete the video of the first leg of my recent flight to the UK.

I’ll do a write-up of the flight north as soon as I can because it was ‘different’, to say the least, and was an experience that you don’t have every day. I’m glad to say 😀

What have I been up to? Yes, I’ve been absent and quiet for a while but there have been reasons for that. First off, I managed to make a flight up to the UK and back in my Savannah nearly a couple of weeks ago which I’ve not yet managed to write about, but I will as soon as I can because it was notable for both good and bad reasons, which I’ll talk about in due course. Secondly, I picked up a nasty bug, probably while I was in the UK, that has been a bugger to shake off. I’m still not quite right but I’m getting there and it’s time to get back into stride with my life, albeit a bit more slowly than usual to start off with.

First off, I’ll talk about photos of my latest UK flight. Unbelievably, due to my own carelessness and stupidity I managed to delete almost all of the videos and all of the still photos that I shot flying up to the UK. I’ve been trying ever since to recover them but I’m now resigned to the fact that they’re gone forever. I’m managing to make a video from salvaged material of the first leg of the flight that I’ll be putting up on Youtube so it’s not a total disaster but although it wasn’t easy taking stills from inside the aircraft or even outside because of the wind and bad weather, I did get some good pics (some of Le Mans and the famous racing circuit there) that I doubt I’ll get the chance to take again. But such is life.

Luckily I did get a perfect video of the first leg of my return flight from Kent in South-East England to Le Touquet in France. It captured all of the radio calls and ATC procedures between myself and other traffic and might be of interest to anyone interested in what’s involved or might even be considering the Channel crossing for the first time.

The flight up to the UK turned into an extraordinary experience. I’ll post the write-up when it’s done but I’ll just say for now that I was detained by the French police in Le Touquet and questioned in regard to a potential terrorist offence!! And no, I wasn’t wearing either a beard or a turban at the time. It was a terribly disruptive affair but was difficult to take seriously, and pretty soon the police didn’t either but they have ‘procedures’ to follow 😕

But for starters I’ve attached a couple of pics that I’ve lifted from the saved videos. The first is of your erstwhile pilot starting the under-wing video prior to take off at Chateau Malbec and the second is of starting the cabin video in the UK prior to taking off for the return flight to France.

The person shown is a gormless looking individual who looks just the type to delete valuable videos and photos, I’m sure you’ll agree 😀

And to finish off, a shot of Cap Gris Nez taken when coasting back into France on 21st August.

And having finished writing this, it’s 9.30 am and time if ever there was one, for a cup of tea and a Bramley apple pie that I brought back with me from the UK 😉

I didn’t want to have another early morning at Malbec after having had one yesterday and then worked for several hours in the hot sun, so by the time I got there today and unhooked the battery charger the temperature was already pushing 30 degrees C, as had been forecast. The first flight of any aircraft immediately following maintenance, especially if it involved the engine, is in effect a test flight and you therefore want conditions to be as good as possible.

So the conditions this morning were yet again far too unstable to get 24ZN into the air and instead I settled for more taxying up and down the runway before parking it under the tall trees at the top of the runway in the hope that conditions would be more favourable in the early evening. I wasn’t holding out too much hope, however, as the forecast for today was for another extremely hot day with the heat continuing on well into the evening.

And so it turned out. When I arrived at Malbec at 8.00 pm the temperature was still around 35 degrees C so I decided that prudence was the best policy and to abandon any idea of flying this evening. As two more very hot days are forecast for tomorrow and Monday it looks as though the earliest I’ll be able to fly 24ZN will be Tuesday so it meant that both it and my Savannah would have to be put back into the barn, with the Xair needing to have its covers put back on as well.

It’s extraordinary. When I wanted to fly 24ZN over to France from the UK in the autumn of 2019 I was prevented from doing so due to bad weather in the form of cold, wet weather and high winds. Now it’s here the weather is again preventing me from flying it, but this time in the form of scorching hot days that would be thermic to the point of being dangerous for such a light aircraft. You couldn’t make it up.

I did have one piece of good fortune today, however. Take a look at the following photo and on the right of the panel there’s a switch labelled ‘intercom’. Underneath it there’s a little green light.

it turns out that whoever wired in the intercom didn’t connect it through the master switch as they should have done. I either left it on earlier or, more likely, knocked the switch on when I was cleaning 24ZN’s panel and it’s been on ever since giving a slow but steady drain of the battery. So that’s why the battery went flat yesterday.

Now that I’ve switched it off, hopefully I’ll have no further battery problems. Certainly, there was no problem starting the engine after the aircraft had been sitting for several weeks, months even, so something must have caused the dead battery yesterday and I’m pretty sure this was it.

Today was forecast to be another very hot day and as I can’t afford to keep losing one day after another, I made the effort to get over to Malbec by 7.30 am this morning in order to finish off the work on my Xair. And everything went very smoothly indeed. Not only did I get the aircraft thoroughly cleaned inside and out – the best it’s been since I’ve had it actually – but I also managed to clean its outdoor covers in which it’s been stored in the barn and which were filthy, and lube all of its control hinges and pulleys.

So as it had then been fully serviced and checked over it was ready to carry out some taxi trials, but before doing so I took some photos after I’d moved it onto the top of the runway.

It was just gone 1.30 pm by the time I’d done a few taxi trials up and down the runway including some high power runs and I was very satisfied with the results. As by then it was much too hot to think about flying – it would have been extremely thermic and bumpy and the approach back into Malbec over the trees would have been very challenging indeed – so I decided to park the Xair out of the sun (and UV) in the shade of the tall trees on the other side of the runway, go off for the afternoon and prepare a flight for when it had cooled down this evening.

My idea was to take off and fly around the airfield as far as Rouffignac and high enough so if I needed to return I’d be able to make it back safely and I also planned to set up a couple of Go Pros on and in the aircraft to record the flight. I also made up 20 litres of new fuel and by 7.30 pm after setting everything up and carrying out some more taxi runs I was all set to go, so I stopped the engine at the top of the runway to start the Go Pros recording. But when I came to restart the engine the battery was flat.

So that was it. I’ve left the Xair out overnight with the battery on charge and I’ll be very annoyed if the battery is giving up the ghost because the one it replaced is still going strong on my ride-on mower despite notionally being too small to start its engine. The other thing is that having made such an early start this morning I don’t think I want to do it again tomorrow and if I try flying later in the morning it might be too hot as it’s forecast to be even hotter than today with a top temperature of 36 degrees C or possibly higher. But anyway, I’ll just have to wait and see.

Having completed my work on my Savannah yesterday, today I moved on to my X-air. Like the Savannah, this has also been standing for months with its engine only having been run from time to time but at least it has been under covers so they took the brunt of the dirt, filth and bird poo and only small areas of the aircraft were affected. I started by pumping up its tyres and then moved on to emptying, flushing and refilling its cooling system with 50% G12 anti-freeze, the same as for the Savannah.

As it has a Rotax 582 two stroke motor which I extensively checked over before flying the aircraft to France in 2020, there was little to do by way of servicing other than a general inspection and cleaning and re-gapping the spark plugs and then I was all set to start and run the engine. It did so faultlessly so after confirming that the coolant and EGT gauges were rising towards their expected levels and there were no leaks, I was able to shut the engine down and move on to the initial stages of thoroughly cleaning the aircraft inside and out as I’d done for the Savannah.

I took the following shots after I’d started washing the aircraft down after I’d reached the end of a very dirty bucket of water which I decided wasn’t worth re-filling before packing up and leaving for home.

As the shots I took of the Savannah yesterday were so poor, I took some more shots today while it was still clean and sparkling in the sunlight.

It was cooler today than it’s been of late but as it’ll be up to 30 degrees C again tomorrow I’m aiming to make another early start on the X-air to try and finish it off before it gets too hot. So it’ll be early to bed tonight with the aim of getting cracking at Malbec by about 8.00 am. That’s the aim anyway… 😕

My Savannah has now received the most thorough service and inspection than it’s had the whole of the time since I acquired it eight years ago. I did it for two reasons but mainly because it hasn’t been flown for months while I was concentrating on my house build and now that it needs to be got back in the air I wanted to ensure that it was in tip-top condition. It took longer than I expected due to the potentially serious problem I found with its cooling system which prevented me from completing its engine service as the system had to be drained.

This prevented me from running the engine to warm up and drain the oil but once I was able to do that and complete the engine service I was then able to embark on a thorough inspection of all of its controls. Yesterday I finished doing that by lubricating all of the control hinges and pulleys both externally on the wings and rear control surfaces and internally inside the fuselage, so all that I then had to do was give it a thorough clean externally and internally in the cabin.

As we’re still experiencing very hot days making it uncomfortable at the very least to work outside in the open, I made an early start this morning. Even so, it took me over four hours to complete the job and I had to push the Savannah back into the shade in the barn to finish the work off by vacuuming out the grit on the floor and the accumulation of dead insects. At the end it looked a treat as it always does but later on I shall have to remove a few more spots of surface corrosion and paint the affected areas before they get worse.

I took a few pictures but as I was inside the barn they were of very poor quality. Nevertheless here are a couple of shots taken of the panel and screen after I’d cleaned it inside and out with Plexus making it clear and clean again.

So what is the second reason for carrying out such a thorough inspection and service? It’s because I’ve decided that I’m going to take advantage of the current settled period of weather to make another return flight to the UK. I’ve already decided on my routes out and back as shown in this final image. I’ll provide more detailed routing information later on closer to the departure date but I’ve decided to go out to the UK via Saumur and back via Blois.

I’ve flown both routes previously so I know they work, mainly for taking on fuel as although you can purchase fuel at many aerodromes in France, not all of them accept a standard bank debit card and require payment by cash or a company card (Air Total or Air BP). The latter are uneconomic for pilots like myself because although you get invoices and a month’s credit you have to pay an annual subscription which is more than the cost of the fuel I’ll use going to the UK and back.

I have to go out and back via Le Touquet due to Schengen Area exit and re-entry rules but there’s an additional complication. If I top up my tanks at Saumur I’ll need to take on more fuel before commencing the Channel crossing. If I don’t depending on the wind direction I might make it – but then again I might not so I need somewhere that will accept my bank debit card and Le Touquet does not. Payment there is solely by Total credit card.

The solution to my problem is to land slightly off track at Dieppe which I don’t mind doing as the deviation is only very small plus it will give me the opportunity to land at a new airfield. An alternative would be to take on fuel at Abbeville but I’ve been there and done that. Also it’s closer to Le Touquet (and further from Saumur), and anyway, I’m always up for a new adventure 😉

Yesterday morning I had to wait in for a parcel to be delivered that needed to be signed for so while I waited I prepared a 50% mix of the G12 anti-freeze that I’d received previously. Afterwards it became too hot again to work outside and finish off the service on my Savannah but I was able to today, which was much cooler.

I started by emptying its cooling system which I’d previously filled with straight water and then filled and emptied it again to flush out as much of the original coolant as I could. I suspect that having the ‘wrong’ kind of anti-freeze may have had something to do with the original coolant expansion bottle having corroded but even if this was not the case, I’ll be happy now that it’s been swapped for G12 which is the recommended coolant for the Savannah’s engine.

As I’d already done an oil and filter change and replaced the spark plugs, it was then just a matter of going all over the engine to make sure that there were no leaks and cable-tying anything that needed to be secured. It was then time to run the engine up to temperature and afterwards recheck the fluid levels. Here’s how it all looked before starting the engine.

So not bad for an old ‘un, which the Savannah now is. The engine started very easily and ran very smoothly with good oil pressure. Afterwards I was able to top up the cooling system after the air in the system had been expelled and as I’d already cleaned everything up and lubricated all the cables and linkages, the engine service was complete.

Then I had the pleasure of replacing the lower and upper engine covers. These had been removed and left under covers for weeks due to the delays on account of obtaining the correct coolant overflow bottle and not being able to work outside because of the exceptionally hot weather.

Before I left for home I lubricated all of the external control system hinges and linkages so all that is left now for the Savannah to be fully flyable is for the internal controls, cables and linkages to be checked and lubricated and for the aircraft to be thoroughly cleaned inside and out. Then I can’t wait to get it back up in the air again. It’s been a long time. Too long 🙁