Lighting the Fires in Lockdown

Just as in the first lockdown of 2020 here in France, we’re not permitted to fly our aircraft. Whether that’s a daft decision or not as if you fly solo and take off and land at the same location you wouldn’t come into contact with another person, but that discussion is for another day.

But whether they’re flown or not, our aircrafts’ engines must still be occasionally started and run until they’ve warmed up in order to keep them in good order and mitigate corrosion and the DGAC published a letter during the last lockdown giving pilots permission to do that as well as make short flights to a maintenance facility if their airworthiness certificate would otherwise lapse.

That doesn’t apply for ULMs but we still need to run our engines, so that’s what I planned to go to Malbec and do this afternoon. I took a GoPro with me to record events but then succeeded in deleting nearly all of the footage that I’d recorded while transferring it to my PC. Below is a link to the video that I put together from the material that I managed to salvage.

Hopefully even if this ruddy ‘confinement’ is extended in some form after its scheduled end date of 2nd December we’ll be permitted to fly again subject to similar conditions to last time. It’s very frustrating because while we’ve been gounded for the past few weeks we’ve had perfect flying weather and I’d have liked to have boosted my feeble flying time before the end of the year.

Even if we can resume flying after 2nd December you can bet that by then the weather will have changed – plus I’m expecting delivery of some new windows in the first week of December that I’ll then need to fit before the weather takes a turn for the worse. How typical is that, eh… 😕