International Incident?! – Part 3

I awoke the next morning in the Red Fox Hotel feeling remarkably refreshed. I didn’t know whether the hotel offered breakfast or not but decided anyway not to bother as I still had a flask of cold orange and yesterday’s lunch in my aircraft which I could consume when I eventually got the chance while preparing he paperwork to depart from Le Touquet. In the meantime I checked the weather and re-did my route calculations on my laptop, although I had to be fairly quick as I didn’t have its charger with me.

Then I went downstairs, paid my bill and waited for my police transport to arrive. And waited and waited, for over an hour. Then my phone rang. “Where are you?” said a voice. “In the hotel, waiting for someone to pick me up”, I replied. The voice said that nobody was coming and that I’d have to walk there. It turned out that the police station was only about five minutes away and when I announced my arrival there, the reply was, “Ah, the aircraft man!”

Shortly after a youngish officer in plain clothes appeared and invited me upstairs. We walked into a spacious upstairs office and a colleague joined us, for no reason apparently, except that he was interested in what we were talking about. After the previous day, the conversation was a bit of an anti-climax. He said that as nothing untoward had happened, everything was in order and I was ‘unknown’ to any of the authorities, things would not be taken further and nothing was going to happen. Then the three of us began talking about flying. The two of them were very interested in my experiences and exploits and liked the pictures of my aircraft that I was able to show them.

But they realised that I was under pressure to leave due to the weather and after bidding farewell to his colleague, I was given a lift back to the aircraft by the first plain-clothes officer. We had a very enjoyable conversation on the way and after dropping me off, before he left and I entered the airport building, he took some shots of Hotel Papa. For the ‘dossier’ 😉

But that wasn’t the end of things. My GPS was totally flat and I needed it for the flight over the Channel to Headcorn. When I went to the counter to ask if they could charge it for me, which they did, one of the airport staff who had been there the day before (but not one of the two apron workers) spotted me and his face broke into a huge grin. “Shall I call the police now?” he said. And we both laughed.

I didn’t stay laughing for long though. When I took off from Le Touquet it was clear that the cloud was much thicker than forecast on the way to Cap Gris Nez. I spotted a corridor that would allow me to climb up over it but it meant initially flying almost directly out to sea in order to do so. So that’s what I did before gradually attempting to regain my planned course to Folkestone on the English coast.

Luckily it was dead calm above the cloud because the conditions were a blue-out IMC with no horizon. Very disconcerting but turning back was more risky than continuing on. I spotted the coast off to my right at Dover before I got a horizon and a sight of the coast at Folkestone at which point I could descend for an eventual landing at Headcorn. After crossing the coast I got a call from Headcorn asking if that was me as they were watching my ADSB out signal on their computer screen. And after a bumpy cross-wind landing I was never more pleased to be back on the ground after the experiences of the previous two days.