Honeymoon Flying Trip - 2022 - Balkan Peninsula + Corsica

My wife and I got married at the beginning of June (by the way on Baltrum, an East Frisian island with one of Germany’s shorter runways at 360m – though this time we took the ferry for logistical reasons).

We were very clear that we didn’t want the classical “x weeks in a Maledives beach resort” type of honeymoon, we wanted to do a trip across Europe depending on where our interest and weather would take us. For some time, we were not sure if we wanted to drive or fly. My wife didn’t want to fly with me in our Arrow at the moment. Although the aircraft is airworthy, we are indeed planning an engine overhaul but since we can’t get hold of the appropriate Lycoming cylinders due to “the situation”, that may take some time. I ended up renewing my membership in the Luftsportverein Rietberg in EDLP (that is the club that I promoted for years here whenever Peter claimed that serious touring in a club aircraft is impossible for reason x or y ) and we chartered a Piper Archer III D-ELQC, which I had used very often before moving to the North of Germany and buying into the Arrow.

After a night at the newly re-opened airport hotel in Paderborn EDLP, our first leg would lead us to Zell am See LOWZ. I have been many times now, but always in winter for short skiing trips. Also, we still had a hotel voucher for a planned winter trip in March 2020, which could not happen due to the then surprising pandemic lockdown. It was also a good intermediate stop on our planned routing towards the Adria as we had decided a few days ago to fly down there based on latest weather reports and the fact that there were lots of places we had not explored yet.

This flight was rather uneventful, although my wife had not flown much this year and was excited to be in the air again. I had planned to fly more or less direct from EDLP to LOWZ at FL85, but this time, we were unfortunately not cleared through the Munich airspace and therefore had to find a plan B. I decided to descend a little and turn onto a southerly heading via Augsburg as I thought we could use this as a toilet and lunch break if needed. We didn’t land there in the end, our detour gave us some good views of the lakes in that area (Ammersee, Starnberger See). At this lower level, I followed the GAFOR routes LO13 and LO55 via St. Johann into the destination.

We spent a good few days here with some mild hiking. We had planned for two nights but had to add one night as the weather was a little bit too unpredictable on the planned departure day with frequent thunderstorms moving through the Alps in our area.

Our next stop was Ljubljana. I had been in 2014 and really liked the city, my wife had not been there and it was a good stop-over for our further routing towards the Adriatic coast and Croatia. The flight, although short, was interesting. I had underestimated the apprehension my wife would have towards a longer flight over the Alps (her first time). After take off, I flew a circle around the Schmittenhöhe that I know so well from skiing – for sightseeing and also in order to build up some altitude as my original plan for this flight was to fly via Matrei and GAFOR route LO40 – which had good forecasts at the time of planning (btw the screenshot below from SkyDemon shows today’s weather, not from the day of the flight). However, we both didn’t like the looks of the rather lower than expected clouds paired with the high reference altitude of 9300 ft of LO40 that would come into play when crossing the Felbertauern Pass. So our plan B was to fly further east along the Salzach valley to then follow the routes further south via Mauterndorf, Spittal, and Villach. For my wife as a passenger not comfortable with the mountains, it would have been far better to simply climb eastbound through the valley right after take-off. She was apprehensive for the entire flight until we had the runway of LJLJ in sight after crossing the border and the last mountainous bit (Kepa mountain).

We spent the afternoon in Ljulbjana (it’s easy to take a shuttle from the airport into the city. On the way back, we used a regular taxi) and moved onwards to Losinj in the evening.

We arrived at LDLO on Thursday evening and it was a long weekend in several countries. The airport was packed with planes. Everyone was good-humoured though, we enjoyed the airport transfer to Veli Losinj. We had booked three nights in the Punta Vitality Resort. We are not normally lovers of such resorts, but we have to say we greatly enjoyed our time there. They got lots of things right over there: The rooms are tidy and spacious, we had a lovely see view. The various pools are great (you can actually swim in them, they are large enough for that), the walk into the village of Veli Losinj is nice and the village itself even nicer. The food, though served in an enormous and soulless hall, is quite abundant and of decent quality. We will certainly come back.

Moving on, we decided to visit Split for a few days. I had the honor of having spend my bachelor’s party in Split and wanted to share some (not all ) of those experiences with my wife. Split airport was very efficient and the service friendly. It’s quite a busy airport, but I think we were lucky that we came in June as I suppose July and August will be much busier with potentially no GA parking.

One of the highlights was to take a private boat to the beautiful old town of Trogir to meet an old friend of my wife for lunch.

Our next stop was Tivat in Montenegro. Flying into the Bay of Kotor is a beautiful thing to do, as well as spending time in and near it. This was definitely one of the surprise highlights of our trip – we fell in love with the country of Montenegro. What’s a bit annoying is that for both our flights (in and out) via Tivat, we were kept low at 1000 ft agl for no apparent reason. There was no or not much other traffic and it seemed to be just standard procedure. Flights need to be notified 36 hours in advance, but the process is quick and easy via email. This was the only airfield on our entire trip that had no AVGAS so we didn’t fuel up. On all other stops, we fueled up, usually right after landing. By the way, it was quite hot these days and it was best to either fly really early in the morning or later in the evening. As we are not early risers, we flew mostly in the later evening hours and found this a quite relaxing schedule for us.

After Montenegro, our southernmost and most exotic destination on this trip was going to be Tirana, the capital of Albania. Also, the shortest flying leg of the trip. Landing in Tirana was fine, although I have to say it was the most chaotic tower frequency both an arrival and departure. On arrival, they apparently had a shift rotation while i was already almost on base leg for landing, when the (new) controller asked us what our destination would be. Of course, our destination is your runway, Mister, we are in fact in the process of landing already! Then, when established on final, the controller asked me lots of questions that I believe could have waited until we were on the ground – mostly related to how long we were planning to stay, what date and time we would leave again, in order to coordinate parking. Parking on a massive, huge ramp with ONE other small aircraft, that is. On departure, the controller for quite some time didn’t really understand who and where we were, telling us eventually after some odd clearances that I didn’t understand “Oh, I thought you were a helicopter”.

Tirana as a city is fine. To some extend, it’s just like a European capital of this size is. It was extremely hot so we kept the sight-seeing to a minimum. I liked the influence of the Ottomans with all the coffee houses etc around. Landing at Tirana requires one to hand in a copy of an awful lot of documents relating to the aircraft and the crew (license, registration, insurance, noise, airworthiness etc.). However, they now have a web portal for this which makes the process very transparent and easy. It’s described in the AIP. No calling of random mobile phone numbers required (anymore).

In Tirana, we spent some time thinking about how to get back home. We could fly back the same route, however that would be boring, the weather in the Eastern Alps was turning worse and Diana was not excited to do another Alps crossing. So we said we’ll fly back via the South of France, leaving the Alps to our right. We had a few days left to spend, so we chose to spend these in Ajaccio/Corsica, which we both hadn’t been to before. This was going to be quite a long flying day! As a stop-over with customs clearance and for fuel and lunch, we chose L’Aquila (after consulting the Euroga crowd intelligence https://www.euroga.org/forums/trips-airports/14009-tips-for-port-of-entry-and-avgas-in-central-southern-italy ) and couldn’t have been luckier. We were dreading some Italian bureaucratic immigration procedure, but at L’Aquila, we just announced our landing a day before via email and telephone (English no problem) and landed there and had pasta for lunch. Maybe we were just really hungry, but we thought this was the best food we had had on the entire trip (and we did visit some pretty upscale restaurants in some cities). Just gotta love Italian cuisine…

In terms of flying, we had a bit of an incident when flying into L’Aquila. I had been on their frequency for several minutes already when approaching from the east. There were some radio announcements and I did overhear one talking about runway 36 (I can’t remember if that was in English or Italian). I then made several announcements of our position, intention etc. and since then, didn’t receive any further announcements, i.e. no one responding to me (which is fine, obviously) and no other traffic apparently in the air. I used the information that I got and planned for a landing on runway 36. According to SkyDemon, the pattern for that is standard left-hand. This is quite a narrow pattern, as it is very close to the mountain west of the runway and also almost touches a prohibited area when turning base. Due to that, I miscalculated the first landing and chose to go around from final for a second attempt, always announcing each leg in the pattern etc. on the radio in English. When I flew the second pattern and was established on short final just before landing on runway 36, I realized an aircraft had entered runway 18 in order to take-off! I believe that there were no announcements of that traffic beforehand (though I can’t say 100%, MAYBE there was an announcement in Italian that my mind faded out when I was busy flying the narrow pattern for the second time?). We both must have seen each other at around the same time, the other guy seemingly cursing in Italian something like “WTF there is someone landing in opposite direction”. So of course I did another go around, continuing to announce my moves on the radio in English. I decided to leave the pattern momentarily to sort things out and flew towards the northerly VFR reporting point. The other pilot then started to announce his take-off etc. in English and I announced my landing now on runway 18 and everything ended safely and successfully. On the ground, I had a chat with one of the guys working the airfield and he had not been on the radio as he was doing some work inside, so he didn’t really notice the incident. He did tell me that the pattern for runway 36 is right-hand, so they are not actually flying the tight mountain pattern. This is not represented correctly in SkyDemon IMO.

After some rest, food, and fuel we continued to Corsica.

At Ajaccio Napoelon Bonaparte airport, we met the coolest handling agent ever: “Y’all on honeymoon, is that right? I’m gonna make sure you ain’t paying nothing here!”. We staid at the Best Western, which is quite close to the airport but otherwise can’t be recommended too much. Nicer options are available in the city. We rented a small Fiat 500 for the couple of days to explore the coast, had some beach time and final relaxation before another long flying day back home.

On the day of departure, we took it easy, had a nice long breakfast as we were not in a rush: Our final destination EDLP is a 24h airport and I had made sure to be night/pax current before the trip so really had no deadline. Still, we were a bit delayed at the airport because the BP fuel pump wasn’t working initially and the fuel guy who was to fix it fueled up one or two airliners inbetween.

We stopped for fuel and dinner at Lyon-Bron. There is now a great restaurant with direct access from the apron which didn’t exist when I last landed there. Awesome! Although when we tried to order food at around 18:30, they said that the kitchen would only open at 19:30 or so. So unfortunately, we could only have some cheese platter which wasn’t really great and way overpriced.

We then flew in a straight line into the night back to EDLP and back into everyday life…

I’m in the process of editing a video of the trip and will add here once done.