Just like the old days

Before I started to become heavily involved in videos, whenever I flew I always took a little still camera with me and snapped away to my hearts content. It was great when I had my French X-Air that had no doors because then the shots were always clear and sharp but that hasn’t applied so much for all my other aircraft that have had plexiglass windscreens and windows that I’ve had to shoot through.

I wanted to take the opportunity to fly in the Savannah today while the weather was so good and I decided that rather than faff around with one or more of my GoPros that are limited by having battery lives of only an hour, I’d dig out one of my still cameras and see how I could do with that. I swapped my little Sony 20 Megapixel camera for a Nikon Coolpix some time ago but some comparative test shots that I did recently seemed to indicate that actually the Sony might still have the edge, so I decided to take that with me on today’s flight.

The flight I planned is shown in the pic below.

My plan was to head south past Belvès to Fumel and then on to another little airfield in the Lot et Garonne called Tremons that I’ve been wanting to take a look at for some time because we know someone who keeps (or kept, it’s been a long time) a Taylorcraft there. Then I planned to turn eastwards past another couple of airfields until I got to Cahors, where I planned to turn left past the city of the same name before returning to Malbec via the towns of Gourdon and Sarlat.

It all started off so well and here’s a shot that I took as I flew out past Les Eyzies.

After Les Eyzies came Belvès and here are a series of shots that I took as I approached the town and then flew on by.

The next waypoint was supposed to be the the town of Fumel but as I continued to fly south I could see that trouble was beginning to brew in the form of a huge low bank of cloud.

If I had been flying to a specific destination that I knew was going to be clear of cloud when I got there, like when I flew up to La Rochelle to get my radio installation inspected and approved, I would have carried on with my originally planned flight as the cloud was a long way below me (I was at about 2100 feet). But this wasn’t the case and it became more and more evident as time passed that both Fumel and Tremons would be totally obscured by the cloud, making it pointless to continue with this segment of the flight. So I decided to turn left and see if it was possible to cut across the corner to Cahors. Here are some closer shots of the cloudbank on either side of the aircraft.

But as I flew on and could see towards Cahors it became more and more obvious that the airfield and the city would also both be obscured by the cloud cover.

So a change of plan was called for. I decided that I’d continue on an easterly heading (see the red line in the first image of this post) until I intersected the return route to Malbec some way to the north of Cahors, continue with my plan to take some shots of Gourdon and then to head for a touch-and-go at Sarlat, where I originally hadn’t intended to land at all. Here is a series of shots that I took as I flew across country with Gourdon gradually coming into frame in the distance on the right.

And here are some shots that I took as I flew, now on a northerly heading, towards and past the town of Gourdon with its ancient church perched on its hilltop.

After Gourdon, I turned slightly off my planned track to the left, so I could join overhead Sarlat-Domme. Here’s a shot taken as I approached the airfield at a height of about 2200 feet.

And finally, after doing a touch-and-go at Sarlat, I continued on past the town of Sarlat heading for a landing back at Malbec.

So I was disappointed not to have been able to make it to Fumel and Tremons, but there will be another day for that. Taken overall, the flight itself was a great success as the air was calm and there were only a very few bumpy bits. I was reminded of how great the Savannah is, despite having plexiglass windows, as a photographic platform because of how stable it is, especially on days like today. I certainly won’t be giving up taking my GoPro videos but I’ll have to make sure that I do more shooting of purely still photographs in the future because they are really worth the effort. At least I think so 😉