Thank you Boscomantico.
I wanted some practical tips from people who fly this busy area regularly. Sometimes CAS is a fortress VFR can’t access :)
I missed that Palma TMA is class A, my mistake.
So, to get FIS, one just calls the nearest APP.
Jujupilote,
Looking at your route: For your first legs (Spanish border towards the coast south of Girona) ATC would probably let you go high. However, before crossing the coast in my experience they will request you to go down, say to 3500 ft because there you get into the appch area of Barcelona (usually descending traffic there, intercepting ILC, so relatively low). Once south of the BCN 090 radial they’d be fine to have you climb as high as you want. And you should, because they’d give you a Palma frequency and when you are low (say below 5500 feet) you might not get radio contact. Inbound the Pollensa VOR you can at 5500 feet max just below the Palma TMA (A) but they start whining at you that ‘over land you need to be at 1000 ft AGL..’ So I would actually make a shortcut to Menorca anyway way before the VOR.
A different approach, a very usual way to go VFR to the islands from France: Stay east of the TMA’s of Girona and Barcelona and so you can be very high, yet not that far off the coast (at least for the first part). If going to to Menorca, it then would not make too much sense to go to Pollensa VOR, but go straight to Menorca, say via SARGO. Officially at SARGO you would need to be at 2500 ft to be below class A above, but I think you stand a very fair chance that if you ask to remain higher than that, they’ll be fine. I have flown often enough in class A airspace in Spain, just negotiate in a friendly way
No need to look up frequencies en-route, they’ll pass you on..
Someone posted in the tg group a reply from one of the handlers, obtained after chasing them pretty firmly, with a quote of €60. Unfortunately he seems to be offline and we need to know which of the three handlers quoted that price
For VFR in Class A (not sure would work in this particular case), it’s always worth remembering that one can request Special VFR, and that theoretically ATC will never even suggest it (because they are not supposed to).
Nope. This merely used to be an exception in the UK only, where they had some class A CTRs going all the way to the ground.
No Special VFR in class A generally.
Although it’s a week before, it seems that the weather will cooperate for the following weekend.
Yes it looks like it will be a nice weekend, with a high pressure moving in
I think most people will be staying in the town of Mahón
I think the decision should be made tomorrow when we have the UK Met Office MSLP chart for Friday. This is the Thursday one:
A good number of the telegram group have not enabled their notifications so they won’t know where anybody is
After some discussions… I recommend it is a GO for 7/8 October.
This will give people the most time to get organised – including maybe some who were unable to come on these dates.
We are looking at something like 10 aircraft now, which is pretty good
That’s a really good size group; maybe 20 people.
We are looking at the restaurant on Saturday evening. Could everyone arriving please say how many they are bringing – either here or in the telegram group.
I hope we get some Spanish pilots coming along, too.
If the weather stays bad in my part of the world, I will have to cancel. Western Europe seems OK but Central/Eastern is looking bad now: