Where I live

Everyone wants to fly over where they live and what better time to do so than in the first few weeks after your aircraft has received its Permit to Fly. So that was also one of the reasons why I wanted to fly to the top of Wrotham Hill yesterday, because that’s the area in which I live. Although the weather wasn’t up to much, I was lucky that in the few minutes when I was approaching and flying around the area, the sun just managed to weakly break through and allowed me to get the following pictures.

The first one was taken as I approached from the south-east. I was flying at about 1600ft on the QNH and as the elevation is around 400ft, I was about 1200ft above the ground.

The dash of red in the left backbround is Brands Hatch racing circuit. They used to run the British Grand Prix there up until the 1960s when it was decided that as a venue it was just too small. Now amongst others they run rounds of the Touring Car Championship there and also the Super Bikes which are both hugely popular in the motor racing calendar.

The next shot was taken roughly from the east and my house is in the middle of that lot somewhere 😉

And this one was taken a little further on, approximately from the north

The last pic, below, was shot roughly from the west as I got ready to turn south-east to head back to Linton. You can’t really tell from the picture, but already the amount of low cloud was beginning to increase as more and more began to drift up from the south.

The main obstacle on the top of Wrotham Hill is the TV mast but I was flying a bit to the north of that so it wasn’t a worry. However, there are also a couple of other radio towers (microwave and such like) because of the elevated location and I had to fly around one of these to get onto heading. By now, because of the low cloud, I’d had to descend a bit to keep clear of it and in sight of the surface. Although I was still at 1200ft on the QNH, because the elevation of the land was about 400ft, it meant that I was down to around 800ft, still legal but not nice if you’re on the ground and an aircraft unexpectedly flies over you at that height. So this meant that as well as keeping clear of obstacles like the radio tower, I also tried to make sure that I didn’t fly directly over any houses or buildings.

Within a minute or so the ground suddenly fell away below me as I reached Wrotham Hill and within a moment or two, I was back at 1200ft. It was then just a matter of beating it back to Linton before the weather closed in, which I talked about in my previous post and sure enough, not that long after I’d landed while I was covering MYRO up, we got the promised rain which has continued on and off ever since and does so even now, while I’m typing this at mid-day on Sunday 🙁