Today was the day of the day. Destination Lido di Venezia LIPV was on top of our wishlist beside Le Touquet LFAT and Jersey EGJJ. A planed trip to LFAT was canceled some days earlier due to rain at destination. On Thursday we made the decision fix to go to Lido on Saturday. Weather forcast for Lido was fine. I made the preparation with autorouter and transfered the route to foreflight. I don’t like foreflight very much but the fransfer of the flight routing into G1000 NXI via flightstream510 is a dream. Start the engine, boot your system and press „transfer to panel“. That‘s it! Departure Leer EDWF was scheduled to10:30z but was shifted to 10:15z because we were ready to go earlier. I called a given number and changed the departure time. No problem at all. Take off, climb, inbound first waypoint, contact to ATC to request IFR pick up, got a squawk and than…. standby. Ok standby! Seconds later „You are to early, you had a CTOT 10:20 -10:35. Me??? Really? No problem I thought, than we do 2 or 3 orbits. Nopes with Eurocontrol. To get me in the system I have to go back to departure airport. You might know what I was thinking about the system right in this moment. …. Exactly this. About 4-5miles before the airport, staying in 4000ft, they called me back, that we were now ok and IFR pick up was granted. Thank you, that makes sense! The flight was planed with step climb up to FL200 to cross the Alps. From abeam Stuttgart till abeam Bozen it was overcast. Tops well below and very cold with -26 degrees outside. Lesson learned, have a rug at hand for passengers if you fly a new and not very cheap aircraft. With changing to Padova Control it was busy on the frequency but still very helpful. We got frequent step descends according their minimum radar altitude. The rest of the flight was nice and easy. Also the contact to Venezia Radio was nice and easy. Report position, call me downwind 23, call me final 23 and welcome to Venezia, your flightplan is closed. All in all a nice flight beside the CTOT mishap. On Monday we do a short VFR flight along the coastline to Portoroz LJPZ. 1400ft if they don‘t allow to enter airspace D. So what.
Initial position this morning: about 10h on the plane. Total IFR flight time on the Malibu 0h. Last single hand IFR flight about 33 years ago.
Beautiful, how did the M350 handle the grass at LIPV?
Landing was fine, take off will be definitiv on rwy 05
Congratulations Tigerfly.
Malibu’s get really cold in the back. One tip is to pull on the cabin heat knob even before departure. The hot air travels to the rear of the cabin through wide pipes just under the skin of the fuselage, so you need a lot of time to overcome the cooling effect of the exterior air. And a nice fluffy fleece rug is very useful too.
I flew a Mirage in and out of Lido several times. It is a long runway and you will be fine on 05.
Will pull the heat knob on the ground on the way back. Hope it helps a little bit. Thanks for the advice!
Thank you for a nice write-up, but much more important, congrats on a new and wonderful aircraft!!!
We use Garmin Pilot (with lots ofAutorouter functionality build in) and would recommend to try that (we run not 510, but FS210). There is as many opinions as there are pilots, but we did at least end up in choosing Garmin Pilot over ForeFlight for Europe. In the US, ForeFlight seems to be the most popular choice by many. Anyway, just my two cents…have no market share data to back it up!
Also want to fly to Venice! :-)
Thanks Tigerflyer, I found this really interesting. Congratulations on the new plane 
Today we continued to Portoroz. VFR in 1000ft. It couldn‘t be easier!!! In Contact with ATC just tell them that you like to follow the coastline. That‘s it. VFR Flightplan via SD. Rwy 33 in Portoroz is a little bit demanding due to the hills. To write something about perfect service in LJPZ is sensless. Everything about this perfekt airport has been written before.
Be aware when going to LIPV and planing to park on hard ground or you need to refuel. You have to taxi over a gravel field. Crying for nics in your prop blades. Fortunately we had enough fuel for the flight to Portoroz.
After landing we booked our hotel. Hotel Marko (4 star) in Portoroz below 80€. Ok it“s off season but the weather is the finest you can have.
And as you can see on the map I walked to Piran. The blue point on the map. You shouldn“t miss it. Time 1 hour.
Tomorrow it goes back. Either nonstop or with pit stop. Depends on the descision of the passenger. They will tell me during dinner. Precallculation for nonstop flight is 3:31 acc autorouter. Let“s see what happen.
Congratulations on your new plane, Tigerflyer
It’s a really “high mission capability” machine.
Indeed; the Lido runway and surrounding surfaces are far from ideal. As some found out during our fly-in there in 2019, one can also easily get stuck in mud. For the money they get they should spend just a little on fixing this
