Meet-up in Sweden, Malmo ESMS

Why did you prefer sferics over your stormscope to avoid electrical activity ?

A very good Q… the stormscope has a limited range, whereas sferics gives you the whole route on a long flight. This is today’s, just now:

could you show us a radar picture at the moment of your flight

I didn’t save any screenshots but AFAIK meteox.com has an archive. Also, wx radar sites aren’t useful for wx which may affect a higher altitude flight. For example most of the stuff here

may only be 2000-8000ft One might expect the circled spots to be higher (more dense) but the IR image shows nothing at all there

so again you are looking at low level stuff and IMHO below FL150.

Can we say you now fly frontal weather systems

I always did if the IR image showed tops well below the operating ceiling

One should not abandon a flight just on the basis of the MSLP chart. I know nothing about weather but you soon realise that a front in a 1020mb region will produce much lower tops than the same front in a 980mb region. One may well cancel a trip planned some days ahead purely on the basis of the MSLP chart (I would especially if it involved – especially non-aviation – passengers) but one should always make the final decision on the actual data. Yesterday morning 6am I even checked out the airlines but found Malmo has nothing at all useful which would have made retrieving the aircraft a huge hassle, with hotel stays probably. The only time I abandoned it was at Split LDSP in 2009 and it was easily retrieved a few days later at a cost of £400 in the form of two Easyjet tickets and no hotels.

About your icing-and-near-stall experience around your ceiling altitude (which does not seem a pleasant one),

I’ve done that many times. The operating ceiling is when you almost stall So that is normal.

not being able to stay clear on top all the time, why didn’t you choose to cruise, even in the muck, below freezing level ? (Of course Monitoring radar and sferics via your sat connection)

That was Plan B. But it would be solid IMC so only OK if the stormscope/sferics picture is clean (which it was). I did that option (flight in IMC at about +2C) for the last bit across the water to the UK, because the tops were way too high there; perhaps FL250-300.

The track ends when London Control handed me to London Info 124.60 who gave me another squawk and seemingly cancelled the Eurocontrol portion (without ever telling me they cancelled IFR!!!). I got rid of them ASAP because they don’t offer a radar service and keep asking for estimates to places… all a charade because they do have radar but are not radar ATCO pay level so they have to pretend they can’t see you. I just asked for a frequency change to Shoreham which they thought was strange since I still had ~70nm to run. I actually called them up a bit later again to get them to phone Shoreham to check it’s open (it had been notaming some short closures due to the accident wreckage recovery process) and they transferred me to Farnborough East soon afterwards, which is a radar unit. I nearly did a CAS bust (just avoided it – wasn’t paying attention to the moving map) but since nobody told me to remain OCAS I was entitled to “just fly” especially as London Control had earlier given me a “DCT Shoreham”. The UK can be a mess sometimes…

Plan C was a descent all the way to say 1000ft and flying back home along the coasts of Germany, NL, Belgium, etc. That would probably mean having to cancel IFR and expose oneself to all the various TRAs etc but I had various VFR charts running as a moving map on Oziexplorer. Plus one would try to talk to ATC… maybe not successfully at such a low level.

as suggests Achim here and there, why don’t you go to a turbo installation ?!?

Because he keeps telling me to do that

I would have to buy a TB21 and spend a chunk of my life sorting it out, starting with sending the engine to the USA to be rebuilt, then a load of avionics work. Probably GBP 100k. Plus a TB21GT is not cheap to buy – when you can find one, and they are rare.

The only logical next step would be a Jetprop.

There is a number of reasons I am not changing aircraft, to an SR22 or anything else, the biggest one is that I don’t want to waste another chunk of my life sorting out a plane which will have issues when I get it. I have mine exactly where I want it, I know where the issues are (there aren’t any) and this gives me a lot of confidence for doing technically challenging flights.

Also the SR22T solution to yesterday’s flight would have been similar to what I did, because even FL250 would not have cleared the tops on the last bit of the route. You just get the pleasure of having to wear a mask if spending a lot of time up at FL250. This is the relevant IR image which I got over Telegram over the Thuraya XT satphone connection

Also don’t forget this serious SR22 FL250 icing incident, on which no information seems to be coming out and probably never will (it’s for sale). It is for sale presumably because the pilot’s confidence in the type was destroyed by the incident. That happens a lot in GA.

That incident is serious only because it would be the first time in physics history that airborne particles would have managed to travel not only against engine suction airflow but also ram pressure airflow while doing a 180 degree turn.

So…. what precisely are you suggesting @Shorrick_Mk2?

ICAO requires an ATCO who uses radar to have a radar qualification.

These cost slightly more than non radar qualified ATCOs, so employers try to avoid radar for this reason.

But London Information uses FISOs, not even ATCOs, so no way can they use radar.

But, under pressure from the large number of serious CAS busts (several hundred per year) London Info does have radar now. They are just not allowed to mention it on the radio. They operate some kind of system whereby they transfer you to a radar unit which is able to “overtly” tell you they can see you, if e.g. you are about to bust.