When I was instructing, a long time ago now, I took a week off in Summer to take a 172 with a friend of mine to a remote strip. We hung up a "joyflight" shingle, and did a week's worth of tourist joyflights, refeulling from a couple of drums.
Now this was under a charter AOC, with the airfield owner's permission et etc - all very legal.
At the end of a fun week, we had a couple of friends down at the strip, and decided to go for a jolly up the coast, to a well known tourist site. Flying aorund the site, my friend and I decided to land in an adjacent paddock, for a closer look.
Prec search and landing conducted - all as we taught and had learned (and the two girls in the back were students at the time), with the final check pass at 50 feet. On landing it was amazing how different the surface was to the expectation - quite a slope (it looked level from 50 feet) and pretty rough. Pulling the aircraft up, while our passengers were wandering around we had a serious discussion on whether we could actually get out of the paddock at all - uphill and into the stiff wind, or downhill, with a tail wind? In the end we compromised, taking off on an angle down the hill.
One of my "more nervous" times, watching the airspeed
creep up the guage, with the windscreen full of bouncing sheep bums (there was a flock in the field, running away from us), and finally managing to "jump" the fence by applying full flap at the end of the run. Bit of an eye opener, that
Bloody good fun though
