The next adventure

My friend Wim usually goes off on some sort of adventure every year – last year he rowed the length of the River Rhine from Strasbourg to Rotterdam in a boat that he’d designed and built himself over the previous winter – but up until quite recently, he hadn’t planned anything for this year. So when I told him that I was thinking about doing a low and slow flight up the whole of the west coast of France over four days or so in late May/early June, he said that he’d like to do it too.

I’ve been working on the plans on and off for several weeks because as I found when I planned my flight down from Stoke to the Dordogne in MYRO, you have to think quite carefully about each leg of the route and where you will need to land along the way. This is because not only do you need to find airfields at the right time and distance from your take off points but you also need to think about whether you’ll be able to pick up fuel at each one if you need to, to supplement what you’ll be carrying with you both in your tanks and in jerrycans. And for a flight spread over several days, because you’ll need to plan for overnight stops, you’ll also need to know whether there’ll be a bed at the ones you’ll need to stop over at or whether you’ll be allowed to put up a tent for the night.

To complicate things a little bit further, we’ll be taking both of our aircraft and as Wim’s Weedhopper is quite a bit slower than 56NE and has a different fuel consumption, I’ve also had to plan a route with landing fields that work for both aircraft. At the time of writing, I’ve managed to do that, but at this stage with several weeks still to go before the flight, I can make no allowances for wind direction and speed, which together can make a considerable difference to the actual times needed to fly each leg compared to the estimates on which the overall plan is based.

Although quite a bit of planning is therefore required, it’s not rocket science. The starting point, of course, is to find the basic route and to a great extent for aircraft like ours, this is dictated by the availability of suitable landing fields as explained above. Here’s a pic showing what I’ve come up with so far for our west coast trip, a total round-trip distance of just over 1500km.

null

It’s essential when planning a trip like this to contact all of the owners or managers of the airfields at which you wish to land well in advance in order to seek permission, and it’s even more important if you are seeking their assistance in obtaining fuel and/or if you want them to allow you to camp overnight. At the time of writing we haven’t yet done this, so for the time being I’ve made it so that airfield names are omitted and specific waypoints are not readily identifiable from the above image, although from the information available on each one from FFPLUM (the French ULM/microlight organisation) and other sources, I do not anticipate any problems on those scores. Indeed, Wim, who has tasked himself with making the contacts, has just confirmed that the proprietor of the field where we want to make our first overnight stop and who was difficult to make contact with, has just given his permission and offered us any help that we might need.

After working out the basic route, you then need to get into the planning of the actual flight in much more detail. Because it’s very tedious to keep recalculating distances, times and fuel usage every time you make a change to the planned route, I use Excel spreadsheets. I’ve got one that I created myself to make all of the usual detailed flight planning calculations using airspeed, track, wind speed and direction etc. But before you can do that, you need to do some preliminary ‘rough’ calculations to see how long and how far you can fly between alternative available waypoints on the fuel that you have on board, so I’ve created another spreadsheet to do this. I’ve also included calculations in this spreadsheet for where and how much fuel will need to be purchased en-route dependent on fuel on board and time flown, with margins built-in for safety, of course, and I’ll go on to give more details of both of my spreadsheets in a future posting.