Planning a trip Hannover EDDV to Bornholm EKRN (with family, and risk management)

Don’t overthink such trips. You’ll be fine. Have fun.

I think you are doing just fine Medewok.

As I probably wrote before, just make it a “high confidence” trip, so if possible fly it before flying it with your family. Confidence is almost everything when taking potentially nervous passengers, especially family passengers who (being “family”) won’t be afraid to apply pressure which they would never apply on a stranger… if you know what I mean

As for the planning and flying part, you already know way more than the average PPL.

I would never say to someone “just do it” or “live and let live” because that is a way to (at best) get scared enough to give up flying or (at worst) get killed. In this game you do the planning and if it looks good technically it is right and correct to get on with it. One of my criticisms of the (UK at least) PPL training scene is that it is full of silly (probably ex WW1 military) proverbs like “there are bold pilots and there are old pilots but there are no old bold pilots”, “better to be down and wishing you were up than being up and wishing you were down” and all sorts of other crap like that, oh and not to forget making lewd comments about the flap lever when you’ve got a female student in the LHS, when actually they should be teaching pilots how to assess the wx, understand what is going on properly, manage risk appropriately (e.g. don’t fly in a rented wreck across 200nm of open sea without a life raft ) and then do the flight.

MedEwok wrote:

I tend to agree but seemingly half of the experienced pilots on this board seem to do exactly that while the other half says “just do it, you’ll be fine”.

You will get that a lot in general aviation. I always stumble about people who need their trips to be extra complicated, things to be overly dangerous or flights to be greatest achievements since the first controlled flights of Otto Lilienthal. There is even one microlight flight instructor in Germany who very loud promoted that 800 hrs FT was too inexperienced for a pilot to fly to France without company of an experienced instructor, or that you needed the same advice for UK, as the overhead join should be practised in Germany with an instructor. Some people apparently need this sort of talk to boost their self esteem. Like my flight to the Aero a couple of years ago, there often really isn’t much to it than normal flight preparation and simply doing it. (Of course, if you want to fly at night or inverted, you need some instruction, but not to perform a flight you essentially have already been trained to do).

Have Fun!

MedEwok wrote:

I am planning to do this trip in a TB20

The TB20 is a ‘complex’ plane, it’s got retractable gear, constant speed prop, advanced avionics, and a pretty slick airframe, so you might want to plan some extra hrs to get used to that. When I switched from my school’s Warrior to the Beech, I needed more than a couple hours to really know how to fly it. You can’t compare this fast SEPs to a normal C172….

MedEwok wrote:

We are prepared to abort the holiday one or two days earlier for this though. However, bad weather over 3 or more subsequent days would be a problem.

I would doubt that…. The weather in the northern hemisphere has a rythm of 2-5 days… during whom you will see a warm front, a warm sector, a cold front, and during the whole period you will see times of flyable weather. So never say die :)

Prepare yourself properly, and you will be fine, and you will also realize if it doesn’t work out. Just don’t succumb to that moralizing BS about little children shouldn’t fly and so on and so forth. I found that quite outstandingly hypocritic. But as a doctor you might have seen the ways life goes, and know what to do with that kind of stuff…

MedEwok wrote:

I tend to agree but seemingly half of the experienced pilots on this board seem to do exactly that while the other half says “just do it, you’ll be fine”. By character I fall squarely into the second half but reading EuroGA I often get a nagging feeling that I’m not doing enough thinking through situations beforehand.

I fall into this as well and sometimes to the extent that I simply give up, such as when the problems flying to a specific place or country are such that it is beyond the bother to do it. And being at the source of weather information, I often find that I actually get too much of it or rather too much too early which is total Science Fiction but often looks scary enough to blow a whole trip.

Fora however, unfortunately this one not excluded, very often yield the sum of all collective bad experiences and inert fears from posters when asked for advice. While I value the experience of my fellow posters and am very much trying to sort the annectodical experiences from useful information, I sometimes wonder what participating in fora really does especcially for novice pilots. I clearly remember a guy not unlike you who turned up in a forum asking about a Cessna 210 just before he finished his PPL. That he eventually went and bought his 210 and flies it successfully, earning the respect of those who before predicted his and the death of his family and anyone under his flightpath to put it saracstically, is more a statement for his stamina and charcter then anything else, as from the aswers he got he would have hung up flying almost immediately. I can imagine Peter might have gotten the same treatment when he bought a TB20 as a “novice”.

That is why I usually don’t ask the question you asked in a forum. Only you in the end can make the decision if you are fit and confident enough to make this trip, if your experience and training have been enough and you go about this trip without anxiety but with confidence and therefore enjoy it.

The flight you are trying to plan here is straightforward enough, it is what you have been trained for in your PPL training and now it is time to put it to use. Nonwithstanding that, there have been some very good ideas and advice in this thread on how to go about it. That is what I’d listen to, the possibility thinkers vs the “come back once you have 10’000 hrs and and ATPL” kind of people.

Mooney Driver, well said. Couldn’t agree more.

EuroFlyer wrote:

Mooney Driver, well said. Couldn’t agree more.

Thank you! I thought your post was very good as well.