Short Trip to Midden Zeeland EHMZ

This flight happened at the beginning of June but i only found some time now to write this trip report.

After our successful first flight with our son, i needed at least 2 landings in June to remain current to fly with passengers.
With me being away for work almost half of the month and the airplane being very popular (the only 4-seater the club has) the only posibility would be the afternoon of June 4th.
The 1st big question was: Where will we fly to?
not too close because we want the kids to get used to flying,
not too far because we didn’t have that much time.
Is there something to do for the kids
Is that something easy to get to?

The kids love the seaside so we decided to search in that direction.
In Belgium, Ostend and Koksijde are close to the see, but still requires a bus ride to get to the beaches.
After some digging on Google Maps, i saw there is a small beach at walking distance (1.7km) from Midden Zeeland.
The planning was very easy, “threading the needle” between the CTR’s of EBBR and EBAW on the way over, and a longer way, over EHSE on the way back.

Saturday morning, after coming back from a 13day rotation at work, i got an interesting thought: Does our stroller fit in the baggage compartment of the P2010? Flying with a family makes planning much more complicated. We drove to the airfield to measure the baggage door and we should be fine tomorrow.
The rest of the planning was super easy with Skydemon. The route was build when we reserved the airplane, the notams were monitored from the week prior and the weather? The weather was VFR over almost the entirety of Europe.
AirportWeather reported 10-12 kts crosswind for EHMZ.

When we arrived at the airport, I preflighted, fueled, installed the car seat and loaded the airplane. Stroller, sand toys, kite (more on that later).
The take off was uneventful, it was just a reminder on how much the performance degrades when flying fully loaded on a hot day compared to just me and the instructor when its cold.

I was happy to have paid for the premium version of SafeSky to get traffic info straight in Skydemon. Though Brussels Info didn’t appear to busy, he did not provide any traffic information. He was a bit occupied with foreign registered aircraft that were flying inside some TMA’s without clearance but for the rest there was surprisingly little traffic flying in Belgium that day. I got a couple of traffic warnings just after passing the Antwerp CTR and without SafeSky i would have never seen them until they were too close. Only 1 of the alerts was from an airplane at my altitude and i was already climbing from underneath the 1500ft Brussels TMA shelf.

Approaching Midden Zeeland, i circumnavigated the traffic pattern to avoid hitting those crazy people that jump out of perfectly good airplanes.
On short final, i was reminded that 12kts xwind in an SEP is not the same as 12kts on the Boeing at work. Nonetheless i managed my best landing since restarting general aviation.

The walk from the airfield to the beach was ok but no ideal. There were no sidewalks but luckily the traffic was not too busy.
The kids had some good fun at the beach.
Trying to build a sand castle, searching for shells. The wind was ideal to fly the kite, if we hadn’t forgotten it in the airport building after paying the landing fee.

We wanted to have dinner at the Fletcher hotel next to the beach but they said they were fully booked for the evening. Or they didn’t want to have 2 kids in the restaurant.
So we decided to fly back and have dinner at our home base.

Leaving some flyers

After flying lower over the aera where we spent our holidays, i decided to climb “high” to FL050. Since I’ve never flown this high in GA this was a nice opportunity to see how the engine behaves. I’ve flown higher during my training 13 years ago but can’t remember much about the engine handling back then.
Approaching the boarder, i descended back to 4000ft to stay out of the class C airspace. And since the military wasn’t active, it was the only opportunity to fly this high in our area.

Airplane in the hangar and a quick bite to eat.

I’m happy with the way it went.
The flight is the same as a car ride for the kids, they are not complaining if they have something to do.

Now hopefully some longer flights in the future.