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Turned back while going to LFAE because ceilings were getting lower and lower to the North.
Beauvais airspace was desert and ATC let us do some detours to take a few pictures (with a real camera, which was a first for me !)
Subjects aren’t great (always the flatlands…), and I found things are happening quite fast in the aircraft when you’re trying to take pictures. There’s not a lot of time for trial and error, and the window that opens outside is really small, so a lot of planning is required in order to choose the right shots.
And as a beginner I still can’t get pictures that look better than mobile-phone auto-corrected ones :)
Beauvais airport (1/640s)
(1/500s)
(1/640)
These next two were taken inside the canopy (I think I can see a difference in quality, not sure)
(1/125, which explains some of the blur)
Took my godson (he is four) flying. He’s been in the TB10 and PA17 before, but this was his first trip as an RV-8-or.
Yet another fly-out to LESL San Luis. Six of us surrounded this poor renegade. Or maybe I should say ‘apprentice renegade’, leaving his flaps up, tsss.
Graham wrote:
Took my godson (he is four) flying
That’s really nice. His parents obviously trust you 
As the long-awaited tip tanks for my Bonnie are underway, me and my mechanic came up with a plan on hoe to keep installation time short. More details later, anyway first thing we wanted to do is get the colors right.
So the plan came up to fly to L’Aquila (LIAP), swap an inspection cover with another Bonnie, and fly back home. Saturday the weather looked mostly ok, so off I flew in the morning.
From Bolzano turning moreless direct VIC, with quite some clouds already there in the morning, but as soon as you get out of the mountains it clears up:
Never heard so much comm going on on Padova Information, where the controller was pretty saturated.
FInally the Po seems to have plenty of water flowing again.
Nicely chugging LOP
Arrival into LIAP was uneventful, very nice approach through the valleys there. Had a good look at quite a few interesting birds at the airport while my panel got some software updates:
Refilled with AvGas and then headed back home. I knew that some thunderstorms were approaching from the south-west, so heading north-east and then along the coast was the plan.
Once over the pianura padana it looked like an easy feat, but the cumulus lurking around the Alps were quickly building up, as expected. Now, I gave it a shot to go directly to Bolzano, but had to turn around and fly in overhead lake Garda and then Trento. Glad I did my planning, but still a little sour that I waited so long to decide to go down and underneath the clouds:
So, all in all a nice day with nearly five hours spent flying throughout Italy. Very welcoming, controllers – they mostly treated me as an IFR flight for some reason (I came up with the theory that if you have a flight plan they threat you better…). Glad the plan worked out, and glad I had the ADL in my plane to check on development of the weather :)
nothing…
PS
had some family obligations (one of those I feel its gonna be a pain, and it was a pain, marriage 🙄). So my steed is resting, flaps down, hanging by the hangers in the hangar, neighing in anticipation of the season 😀
Picked up the aircraft from service shop after they finally fixed couple of things remained after annual.
Just a local flight to meet family for lunch at Glenforsa. Weather was nice, for a change. Paps of Jura peeping out above a layer of cloud on the way home:
