Tuesday 25th May
Taxi back to Manston; wx is still lovely. We fill in flight plan form, and get given yet more conflicting advice about customs at Calais. This is a long story. I'd heard they needed 24 hours notice, then a recent article in Flyer said you could just file your flight plan and turn up. To make sure, I phoned from Wellesbourne, but I don't think they understood what I was getting at...though they did tell me we'd be most welcome. The flying club at Manston says they needed 24 hours notice; one of the flying instructors there says it should be fine. This, we discover, is typical of flying in France - you can never find out just what you're meant to do!!!!
I fly the next leg, climbing to 5000 ft so that we can glide to land in the event of engine failure, and....because I can. Wx like this doesn't happen often, so why not. We land at Calais - no customs. Questions about what to do receive Gallic shrugs, so we give up and have lunch, then go up to the tower to get NOTAMs etc. We're planning to fly to Charleville, but it turns out they're closed!!! So are all the other small airfilds in that area; it seems we've picked the couple of days in the year when they want to do maintenance - at least, we think that's what they said. Eventually we decide to go on to Reims Prunay, and settle down to work out which of the many restricted areas that takes us through, and who we need to contact to find out the status of each one. Whoever said they're closed or you can fly under or over them all is wrong; in this area that's not true - unless you know how to get from under 800 ft to over 2500 ft to over FL55 in no time at all...and we're in a C150, not a helicopter. Anyway, maybe Lille FIS will sort it all out for us. We can hope.
So we leave, and get passed on to Lille. I call them - no reply. I try again, saying "Bonjour" very nicely - no reply. On the third attempt they tell me to "report coasting in"!!!! We are now a couple of miles from their airspace. Resisting the temptation to be rude, I tell them who we are and exactly where we are; that we are in France, not crossing the channel, and very close to them. Lo and behold, they talk to me, and clear us into their zone.
This sort of thing continues. Lille pass us to Cambrai, who control the restricted areas, and they route us around the super-fast nasties flying close to us. These restricted areas are very definitely active. We then get passed on to Paris Info, then Reims. In each case, sometimes they answer us, sometimes not. Sometimes I can't understand a word they say, and have to ask them to say again about three times. I feel like a new PPL all over again, and whoever said this was easy is talking crap!!!! It may be easy when you've done it for a while, and it may be easy at weekends or in a different area, but sorry folks - this was just not my definition of easy!!!!!!!
Eventually we get to Reims Prunay. It's a lovely little airfield, reminding me a bit of Welshpool, where I learned to fly - it too has a main road on the undershoot, and is surrounded by fields. But Reims is better than WPL in that it has a hotel on the site. It's a real aviators' hotel, with all the rooms named after famous aviators - a sort of French Sywell I suppose. There were only a couple of rooms left, so we didn't manage to get St Exupery or Lindburgh, but some French pilot we'd never heard of; ah well. The food was wonderful, like everywhere in France. We drink wine, gradually de-stress, and decide maybe it was all great fun after all. We then do a bit of route planning for the next day, sitting in the evening sun - Nancy for lunch, then Biberach in Germany. This involves climbing over 4000 foot mountains, so we hope the weather holds.
More later......