I fly my Rallye in the winter. Weather permitting, I’ll be doing just that this coming weekend—from near Belgrade to near Budapest. Eager to check things out after cylinder, piston and valve replacement.
FL80 Kassel to Shoreham today the views were great. OAT -12C. South of Brussels it all looked very white on the ground. I think we were lucky to get two good days in a row in early February, but it does happen!
Dunkirk
I think this shows why we fly in winter, even when there’s not much snow:
As JasonC wrote
I have over the past week been flying in areas where the weather was -6 to -27 C. I have never really flown and operated an aircraft in these conditions but it went quite well.
I made the same experience this week over Germany. -26 degrees. It was nice, but cold in the cockpit.
Absolutely new to me, was to see, that snow could freeze on the wings during departure climb. I didn‘t expect this. Look here.
Also landing on snow contaminated runways was a fairly new experience.
Yesterday, I had this too, when approaching ETSI at night. It was snowing and runway and taxiways were all snow covered.
Peter wrote:
What % of people fly at all in the winter months?
I personally don’t change my approach to flying in winter in general. When something comes up that I want to do, I’ll do it. However, there are less ideas coming up, many destinations (apart from the skiing flights etc.) are more suitable for summer. And the cancellation rate for planned flights is a bit higher. This results in effectively much less flying than in summer, which is ok, because not-flying in winter subsidizes more flying and longer trips in summer. 
Winter flying is of course SOP in Scandinavia and Finland. My club runs its own airfield and we have snow removal equipment and all aircraft are permanently on electric oil sump heaters.
Beautiful pictures and videos !
We do fly in winter, but living in the rhineland we have a ot of nasty weather, low ceilings, low temps, and icing, and the few days the sun comes out are usually the ones I have to work… Additionally, I am currently doing my CBIR training in the SIM, which is GREAT because weather doesn’t play a role, but it doesn’t get me into the air. Once that’s done I guess I’ll have more time and opportunities….
If I had that kind of countryside at my doorsteps like Jacko, and a Maule, though, I would just say, to hell with work, and go flying. Wonderful.
I normally fly my usual once a week in the winter, though it tends to be not the long trips simply because the destinations are cold (even Greece has very similar wx to the UK, albeit for only 2-3 months) and are usually deserted with maybe just one restaurant and a supermarket still open. Le Touquet remains a super destination especially on clear winter days, when you can walk down the deserted sandy beach.
The Annual takes up a bit of time too.
Winter provides some great flying because you generally don’t get the summer haze.
As for ski trips, it has become obvious to me that one needs to do red+black runs easily before most of the easily GA accessible ski locations (e.g. Zell am See) become usable.
Our club has its own hangar and we have heaters for all aircraft. There is a system that automatically turns on the heater an hour before the booking starts (if the previous person remembered to reconnect the cable). If the system has not automatically turned on for some reason, you just turn on the heater yourself and wait some time. So we don’t have any problem with ice on the wings or cold engines.
VFR days during the winter are usually very nice and clear, with calm skies. However, you don’t get many VFR days here in south Sweden. Most of the time the temperature is just above 0 C, so you get foggy cloudy drizzly days.
This winter we didn’t have much snow, so not many nice VFR days, but it has been getting colder and nicer during this week.
Airborne_Again wrote:
Scandinavia and Finland. My club runs its own airfield
Do you mind me asking where that is? In Finland? Without hangarage, it would be very difficult for a visiting aircraft at this time of year. I was in Helsinki this Sunday, sliding around on snow packed pavements, but the plane was in far away England! The last I heard was that Malmi had been evicted from their hangar, even for based aircraft.
Re: using credit cards, I actually did that once, but don’t expect the card to work afterwards! Mine didn’t.
