It is a nice destination; a lot bigger than say Le Touquet.
You have to get a taxi from the airport into town. This used to cost €50 (each way) which was notorious but this time we paid €25 there and €34 back. However it is not an issue anyway if you can fill the taxi.
There is a lot to see and a lot of good shopping. And of course the food is a lot nicer than you can normally find in the UK. Forget it if you are a vegan though 
Weather was quite cold and windy. Departing from the UK, filed for FL070, London Control would not handle it because I would not be in CAS for long enough (they would have handled it at FL080) so I departed VFR at 5300ft (to stay below the 5500ft Class A) and flew like that all the way to France, and then with Deauville Approach got a radar vectored ILS. Prior to that there was a bit of cumulus avoidance at ~5000ft.
Departure from Shoreham, over the wind turbine field
Around 3000ft, shortly before the ILS platform
Another Jetprop, unrelated to our group but the same age airframe
A rather colourful beach
More activity on our return
There are airline flights to some surprising (for France) destinations: Rhodes, Kos, and they even did flights to Brac (not sure if that’s current)
A fair bit of French activity, this time all of it in Robins
I got an interesting departure clearance: FL060 on runway bearing. Then a handover to Approach.
To get reasonable routings I filed EGKA SITET ETRAT LFRG there, FL070, and LFRG ETRAT VFR SITET EGKA, FL060, back. Frequency change directly between Deauville and Shoreham; London Info was busy doing stuff all over Wales and other places
I’ve done Deauville a few times myself and generally go to Honfleur, which is very pretty.
Honestly don’t see the point of filing IFR for this one unless you have to. N859 goes around the mid-Channel danger areas (two sides of a triangle) that are often not active so you can go straight over them VFR and save a lot of time.
Yesterday’s wx was interesting enough to make a request for an IFR clearance more likely.
Peter, please tell me you used your anti-icing kit for that journey or I’ll be very depressed
I aborted plans to fly to the same destination this weekend due to Windy showing freezing levels as low as 3000’ and considerable cloud (as depicted in your pics). Disappointed but happy with the go/no-go decision… glad you had fun at least!
I was planning to fly direct VFR saturday morning but I end up with similar IFR routing inconvinience, I flew via Dover/Calais and then low level to Havre/Deauville due to weather: frozen clouds and CB overdevelopement (the view was nice but I would not punch through that even with an A320 that had carb ice hot)
Saturday Deauville parking was allmost empty and surprisinly you don’t have to park on wet grass this time, they did always send me to grass anytime a posh bizjet is around ;)
It was -4C at 5000ft, but at 5000ft it was mostly “cumulus towers” (no idea of the right name) and one could zigzag between them. Then in the descent to the ILS platform of 3000ft I got a few mm of ice but the temp was +2C so it came off quick. If one had to say hold at 5000ft in IMC, icing would have been fairly rapid.
Without ice protection it was doable fine because the bases were 2000-3000ft and you could just fly VFR down there. The cloud started only near France, so you could have still flown at 5000+ over the Channel – for radio comms and to get 5 mins+ time when ditching.
The follow me car guy at LFRG tried to push me (and others) onto grass but I absolutely refused (with arm gestures). The grass looked pretty rough, and completely pointless due to the amount of tarmac available. I then said to tower I need hard surface parking and they said OK. This common situation is more formalised at say La Rochelle where I believe you have to pre-book hard parking and it costs some €€€.
This was the first “big” (as in Le Touquet, Caen, Cherbourg, etc, are “big” ) French airport where I saw any significant F-reg – possibly aeroclub – activity.
Peter wrote:
The cloud started only near France,
It must have improved because when I looked there seemed to be a fair bit of cloud coverage in the UK, en route from North Weald, and some across the Channel, which put me off in case it worsened. Is that a sensible precaution or just being feeble – ie. is it safe to assume you can always dodge light/scattered coverage even at low freezing levels? Interested to know people’s approach to these situations in case I’m being over cautious
Deauville had a notam Saturday that the west side of the grass park is wet/muddy and grass taxiway Alpha entry closed, still taxiway Bravo is open to get you there leaving tarmac room for other $-clients, I was flying a grass root C172, I bet she did not mind…
Saturday, cloudbase in UK/France was 5000ft? and freezing level was 3000ft? I think a long direct crossing is doable 100% VMC at 2000ft as long as one is happy for a cold swim and does not mind dodging patches of rain/hail and keeping the carb heat on all time but does not give much room if it turn out worse on top of water, which it did…
Ibra wrote:
as long as one is happy for a cold swim
Noted
Deauville city is nice, and the airport is easy.
Sorry couldn’t be there.
You saw more light activity because it was a weekend, and Deauville is a big destination for pilots. It is kind of the typical first place you take friends to after your PPL. When they get more seasoned they go to Le Touquet (because of the bike rental making a nicer-less-ripoff trip).
