VFR Germany to Spain and back

Motivated by Antonio here I provide a short writeup about a challenging VFR trip over 770nm from the Frankfurt region to LEMR La Morgal, next to LEAS Asturias and back.

1. My first far flight in one leg

I’ve already flown to Spain in microlight aircraft, but due to lack of range this was never possible in one hop. So this time the plan was to do the whole flight without stop. Wind was forecasted as tailwind and Skydemon said about 4.5 hours of flight for 770nm (depending on altitude), so we were eager to go. Cloud forecast was maybe a broken thin layer in about 3000 ft MSL in the beginning, but should shortly open up with only sun remaining in the sky. How wrong!

We left at 0730 UTC with a full overcast stratus ceiling in 1700 ft MSL, and it remained there between 1700 and 2200). Tops of close-by Spessart and Odenwald in clouds. I’ve done a lot VFR down low (although at half the speed of the Comanche) so that in principle I knew what I was doing, nevertheless it gets challenging, because you have to constantly assure that terrain would not enclose you. Albeit I had seen the satellite weather images before takeoff, I did not expect that it would last until about 160nm into the flight before I would be possible to climb out. Satellite image looked like broken, 7/8, and cloud layer thin, so that any small “hole” of some 1000 meters would have sufficed. So I don’t have any foto from below, because I was hand-flying that aircraft and constantly planning the route taking into account surface height. Visibility was also quite bad, say 5 km.

After we finally found our hole and climbed up, it turned out that in fact there were two layers of clouds and thickness in total was about 500 meters. So the 1700 ft MSL ceiling which I had to descend below every now and then before was in fact another cloud layer. We finally climbed above, and the remaining 600nm of the flight were just fantastic, straight forward and relaxing. Until the Atlantic Coast there was nothing to see but white below and blue above:

And this one in cruise altitude ~FL125:

We flew in FL120 until Paris FIR where I was asked to descend below FL115 for just some kilometers. Thanks to EuroGA I knew about this, and it was no issue at all. By the way, the forecasted tailwind did not join in, the TAS was equal to GS. I decided to go at about 150 KTAS LOP burning around 9 Gal/h.

At the Atlantic Coast we made a shortcut over the Atlantic Ocean, but staying within glide range. Clouds eased up a bit:

We landed at La Morgal after nearly 6 hours of flight, having burnt in total 60 Gal of fuel. Just before landing I switched to the remaining main tank, so I still had about 30 Gal or 3 hours of fuel.

I keep thinking that this flight would have been a lot easier with an IR, however to be legally fine this would have mandated an intermediate stop at (or low pass over) an IFR airfield for the IFR pickup, as cloud base was so low.

2. Return flight

The return flight 10 days later was the other way round, easy in the beginning but turned to be really challenging over France (all flying VFR). The weather two days ago was very interesting, with a rather “high” low over Spain, another “high” low in the North-East of Europe and some form of trough in between:

The front was in fact faster than announced and covered whole France in clouds. We left at 09:00 UTC from La Morgal and step-climbed on top over several thin layers with some 30-35 kts tailwind. But things got more and more challenging, had to continuously climb to stay on top and with kids on board we did not want to use oxygen (although I prepared everything to just plug in the masks in case it would have gotten worse). I took these fotos just before taking the next “exit hole” down:

Every now and then there were in fact holes big enough to go down, where earth could still be seen, so it was not quite as “hopeless” as the fotos might suggest. However, I took one of the last “exits” before the front in fact became solid and towering, and the cloud top I was soaring above began to rise significantly. I hopped over that last top in FL140 and went down thereafter.

Cloud base down low was already far down again and we continued below in about 3kft. Decided to make a stop in Montlucon shortly thereafter, as we expected that the flight will take longer than hoped (and we were down low anyhow):

The first 400nm were done in about 2.5 hours. Now the kids could move, and we just relaxed, watched the weather and after some 45 minutes or so proceeded to Nancy, where we waited for the rain to stop and refuelled (in fact just to test my brand new Total Card, worked fine). After an hour we proceeded below the front for the remaining 45 minutes of flight, but as 3000 ft MSL was possible (instead of 2000ft) it was far easier than the same route the other way round 10 days earlier.

I did not make a screenshot of the ice forecast of that day, but it was moderate icing all over France and Germany and 0°C in about FL100. With convective clouds and cloud tops in about FL220 the only way to fly this IFR would have been to climb above – or to fly around. I was thinking about flying around, too, but it would have been quite far – and doing this VFR during the week inflicted an incredible amount of further flight preparation due to all these airspaces all around France. So I sticked more or less to my planned route.

Anyone who has flown VFR through France during the week in about 3kft can imagine what a workload you get changing every two minutes Frequency from Information to any military control, back to information, to some approach and so on. But hey, we arrived in the end after a flight which I never felt to be anything near dangerous. Tiresome, yes, due to the constant re-planning of route and altitude and the challenging weather situation, but it was all safe with possible exits any time.

However, for sake of good order, as this is an open forum, I do not want to encourage anyone to fly like this without the necessary experience and a capable equipment. I constantly had several ways out fully prepared (including, for example, just switching on the existing oxygen bottle) and have quite some experience to evaluate possible actual weather changes, so I knew I would not get trapped up there. I also had plenty of fuel for any far diversion, if necessary.

I hope you enjoyed reading…we just only started to explore Europe this way