I don’t know what the conditions were at the actual time, but the three METARs don’t suggest that it required SVFR.
Visibility no problem.
FEW clouds can easily be avoid, no no problem with distance from cloud requirements there.
The SCT are more difficult, but only the first one drops below 1500ft AGL. So on the other two you could fly 500ft AGL and be 1000ft from the cloud.
So in the circumstances I think the controller just looks at it and thinks “It’s the pilots responsibility to maintain the cloud seperation. If they think that they can do it, and it’s not blatently impossible, then let them get on with it. I’m not the air police!”
dublinpilot wrote:
At a busy airport, don’t ever offer an intersection departure when you’re being put into the queue with everyone else. If you’re in the queue, they have to release you when you get to the front or you hold everyone else up!
Thanks for the tip, I will keep that in mind for the next time! Lucky for me, they just kept my spot in the queue.
dublinpilot wrote:
Can I ask which of the two pilots had the initial problem? Was it the 2000 local hour guy? And was he the one who left after the first few legs? How did you get on with the other one after that?
No, it was the 200h guy. That was also the pilot who would leave us in Athens and flew the first two legs, because he was just qualified on the Mooney. Also the flying was no problem for him, it was everything around what was too much.
The 2000h guy has his hours mostly from years of glide towing. Occasionally years ago he flew with 3 other pilots to the UK and now, sometimes he makes a small navigation trip to EHMZ or something similar, but always with paper chart. He has a lot of experience as a gliding instructor, in Belgium but also in France.
After Athens the 2000h guy became my copilot: he was flying the aircraft a lot, but the landing and take off where for me. But I knew already he was not capable of navigation on his own, that makes things easy on one site. I learned him to use SkyDemon, I learned him the beginning of working/programming with a GNS430. (Before he only used a paper chart – but we mostly used the airmillions, so that is not very well as primary paper chart for navigation)
Also ATC, he wanted to learn but said to me: if it is too busy you do it, because that is too difficult, but I want to try it en route. So in the beginning I guided him trough the ATC en route (and you know it yourself, mostly it is always the same, but if your ATC is ok, you can get a lot when you ask) and at the end of the trip he had a lot of extra skills, still not enough to make such a trip on his own, but a lot of extra skills. The difference was: he knew it, he wanted to improve and he did.
Now he is learning more and more. He wants to get this year his night qualification, wants to make more trips with me.
dublinpilot wrote:
You’re right that it’s important to be able to do everything yourself, to know that you can do everything yourself, but as you fly more with someone you trust and get to know, having someone else there who you can trust, who you know their skills and they yours, can be really useful in high workload situation. But you only get that from flying together regularly.
At a busy airport, don’t ever offer an intersection departure when you’re being put into the queue with everyone else. If you’re in the queue, they have to release you when you get to the front or you hold everyone else up!
That’s probably good advice if the ones in front of you are airliners – because in Europe most airports will depart all airliners they have before departing any light GA. And one can see why: they get maybe €1000 from every airliner, and hassles from their company (Ryanair etc) if they delay them.
But if in front of you is mostly light GA then being able to depart from an intersection can get you away sooner if somebody is taking ages to do their power checks etc.
However I tend to find that when all those ahead of me are airliners, ATC sends me to an intersection anyway, explicitly, so they can stick me there and depart all the airliners who were behind me 
Peter wrote:
That’s probably good advice if the ones in front of you are airliners – because in Europe most airports will depart all airliners they have before departing any light GA. And one can see why: they get maybe €1000 from every airliner, and hassles from their company (Ryanair etc) if they delay them.
In my experience (mostly EDDL, but also some other busy airports) that’s not the case. I feel more comfortable at an intersection because I get to do my runup without any pressure. I find that most of the time, once I call “ready”, I will be put in-between one of the next few airliners.
Obviously, at a really busy airport, if they departed all airliners first, you would never leave.
The two later METARS are to show the evolution. We landed just after noon but I don’t know anymore the actual conditions, but the first METAR had to be from around landingtime. I do know I was thinking Specials VFR when I heard the ATIS.
It is right I didn’t mention SVFR, even I didn’t ask for a clearance to enter the CTR. I just called them with my call sign and they cleared me in immediately without any request. But it is a homebased acft and later on, I heard they are very “easy” with the limitations.
500AGL is not allowed above a City with a lot of industry I think. (the MSA is 2400ft)
Vieke wrote:
I was allowed to make the trip with their plane if I was searching a copilot with at least 2 -3000 hr and and ATPL or instrument rating.
Outrageous.
500AGL is not allowed above a City with a lot of industry I think. (the MSA is 2400ft)
Ah I missed that bit!
If I remember correctly, once on a SVFR clearance, you need the same seperation as an IFR flight. So often ATC prefers you not to be on a SVFR clearance, as it’s easier to fit you in.
So there may be an element of “if you don’t say anything, then I won’t either”, in that it suits ATC for your to stay VFR.
I was allowed to make the trip with their plane if I was searching a copilot with at least 2 -3000 hr and and ATPL or instrument rating. But that is not easy to find for such a long trip. And even then: I want to chose myself the people I fly with. Copilots are nice, but if you make a trip like this, imho you have to be capable to do it alone.
Absolutely the right position Vieke. Your passengers are your decision, and in a single pilot plane their experience is nobody’s business.
Flying alone is definitely better than flying with someone who you don’t get on with, but flying with somebody who is nice is better than flying alone 
Also the 2000hr+ IR requirement is completely crazy. Whoever came up with that needs his head examined. It’s a hugely unnecessary amount of hours. I’ve done this lot under IFR (plus a load of VFR stuff, all the way down to Crete, beyond which avgas and other stuff becomes a real issue) and I am at 2050hrs right now, 15 years since I got the PPL. So I wonder what these people were smoking.
With other words, they mean professional pilots, like they are.
But this was not the first time.
- The first time was when I wanted to get my siterating for Courchevel. When I mentioned it to the Chairman, he went angry. I was not experienced enough and I had to start with small trips like LFAT and such (I did them already). And they would tell me what I was mentionned to do and what not on my level. Again my FI called him, but it didn’t sort anything out.
- The second confrontation was with this trip: “he had to protect me from myself if I would not do it” I also talked with 2 other members of ‘the board’ and they said the same thing, but they said to me that if I wanted to make small trips like to Dublin or Cannes or something, they thought he would support me, but was not sure.
- The third time I had another approach: Barcelona, november 2015. I wanted the permission to fly solo to Barcelona and I talked with the two FI who trained me on the Mooney. I booked the Mooney and I didn’t talked with the Chairman, but my two FI would call him for me. If he refused, the other one would call me. After a week I got a call of me FI that the trip was granted and he didn’t think the Chairman would refuse me any trips anymore in the future in Europe.
- The forth time I had booked a plane to fly to Courchevel. Really not done half a year ago. When I was in the club somebody other of the board mentionned it in a conversation with me and the Chairman was sitting next to me. This time there was no discussion or anything, he just acted normal.
So I hope and I think I did prove myself a little bit with this trip, and the outcome? We will see.
You ended up getting the aircraft from EDKA, Westflug in Aachen-Merzbruck in the end, didn’t you?
Great to see that their attitude is still the other way round than in your club. I “checked out” on one of their Mooneys ages ago, with maybe 10-12 hours after getting the PPL, and with a whopping 50 hours total time.
When I told them right after the PPL (done in a C150) that I wanted to fly the Mooney, their reaction was “Ok, we’ll check you out on the C172 Reims Rocket so you can get used to the VP prop and to going a bit faster than 80kt, come back when you feel comfortable”, so after maybe 6 hours in the 172, I did the training in the Mooney and that was it. And then immediately took it to Munich, with their blessing.
