Month: September 2025

I still need to fly my Savannah back up to la Rochelle for my transponder to be refitted and this week there is a very limited weather window. Tomorrow looks good and possibly also Thursday, but tomorrow is definitely the better of the two.

I have just checked with the la Rochelle tower for permission to fly in without a transponder which should normally be forthcoming but there’s a complication. The runway is closed to all but commercial and essential traffic from the early morning until 3.00 pm local time which would make it impossible for me to get there and back tomorrow while the weather holds.

The tower referred me to the relevant NOTAM and advised me to call the mobile number included in it to see if I can be granted permission, which I have just done. The answer… no worries!

La Rochelle is a fantastic airport to fly into and you can’t beat flying in France for being so cool and laid back!

Here’s another teaser pre my MSFS 2024 flight commemorating the tenth anniversary of the epic real flight that my friend Wim and I did up the west coast of France. The pics show la Bochet, another small private airfield at which we stopped over briefly on day 5 having left Saint Brevin les Pins at the mouth of the Loire for our final destination of the day, Mouchamps in the Vendée.

We were met by Mr Gautier who did a 35 km round trip bringing us sandwiches, which we declined as we hadn’t long eaten, and cold drinks, and then kindly took Wim to fill up our jerricans with fuel. Mr Gautier did not own an aircraft himself but he told us that his friend flew a Mooney into the airfield. It doesn’t look as though he still does because Google Earth now shows that the runway is half the length that it then was and would now be too short for a Mooney to land on.

We took off after a stay-over of about two hours to head for Mouchamps. I only took two photographs at la Bochet so my scenery relies on how I remember it as being but my efforts are a great improvement on Microsoft’s idea of what’s there.

Here’s another teaser in advance of my MSFS 2024 west coast flight. The airfield is Coutin-Carcans in the Médoc to the south-east of Lacanau and the north-west of Bordeaux. Wim and I arrived there in the early evening of day 2 after suffering bad weather en-route from Amou. The problem was sea fog on approaching the coast that caused me to turn back and make a precautionary landing at Mimizan and Wim at Arcachon, which delayed our arrivals by several hours.

My airfield scenery is exactly as Carcans was then. I think it’s gone now, maybe just one hangar remains from the look of Google Earth and street view shows a sign at the side of the main road advertising pleasure flights. When we arrived the place was deserted but it became a hive of activity the next day when we took off for Le Thou, as the real life photograph above shows.

It’s just over 10 years since my friend Wim and I made our epic flight up the west coast of France over 6 days in June 2015, Wim in his red Weedhopper which he’d named The Red Baron and me in my yellow X-Air 56NE. I’ve been thinking about commemorating it, not by doing it again because I doubt that either of us would want to repeat the experience, and I’m not sure it would be possible to anyway after all these years with the increase in controlled airspace in that part of France and certainly not without transponders. Well, sort of doing it again, but this time in Microsoft Flight Simulator.

The program has come on so far with the latest version MSFS 2024 that visually it has come as close to real life as is currently possible, which is incredibly close on high end computer set ups. Even on my mid-range machine it’s highly immersive when ‘flown’ in virtual reality wearing a VR headset and the degree of realism is very high, so I’ve been thinking about repeating the flight on my computer. There are a couple of problems though. I don’t have either a red Weedhopper or a yellow X-Air in my flight sim but I do have a red and yellow MW6 which in style and performance are very close to the real aircraft we flew, so they will do in any imagery I create along the way.

Also, most of the airfields that we landed at do not exist in the flight sim. Most of them do visually, although only as very rough strips in the grass at best with buildings that look nothing like what actually exist, because the flight sim software uses Google Earth to create the terrain over which you fly. It is amazingly accurate when viewed from the air but not so much at ground level unless software developers have taken the trouble to design accurate airfield sceneries.

I’ve done that for the local airfields in the area around where I live and in which I fly – Chateau Malbec, Wim’s old airfield at Plazac, Philippe’s airfield at Mauzens and the airfields at Condat, Galinat and Figeac, but the only two sceneries that I can find of airfields at which we landed during our west coast flight are for Montpezat in the Lot et Garonne (stop-over on day 1) and St Brevin les Pins at the mouth of the River Loire (destination day 4).

For the flightsim experience to be worthwhile the airfields at which you take off and land have to be at least fairly close visually to the real thing, not for third parties who will most likely never have visited or even seen them, but for you the pilot at whom, after all, the experience is aimed. So I started by making some rough sceneries of the ones for which there are no detailed sceneries available ie most of them, and they would have done for as far as it goes. But that wasn’t really enough, not sufficiently immersive, so I’ve begun to make ones that are more accurate based on photographs etc that I took and will do so until I either get to the point that I’m happy with the result or fed up with the work.

For the most part, in flight sim scenery design terms, the work is not too difficult because the airfields were mainly fairly sparse with just a hangar or so, a windsock and the markings for a runway. So the overall task is not too great and I’ve been working my way through it before starting on the flight itself, which will be all the more satisfying for the effort involved. I’ve also recreated the actual route that we took in the flight sim’s flight planning software from beginning to end, so it’ll be fairly easy to retrace our route in the flight sim. Here’s the route that we took on day 1 from Wim’s airfield at Plazac to Amou in the Landes with a stop-over at Montpezat.

Now a couple of shots at Wim’s airfield,the first taken in my flight sim scenery of Wim’s airfield and the second lifted from a video shot on the actual day of the flight from under the wing of my X-Air, which is why the quality is somewhat poor.

As mentioned earlier, we stopped over at Montpezat and here are two more shots, the first in the flight sim of the MW6 I’ll be using for the flight and the second of my old Weedhopper 28AAD actually in front of the control tower. The flight sim scenery designer (not me) did a very good job.

And as previously mentioned, we stopped overnight on day 1 in our tents at Amou in the Landes. As I recall, we had the only rain of the whole trip overnight and the next morning and we also had a disturbed night’s sleep because of night exercises by jets from the nearby armée de l’air airbase at Mont-de-Marsan.

The final two shots are of my Amou scenery in the flight sim and of the hangar at Amou taken during the actual flight.

I don’t know exactly when I’ll be doing the flight in MSFS 2024. It’ll be when I’m happy with the airfield sceneries that I’ve created. It’ll probably also be over the course of 6 or more days, just like in the actual flight, but when I do do it I’ll be posting stuff on here, just as I did 10 years ago.

This summer has been a bit disappointing for me. I think it has been the worst I’ve had health-wise for a long time. I seem to have been going down with little infections one after the other almost every time I’ve stepped out of my front door or gone to the shops and as a main consequence I haven’t been going out very much, certainly not as much as I would have liked.

For the past week or so I’ve had an awful pain in the back of my neck. It may have been as a result of spending a lot of time bending forward in front of my computer for reasons I’ll explain later, but it’s made sleeping really difficult. Even when I’ve been able to drop off I’ve then been waking up again and pacing around in the early hours. One time I was even doing housework at about 3.00 am to take my mind off it but fortunately it does now seem to be getting better.

The health service here in France is probably the best in the world. On Monday I got an appointment to see my local GP later the same day and he arranged for me to have an x-ray on Thursday last from which I came away with the results. They said I’ve got some osteoarthritis in the vertebrae at the top of my spine, something that is very common among older folk which is reluctantly how I now have to describe myself.

But no worries. I must surely have had it for a considerable period of time – it’s not something that develops overnight – with no real pain so I’m sure it’s because I’ve been on my computer so much lately, which I couldn’t avoid. I think all I’ll need to do is be more careful about my posture and be sure to keep my body and neck more upright while I’m sitting and walking. At least that’s what I’m telling myself.

But getting onto the main subject of this post, why have I been almost full time on my computer for the last several weeks? It’s because I’ve been researching and investigating my Chinese scam and putting together a document detailing what happened and who I think (more like know, actually) was responsible in order to see if anything can be done about it.

Here’s what has occurred. I transferred funds to a company trading on Aliexpress, the internet platform used by many Chinese suppliers of a wide range of goods, in order to purchase a mini excavator. The company appeared to be legitimate as it had a bank account in Germany and also a J P Morgan account in Luxembourg. The latter isn’t something that is easily or routinely available by anyone just walking in off the street.

Also, before I transferred the funds in question the seller’s representative, who called himself Simon, provided a considerable amount of high quality supporting material including very detailed photographs and videos purporting to show his firm’s products and factory facilities including a couple that were specially taken showing the product and accessories that I’d ordered laid out on the factory floor.

I’d tried as far as I could to check out the company’s address as shown on the documents that I’d received but hadn’t been able to confirm it definitively. Google Earth street view is often of great value in this respect but coverage in China is poor, especially in the outlying regions. I soon located the J P Morgan bank in Luxembourg but was unable to do the same for the German bank address that I’d been given because Google Earth had been unable to gain access to the street due to road works. Nevertheless, the bank’s address appeared to be genuine.

After I’d transferred the funds, contacts between Simon and myself continued for several days, a week or more, right up to the time the goods were said to have been manufactured and transported to the port for shipping to Marseille. Then all contact was lost. It was only then that I concluded that I’d been scammed and I began my efforts to investigate what had happened, how it had been done and whether the party or parties responsible could be brought to account.

I started by contacting J P Morgan in Luxembourg to check on the supplier’s account there and see if it might be possible to recover my money. My enquiry was referred to a J P Morgan VP in London who said that there wasn’t much she could do but that I needed to advise my bank, Credit Agricole in Montignac, to launch a procedure via the SWIFT banking system to recover my funds.

I did this and supplied the correspondence I’d received from London but CA were useless. I checked on their progress after several days, they said they couldn’t get in touch with J P Morgan in Luxembourg (funny how I’d been able to), said they’d been in contact with the same person I had in London and repeated what she had said, which is what I’d already told them. So after that delay the chance of getting my money back via that route is probably zero and up to today they have still done nothing, so I’ll be making a formal complaint about their dereliction of duty to their customers to Credit Agricole.

But back to the main problem. Quite fortuitously, one of my countless internet searches threw up a company with an address that was slightly different but not identical to that of my supplier company that happened to be in the same line of business. Digging into that company showed that it had a presence on Alibaba, the parent of Aliexpress that is aligned more to volume ‘trade’ type orders rather than to one-off sales to individuals and small companies and when I logged onto its Alibaba web site I was amazed at what I found.

On that site there is what they call a ‘VR showroom’ which you can view in 360 degree mode and ‘walk’ around in to view the products on show. It is constructed from real ‘3D’ shots of the company’s factory floor and as well as showing rows of finished product also shows the areas where assembly and final packing take place.

By ‘walking’ around the company’s VR showroom it was not only possible to identify from where photographs and videos that I’d received from my supplier had been taken, both interior and exterior, but also an upstairs window from where a video had been shot showing packing of machines in progress. This clearly indicated that Simon from my supplier had intimate access to this second company’s factory and facilities and also to its marketing material as one of the shots I’d received seemed to have come from that source.

So I then contacted the second apparently legitimate company on Alibaba and what do you know, I received a response from someone calling himself Si mon. Si mon’s language, style and vocabulary were so close to Simon’s from my supplier company as to lead me to conclude that they were one and the same person, but when I confronted Si mon he proclaimed to have no knowledge of anything that I was referring to.

At that point, therefore, I came to the reasonable conclusion that Si mon, an employee of the second apparently legitimate company, was operating a side scam through a second fake company with a similar but fake address using a Gmail address and product and other material from his real employer and I therefore put together a long document which I intended to send to all and sundry accusing that individual whose real name I didn’t know of running a scam under a false company name while working for his legitimate employer.

But I then had another stroke of luck, if you can call it that. As mentioned previously, the company that took my money had used an address that was very similar to that of the legitimate company and I’d been unable to turn up any more information on it. However, as I was finishing off and preparing the document for despatch I happened to look more closely at some official certificates (including ISO 9000) on the legitimate company’s web site and blow them up. What I saw came as a complete surprise because they showed exactly the same address as the scammer company’s.

This led me to a completely different conclusion, namely that the legitimate company and the scammer company are either one and the same or are at least associated. That would explain how the scammer company got hold of all of its supporting material and, more importantly, also a reputable J P Morgan bank account which had up to then always mystified me.

Information on the legitimate company is quite forthcoming, including its registered office and trading addresses and also the names of its CEO and legal representative. It also has a presence on Alibaba which must be quite a valuable source of sales for it. It therefore must have a reputation to protect, so I ended up rewriting my investigation and sending it off to all and sundry – the legitimate company’s CEO and legal representative, the Alibaba internet platform on which the legitimate company operates, J P Morgan bank and the Chinese trade minister’s office at the Chinese embassy in London.

I included the latter because the Chinese government takes internet scams quite seriously and has a law called The Anti Telecom and On Line Fraud Law of the People’s Republic of China to prosecute people and companies indulging in such nefarious activities and damaging the country’s commercial reputation.

Posting the document to the various parties alone cost me 50€ and I’m still wating for any results but it will probably take a few weeks because my document was 35 pages long and fully detailed in English, so they’ll need to translate it. I’m hoping that now I’ve shone a light on their activities the legitimate company will be shamed and will either return my money or ship the goods. I’d prefer the latter but we’ll have to wait and see how events now pan out.