@aart: it doesn’t even take a high speed train, not for me at least. On the Brussels-Leuven-Liège high speed line, they are now running “conventional” trains at 200 km/h. Most frustrating indeed.
I’ve been lucky so far overflying the French TGVs :-)
I was overtaken by a motorcycle on a French highway (not even motorway) once. That lasted until he reached a roundabout. It was in a PA28R-201
I was overtaken once at 2,000 feet by an aircraft on the runway below – does that count?
Two experiences, each on the opposite end of the scale:
1. I once was overtaken by offshore speed boats doing a demo race on lake Geneva, my ground speed of 120 kt was way too slow to keep pace with them.
2. When flying along a fiord in Norway against a headwind of 60 kt it took me ages to overtake a cruiseship. At least we had plenty of time to wave to the passengers.
Talking about ground speeds so low you are overtaken by whatever other kind of vehicle, this is my personal “highlight” in cruise flight so far:
OK now that we are comparing the slowest speeds, here is mine
That’s with about 600nm to run, too….
Cheese us, @Peter, 74 kts is close to my standard IAS … But a negative LFOB figure must be slightly worrying, yes …
D’you know, not having all those fancy indicators avoids some unrest. I do have a ground speed indication somewhere in the GPS but no fuel totaliser – one thing less to worry about.
I have flown a Champ on floats in 40-50mph headwind. I was cruising at 80mph, so this worked out to a 30-40 mph groundspeed. I only wish I had slowed down and flown backwards! It would have been awesome to have a picture of the compass and GPS pointing opposite directions!
I thought the topic was most satisfying moments in flying? For me, the most satisfying moment goes back a couple of years when the club set off to fly down to Dubrovnik. On the way back, we stopped off in Venice, the following morning we all met for breakfast to discuss routing. I was responsible for working out the weather, interpreting which courses were open to us; my interpretation was that the Brenner route would be open to transit to Innsbruck, then out following the Inntal and into Germany for about 3 hours, meaning if we left within 30 minutes, we still had an hour leeway. GAFOR / METARs / TAFs all looked good but some of the guys were reluctant to fly the Brenner whilst neighbouring routes were showing as marginal. The route via Vienna or further east of the Brenner (e.g. via Villach) was a definitive no go due to stormy weather, half of the group were concerned about the forecasts along the Brenner and therefore decided to route via France and up the Rhone Valley. Our intentions were to meet that evening in Koblenz.
Our group arrived, having refuelled in Nördlingen, around 3pm. The other group finally turned up around 2pm the following day, recounting tales of maximum 50 knot ground speeds (in C182s!) due to the Mistral blowing, were thoroughly demoralised by lorries overtaking them so they stopped overnight at a french airfield to refuel, hoping that the winds would be lower the next day. Unfortunately, they got worse, with ground speeds of just 45 knots… Where we needed slightly more than 4 hours to get from Venice to Koblenz, they needed nearly three times that amount…..
