Many say it was, and they found it hard to get flying.
I think there was a lot of frontal wx which had gaps of about 3 days in between, which is OK if you are not limited to weekends.
My hardest flights ever were in 2014. Lots of icing conditions, lots of having to climb all the way to the ceiling (stall warner going off at FL190 or so). But I still managed the most hours ever, though that is probably more due to having good locations to go to (two great EuroGA fly-ins and some other meet-ups) and nice people to fly with.
No, I wouldn’t say it was particularly challenging. But then again, I tend to adjust my flying to the weather quite a bit. Mind you, this year’s July was totally fantastic in Northern Europe.
In Germany, 2014 has also been the warmest year since 1850 or so and the weather was very flyable in the first three months.
We should have flown to Scandinavia this year. They had fantastic weather until mid August.
I also thought that there was constant frontal activity, especially in the spring and early summer. Late summer was somewhat better and the weather for the Calvi fly-in was fantastic although I had to beat an area of TS on the way home.
Ok, so I ran the old metar script that produces the percentage of VFR flyable metars per month for 2008-2013 and 2014 at EGLL (Heathrow). Here’s the results:
A VFR flyable metar is one where wind is less than 15kts and no reported gusts, Vis is better than 5000m, minimum of 2200ft AGL (FEW ignored), no weather conditions (light ignored). The script filter out reports before 09:00 and after 16:00 utc.
The average for 2008-13 was 65.4%, 2004 it’s 69.6%. So 2014 was slighty better on average than usual, at least over Heathrow!
I certainly perceived that 2014 was a much better than 2013. I also got more flying in. Worst flight was Newcastle to Blackpool, IFR, solid IMC at 6k, in early July. It was a crap flight, the only thing I did not get was icing.
The Blackpool, Glasgow leg was done at flight level 8, over the crap I had flown through.
Overall though, some great flights. Alderney was a first.
