Looks like a great trip.
Peter wrote:
Landed with 17.7 usg
After that flight was that in the tanks or your bladder? 
My bladder holds a max of 0.25 litre – a factoid which will be more readily appreciated when you reach my advanced age 
I am sorting out some pics but hope others can post theirs.
Hi Peter, thank you very much for organising the Brac Fly-In, which I really enjoyed and it gave me fantastic opportunity to test the EC120 in a challenging weather. Also, this was my longest heli flight ever and a motivation for future long distance heli trips (we are already planning Spain + Morocco next year).
Posting few pictures from our journey:
Leaving Maribor
Slovenia
Zadar
Between Zadar and Brac
Between Zadar and Brac
Between Zadar and Brac
And few more from Brac and on the way to airport prior departure home. Just to make sure, our helicopter is the EC120 behind much bigger, twin engine EC145 on German registration standing in the front. The EC145 is 9+1 configuration with autopilot, IFR certified whilst our EC120 is 1+4, no autopilot, IFR equipped but not certified (helicopter without autopilot can never be certified for IFR operation.
And finally, some more from the way home. The first three pictures show nasty weather on departure, which improved much on the way to Rijeka. Last picture before Rijeka (helicopter standing on apron) is Krk.:
Some great photos!
Flying a DA40 with very limited capability to climb, flying over the Alps was not an option. I could either go over the Alps to Linz and then West to Paris, or West to Calvi and then North. That’s all I could do in terms of range due to the headwinds. Since the 0-isotherm was relatively low and moderate icing was forecast over the Alp route, I decided to go for Calvi. That would allow us not to traverse a front and thereby avoid the worst weather.
According to GRAMET the 0-isotherm was supposed to be FL110 and that proved to be the case. I file for FL100 but was asked to climb to FL110 and requested further FL120 to stay on top.
Right after take-off
Last glimpse of Croatia
On top at FL100 over the Adriatic direct to Ancona
Landfall slightly south of Ancona
Lago di Bolsena
CB over the South of Elba that everyone on the frequency tried to avoid
The island of Elba
Approach to Calvi
Runway in sight
So far so good. We managed to stay on top w/o oxygen at FL120 and avoid the few CBs on our route either visually, or using the ADL130 which gave us advances warning. The stormscope was not too useful. It did show some electrical activity, but only isolated strikes appeared on the MFD.
We also got a wonderful shortcut which shaved about one hour off our flight time. The block time was 02:45 versus a planned flight time of 03:40!
Here is the my FR24 track for the flight back
Nowadays I fly back over N Italy because it burns off some more fuel before having to climb over the Alps. Also it gives the chance to divert to Cannes etc if the tops turn out to be too high there.
This is quite funny:
The altitude is right. We had to descend soon after departure, over the Adriatic, due to ice.
The GS is very poorly represented but we know that for FR24.
Running a topo chart on a tablet, when crossing the Alps above an overcast
The glide range in the above pic is about 1/2 of the screen width, so you can see plenty of options to glide into a canyon.
The database for the above was generated using MOBAC, from Google Terrain. About 50GB for just the Alps. I don’t know if GT has since blocked such bulk downloads, but the whole online map scene was heading that way, with OpenStreetMap blocking almost everything.
Short clip from Brac fly-in. Enjoy!
Great video!
Split to Brac. I diverted to Split and flew to Brac the following morning.
Here is a video, edited only to remove a boring over-water portion.
Started at 500ft (the max climb clearance from Split, to stay below jet traffic) and climbing to 2700ft to land on Brac which is nearly 1700ft elevation
I have another 15hrs or so of continuous HD (1080P 50FPS 25mbits/sec) footage from that trip (Shoreham to Split, and Brac to Shoreham) which needs a lot more work
