Trip Report – North Weald – Troyes – Montpellier – Elba – Cannes – Troyes – L2K – North Weald

This trip was flow over seven days leaving June 30th 2023 and returning July 7th. Flights were a mixture of IFR and VFR as my flying “buddy” has no instrument qualifications.

Aircraft is a 2013 DA40 NG with G1000 and GFC 700 autopilot.

Day 1 – North Weald to Troyes

This was flown IFR allowing us to get high for the channel crossing and above some low cloud lingering in southern England and northern France.
Timing on this leg was fairly key as we had notified customs/immigration the previous day for our intended arrival time at Troyes. We also had to time this with the availability of the FISO to use the RNP approaches. This turned out to be a good decision as we caught up with a cold front and arrived in low cloud and moderate rain.
Once the front cleared through we had a fabulous day wandering around Troyes.

Would visit again as the immigration, parking, fuel etc. was all straightforward and the town is pleasant.

Day 2 – Troyes to Montpellier

This was a VFR leg and the weather played nicely for us to climb up to FL095 and sit above the cloud for the entire route, with it clearing nicely (obviously we’d checked this to be highly likely) for the arrival into Montpellier. This sort of travel, assuming you do the planning works very well in France as has often been discussed here, as the ATS is much more joined up and there is very little difference between VFR and IFR. The airspace on the southern coast of France looks like a total mess with multiple restricted areas at different levels, but in fact we were just cleared through without even needing to request.

The mistral had picked up for our arrival which made for an interesting approach. Montpellier was a surprisingly pleasant town to visit! Again no hassles at Montpellier on the aviation side and a pleasant “crew lounge” to use.

Day 3 – Montpellier to Marina Di Campo

We really wanted to visit Elba, doubly so with the rumours of the airport possibly closing. This leg was flown as a Y flight plan, switching to VFR as we crossing into the Roma FIR.

We did get a CTOT at Montpellier, but this ended up being only a 15 minute delay. The flight planned route that Autorouter generated had us dog legging along the Cote du Azur, but after flying only part of the SID we were given lots of “directs” which made the route much more like what one would logically expect and shaved around 20 minutes of flight time off.

Day 4 – No flying

We bought a “go anywhere” bus pass for Elba and spent the day visiting various places of interest, soaking up the sun and eating delicious food.

Day 5 – Elba to Bastia

This was the shortest leg of the trip by far at 66km and was done VFR in pretty much a straight line, climbing to FL65 and then almost straight back down on a 3 degree continuous descent into the airport.

Bastia ended up being about the most expensive stop on the trip with the taxi ride from the airport coming in at not much shy of Euro 100 each way. Again, the town is very pleasant with more than enough to do for a couple days.
Bastia airport had mixed reviews in terms of mandatory handling and hassle. For us it was very simple, we just went to the information desk in the main terminal when we returned and within a couple of minutes we had an escort to go through a crew security channel. The only minor downside was that their crew transport had broken down so we had a bit of a walk to the GA parking.

Day 6 – Bastia to Cannes

Although getting access back to the aircraft was simple, it went slightly downhill here. Immediately after startup we got a CAS warning for the fuel temperature in the left (main) tank being too high. This didn’t extinguish and indeed the temperature readings were climbing so we had to shutdown.
This resulted in a few phone calls back and forth with maintenance in the UK and some remote tests on the aircraft (basically checking whether the fuel actually was hot) before we determined there was either a loose wire or a sensor fault and decided to fly to Cannes with the likely erroneous warning.

No one was 100% sure whether we would be able to perform the pre-take off ECU test with a seemingly out of limit fuel temp, but thankfully it seems this parameter is ignored and we were safely on our way to Cannes.
This leg we may have in hindsight chosen to fly IFR instead of VFR. We had no problems with the initial climb to FL85, until we were handed over to Nice who wanted us down at 1000ft! We managed to delay the descent as much as possible and selected the lowest descent rate they would let us get away with, but we still ended up flying 20 odd miles at 1000ft above the wave tops.
We parked on the grass at Cannes and had a small debate with Ground as to why we were not going onto the “grass” which was about waist height on one side of the taxiway. I refused to mow it with the prop and we taxied round to the other side of the grass and pushed back. Much better for prop!

Again, the airport facilities at Cannes are very good and with the very minor point of getting safely onto the parking everything was very smooth.
We had a pleasant enough afternoon (most of the day was lost dealing with the tech issue) in Cannes on the sea front, but I’m not sure we are the sort of clientele the destination normally attracts.

Day 7 – Cannes to North Weald

The original plan had been to go back to Troyes, have another night stop and pick up some champagne… The first part of the plan went well. We filed IFR from Cannes to Troyes and apart from having to resolve having the flight plan suspended because we didn’t have a slot at Cannes the departure was easy enough. The slot issue was resolved by calling the slot controller in Brussels who didn’t really seem bothered and couldn’t understand why this had applied and subsequently released the flight plan.

As seemed to be the norm, we got lots of “directs” on this flight too which ultimately saved around 30 minutes of time in the air. We did not have O2 on this trip so some of the routings initially looked sub-optimal but what we flew in the end looked much like the higher routes.

On the arrival to Troyes we did hit a patch of convective weather which lingered very locally around Troyes and was totally unforecast. The TAF for Paris Orly we obtained before departure was forecasting some heavy showers but not until much later in the day, some 6 hours after our planned arrival. Even the METAR’s we picked up in flight were showing everything around CAVOK but we still had an area of significant precipitation showing on the weather radar images were getting via 4G.
Once we got in visual contact with the weather we were able to deduce a path around the worst of it looking outside to place the weather versus the radar imagery. We did have to make a descent down to FL080 to avoid icing conditions and then had a few minutes of moderate turbulence and a good plane wash as we went through the lightest area of precipitation we could find.

Luckily the short cuts we got earlier in the route meant that the FISO was still on duty and we remained IFR for the RNP arrival.
Once on the ground in Troyes our plans had to make some significant changes. We both got an alert from the MetOffice for severe weather in the UK for the next day (Saturday). We had another review of Windy and indeed it looked like a return on Saturday or indeed Sunday would be difficult.
This is always a dilemma now with the long PNR requirements for customs and immigration at many French airfields. We decided that the best course of action was to quickly refuel (the FISO was also predicting the storm would get worse at Troyes) and head to Le Touquet where we would be able to perform the departure procedures without notice while submitting a GAR for our arrival back into North Weald.
This all worked surprisingly well for a plan made on the fly. Our flight plan back to the UK arrived with Border Force before the GAR had been processed, but this was sorted out over the phone and forwarding the GAR a second time to the Border Force official who had picked up the flight plan.
Another short VFR leg and we were back to North Weald.

Overall a very enjoyable trip. The DA40 makes a great touring aircraft especially with the G1000 and GFC 700 autopilot. JetA availability is always good which takes away another headache.

Now looking forwards to the next one.