Good morning prunners!
Thank you for everyone's replies to my post. I just thought that I would let you know that on saturday I successfully completed my trip to Ireland ... hurray! A friend and I flew from Sleap to Newcastle in Ireland. We were very lucky with the weather, and I was watching the weather like a hawk all week! We had some great views of Wales, and then it was really cool heading out over the coast, roughly 10 miles South of Caernarfon. We went via LIPGO. It was cool to see the Irish coastline. It was my first landing on grass, and I was a bit surprised at how slippery it was ... icerink springs to mind
. Newcastle was a nice airfield to visit, and we were made so welcome by John Nugent (Manager) and his staff. I wish I could have stayed overnight and enjoyed some of the legendary partying that the Irish are famous for
. I'd love to do a tour of Ireland someday.
When it was time to leave, we got airborne and asked for the flightplan to be opened up for our flight back. Dublin couldn't find it ....
. I had filed it through AFPex, and had a hardcopy with me, but they still couldn't find my flightplan ... agghhhh! After returning back to Sleap, I found out that my friend's dad had this problem too, and he nearly got interecepted by the military
. So it's not the first time that Dublin have not been able to find a filed flightplan. I was very surprised to found out that in UK you don't have to close a flightplan???? I triple checked this, as I always believed that you HAD to close a flight plan. On the outward journey Dublin closed it for us, so that was fine. I was told that here you don't have to close a flightplan, but I was worried that if you didn't, then SAR would be scrambled? I was told that this isn't the case. My point was 'what happens if you crash and die ... then you can't alert the authorites either'? No one knows and assumes that you got back safely as 'no news is good news'??? Apparantly you don't have to close your flight plan anymore because so many people forget to do it? I think (despite still being lowish hours) that this is a flawed system. I guess that we could have closed the flightplan with London Information before we changed back to Sleap????