Originally Posted by
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I know this isn't quite the same thing, but take that twin Seneca (?) pilot who flew some journos into Bournemouth, showing them how easy it is to enter the country without any paper checks. This got onto the local TV. If he did this deliberately (being perhaps a paid up National Front member
) that's pretty bad, but he might not have done so. They might have set him up.
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I know the pilot in question the whole thing was a farse as the reporter was doing his over dubbing about how they hired an aircraft from cherbourg they showed them taxiing in bournemouth with a uk registered a/c, they then quoted how they flew under radar across the channel and then cut to him on finals on rwy26 talking to the tower( hardly a clandestine night mission into a grass field somewhere) finally they cut the interview so it portrayed a completely different slant on what the pilot was trying to say.
If they had reported that they took off and then returned to EGHH, that you report POB when you book out and when you rejoin, that the a/c in question was uk registered and based at EGHH and that if you take off with one POB and land with four, customs are likely to ask you to drop in and the fact that these a/c silly expensive to fly and that you can only seat a couple of people the article would have been far less news worthy. Oh yeh and truthful too!
And one final point they also forgot to mention that the pilot in question was a professional pilot based at Bournemouth and regularly flew both commercial and GA flights from there and was well known to all the ATCOs.