All my flying everywhere was done 100% in English.
The only significant issue I have had in France was sometimes not being able to understand their ATIS. Normally they record it in French and English and the two versions alternate, but sometimes the English one is so heavily accented that I can’t make it out no matter how many times I listen to it.
Despite the pretty amazing “straight line experience” on that VFR flight, even more amazing considering it was a weekday (the military in most places especially France are normally inactive on weekends) my view remains that one does need to plan the route with an awareness of the various (mostly military) airspace and be ready to navigate around it if ATC ask you or if radio contact is lost. In fact a loss of radio contact would be a huge problem along that route, Rodez to Cannes, if you did not have a solid “OCAS” plan.
If you lost both your radios without being a case of complete electrical failure (how likely is that??), would you really continue the flight and not land somewhere convenient?
Is flying VFR in France unproblematic with the full absence of any French language skills?
If you stick to airfields that are not marked fr only, then yes.
she doesn’t even understand what has been said over the radio in German
I’m a native german speaker and have an english radio license, and I still find german radio strange.
The most likely loss of comms is not a hardware failure but a loss of contact with the current unit because you flew out of their range at ~150kt. Perhaps preceeded by having been given the wrong frequency and taking a while to discover that. It is quite possible if you are flying at a low level, and more so along a coast with mountains on it.
I don’t think this is true anymore but when I last did a lot of VFR in France (2005) I sometimes – at weekends – found a large area FIS region frequency totally dead. For example all of Aquataine ATC would be at lunch. In Italy, it can still happen today because they don’t always change FIS controllers seamlessly when they break for lunch.
If you stick to airfields that are not marked fr only, then yes.
Very true! However none of the French-only airfields can be flown to/from non-Schengen.
Peter, as you were asking for names:
You seem to make a habit of flying to places that I travel to for climbing. Last time it was Kalymnos.
I’m pretty sure this (and the subsequent photos)
is Capo Noli.
It is one of the most unusual and better known climbing spots in the area of Finale Ligure, as you are able to climb a traverse along the coast line for about 400 meters with nothing but the sea below your feet.
Unfortunately, when I was at that spot in 2011, I had no buddy to belay me so it will have to wait until another time, but…
This must be an interesting road to drive along…
that was definitely the case. I stayed in the area for a few days and enjoyed that road a couple of times. I have it on video, but just checked it now after 3 years and it’s not really interesting enough to upload and share. Lots of traffic on the road so not much fun.
this is the peninsula of Cap Ferrat between Nice and Monaco with some wonderful villas and five star hotels on it. You pass west of it when doing an approach to Nice RWY05.
I have to correct the above. It’s of course the approach to RWY 22 in Nice ( VPT RWY 22L/R), where you pass a bit west of Cap Ferrat at 1000ft.
Nice report !
Thanks.
I suppose this report is a good case of having a GPS feed to the camera!
Then it’s probably trivial to upload the pics to google maps and see them laid out precisely along your track.
Phone cameras store the GPS coordinates in the photo’s EXIF data (unless you disable location services / whatever – a hugely good idea for posting pics on f***book etc 
) but most DSLRs don’t have a GPS. My Pentax K3 has an optional GPS but I can’t be bothered to have a big lump (200 quid?) sitting in the hot shoe.
However a few of the pics were done with the Nokia 808 and should have the lat/long in the EXIF. In good light, in 900px width, shooting through aircraft windows, you won’t spot the difference between the K3 and the 808 especially as the white balance is, ahem, a subjective thing anyway. I did tweak the pics in Lightroom or ACDSEE7 but one can’t always get the snow as white as it should be (and I do have a calibrated monitor).
I have also seen a feature in Lightroom whereby photos can be laid out over a google map. How that sort of thing could be presented in a web writeup is something else though. Presumably it would need javascript – it is similar to making buttons change when you hover the mouse over them. One can do an image map in pure HTML but that’s not enough.
Peter, don’t you carry a portable GPS (or even record your track on the panel mounted unit)? You can export these tracks and import them into Google Earth – voila! I have almost all my flights recorded in that way – good fun to look at afterwards. You can then either visually match the landmarks you want to ID, and/or match the timestamp(s).
Yes – I have an NMEA bluetooth unit running the whole time. It has a rooftop antenna and feeds the tablet on which Oziexplorer logs every flight.
But there is no way to “connect” that GPS track with photographs, unless the camera time is set more or less exactly right and then you can do it manually.
I have had the ex-Ozi tracks converted into KML (thanks to Dublinpilot) but, in the absence of lat/long EXIF data, that still doesn’t connect photos to locations.
Maybe there is a route whereby one can do the GPS connection using the time of the photo but I haven’t seen that. I guess that route would involve reading the GPS track and inserting the GPS lat/long corresponding to the photo’s time into the photo’s EXIF header. Actually there must be tools which simply take a KML file and stuff the appropriate lat/long into the EXIF headers in all pics in a folder.
Edit: this should do it.
