Hi everyone! I am going to Croatia to Varazdin and will rent a DA20 for a big 50h pack at least. I don’t have much experience, but when i get there i will have approx 100h. I have no idea about how the airspace is in Croatia and the countries close by.
How feasible is to do trips to italy, austria etc?
Any dangerous things i should care of?
Any info that you have about croatian airspace and making trips would be really appreciated! Thank you and safe trips :)
Croatia is very easy to fly, i just crossed it the maybe 20th time, on my way to Athens. There’s very little GA traffic, the routes (especially ADRIA 1 along the coast) are scenic and most airports have a great and friendly service.
For flights to Austria and Italy you need passport control, so you cannot fly to any small field directly. Other than that: File a flightplan and go!
Nice thanks! Where can I find VFR routes to do? And where would I need to stop to make those flights to cross to another country?
Basically I have no idea where to get information! Thanks a lot :)
- Fly with SkyDemon, which shows all routes
- In Croatia you can go from every airport, they all have immigration!
Read the trip reports other pilots wrote!
Not correct.
Im going to check those reports, lets see!
How possible do you see travelling from croatia to spain having all my 50h?
What do you mean peter? Thanks
Varazdin airport is doing some great steps supported by Diamond and I’m sure it will very soon become a successful GA airfield. Currently they don’t feature permanent immigration/customs but you can get it with notice of just few hours prior to flight.
Other airports that can be used for entering/exiting the country are: LDZA, LDOS, LDLO, LDPL, LDPV, LDRI, LDZD, LDSP, LDSB and LDDU. Flying to all “neighboring” counties (Slovenia, Italy, Austria, Serbia, Bosnia and Monte Negro) is easy although you won’t find 100LL in Bosnia and some places in Italy.
Besides these airports there are many grass airfields usually operated by local aero-clubs but the working hours, condition of runway and availability of transport from airfield to neighboring cities are very hard to check.
Filing the plan is necessary wherever you fly, on big airports it’s required even for panoramic and traffic pattern flights.
VFR you can fly wherever you like, recommended routes are not mandatory, when submitting fileplan you can list cities at route points. Of course coastal flying and coastal airports are the most attractive with LDPV and LDSB featuring some of the most scenic approaches I’ve ever seen (forgive me if I’m biased a bit).
I’m traveling to Spain next week (although IFR and with DA42) but I think it’s feasible with DA20 as well, taking sufficient buffer for avoiding bad weather. I think Barcelona (Sabadel) can be reached in 10 flight hours with DA20, so planning will include several fuel stops and some sleep-overs. It could be nice trip at this time of the year.
50 hours is a lot. Imagine flying 5 hours per day during 10 days… Not much time to enjoy what the places you overfly have to offer.
What I think is important in your situation is to learn how to plan such a flight using the Aeronautical Publications that are made available to the pilots for that purpose. You should start by studying the AIP for Croatia. For that purpose, the autorouter is perfect. Even though it currently only supports IFR flight planning, the AIP browser is superb.
I recommend you study the GEN and ENR sections of the AIP of the countries you will visit, thoroughly. You will find that a lot of it is a rehash of ICAO or EASA rules that you already know, but sometimes there are differences you should know about. And it will tell you what the entry requirements are, sometimes also the list of the ports of entry.
What Peter meant is that not all Croatian airports have immigration. See GEN 1.2 in the Croatian AIP. That is why you should study the AIP for yourself – so that you do not believe erroneous information of which the Internet is full of.
As we have seen here on some occasions, sometimes also the Internet is right and the AIP is wrong.
