Fly-in-Spain trip report
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Fly-in-Spain trip report
I recently did 30 hours at Fly-in-Spain, and given the lack of recent information on here, I thought I would share my experiences.
This is a long post. Brew up and get some biccies before reading on
.
Pre-booking information:
Well, this is kinda why I’m writing this trip report – there wasn’t much and I had a LOT of questions which my eclectic conversations with the boss did little to answer. Eventually it became a case of “The pilot briefing notes will answer all your questions, but I’ll only send you those when you’ve booked and paid the down-payment”. Not great to be honest, but read on; it does get quite a bit better!
So, after much deliberation, I decided to take a calculated risk and paid the down-payment to secure the booking. I was going.
Booking:
When you book, you’ll be sent a PDF contract to fill in as well as a quote for the rental you have requested. Now, Fly-in-Spain is run by a German (possibly Austrian?) chap, in Spain, and is staffed by a mix of nationalities. The standard of English on the contract paperwork is 6/10. Whilst it would be somewhat arrogant of me to expect German speakers in Spain to speak perfect English, the ambiguous/slightly inaccurate language in what is a binding document (the contract) is disconcerting when there is a lot of money changing hands based on the wording.
You put down your credit card details on the form, from which your advance down payment of, gulp, €1200 is taken. Alternatively you can pay by SWIFT. Non-refundable, and the contract says in a number of places that payments are almost exclusively non-refundable. Gulp. All credit card payments (and the term “credit cards” is deemed by FiS to INCLUDE debit cards too!!) attract a 3% surcharge, so your €1200 will result in €1164 being credited to your account. ALL cards, 3% surcharge. That is on top of whatever fees your bank/credit card company charge you for non-sterling transactions. I got properly screwed on bank fees, so perhaps I should have been more careful about how and how much money I exchanged at a time. Be aware of this, it can run to ~£200 over the whole trip…
Once your down-payment has been processed, you will be emailed the pilot briefing notes, which are actually pretty good and thorough. It would do FiS no harm whatsoever to send these out prior to people booking. The briefing notes answered a LOT of my questions.
In preparation, I would make sure your flight bag is in order.
· Some bits can be got from FiS, like fuel strainers and VFR charts, but headsets are rented for a cost, and as far as I know they do NOT have any life jackets or rafts. The aircraft I rented (D-ERPC) had an onboard ELT.
· You need Enaire charts LE5 and LE6, primarily LE6 but if you go up towards Badajoz or Albacete, you’ll need LE5. They were actually cheaper at FiS than they are in the UK, but I got copies in before I went. The pilot shop at Booker normally keeps these charts in stock.
· You’ll also need to make sure you have the ole’ HiViz. If you are caught airside without it on, you’ll get minimum a shouting at, and apparently, potentially, a €300 fine from the airport Police!! Just wear it; no worries.
· GPS if you like it. Make sure you have a bunch of chargers for whatever you take!
Accommodation:
I stayed at La Cueva Park up by the racing circuit for about €50 a night room only (although this was a mega off season deal, I gather €120 a night is the high season rate). Very nice hotel, but there are cheaper options. The Ibis is basic but cheap, and FiS have a couple of apartments for about €150 a week. There was a guy staying in one of the apartments when I was there, and he certainly had no complaints about it. To get the discount rate for the Ibis, you have to get FiS to book for you. I didn’t want what (at the time) appeared to be a slightly loosely organised business looking after the roof over my head, so I sorted my own accommodation.
There is a hotel just by Jerez airport, which might appear convenient. I am informed that this hotel is also a knocking shop. Won’t suit most (unless you like your endings happy, I guess)!
Rental car:
You need a car. Seriously. Well unless you’re flying into Jerez and fancy taking your chances at the brothotel.
I got a cracking deal with BA as I went in February (off-season). Return flights LGW to Malaga and a Fiat 500 for 8 days for £180 all in, so I didn’t take FiS up on their offer of a cheap rental car. To be fair, none of the others were driving old beaters, so I guess the super-cheap FiS rental car deal must be OK.
Driving to Jerez:
Driving in Spain is just like driving over here really except people have a habit of just stopping in the road/roundabout, bunging the hazards on and going shopping… They have speed cameras too and they’re well hidden, although the big signs ought to be a large giveaway that you’re about to drive past a camera. Google it before you go and don’t get caught out. Its €100 for <20kph over, and €300 plus if you’re well over. Beware that some of the tunnels near Algeciras on the dual carriageway to Jerez have 100kph or even 80kph limits for short sections. It’s easy to not slow down enough and I did see people get nicked for it. Didn’t slow down for the brief 80kph limit? That’s +40kph and €300. And they will demand your licence details from your rental company. And your rental company will charge you an admin fee for releasing the information to the police. And the Police will write to your home address. If you don’t pay the fine, you risk arrest on your next trip to Spain. Well, that’s the worst that could happen…
The Peaje (toll roads) are pretty good actually, and not that spendy. From Malaga to Jerez on the posh roads is about €9 each way. Cheaper than France and cheaper than M6T!
Arrival at FiS:
I arrived at 1500 on a Saturday afternoon after a long day travelling (0430 get up) and went straight into my briefing and check-flight. I’d probably advise against this because I didn’t fly that well honestly. I was tired. Still, no problems and I was signed off after a 1h20 familiarisation of the local area with an instructor, a couple of stalls and a couple of touch and gos.
FiS office and briefing rooms:
FiS isn’t the most homely of places, I gotta say. It is a bit unkempt, but then even FTE’s place doesn’t look quite as glitzy up close as it does on their website..! When I arrived, there were no office staff. There were a few students and a few instructors milling around, most of whom were busy, so I got a good ignoring for the first ten minutes. After a while I did manage to get talking to someone and an instructor then appeared who, to be fair, was expecting me. However, no aircraft had been allocated to me. Luckily (and I believe it was pure luck) D-ERPC was available all week, and my instructor checked with the boss and allocated it to me exclusively all week. Ok, fine, but slightly unnerving. €1200 up front and a 1000+ mile journey, and they hadn’t even managed to allocate me a plane?
In the office/briefing rooms, you will find two computers which can be used for MET, NOTAM, AIP/charts etc, and they are hooked up to the printer/scanner/copier/fax machine. You can print off VFR arrival charts, aerodrome charts etc for your flights for free.
There are a couple of vending machines for coffees etc, but they’re a bit geriatric.
There is a slightly battered VHF radio handset so you can listen to the ATIS.
FiS does have a company frequency, but I never once saw the radio tuned to it.
Instructors:
The instructors are a really good bunch. They all speak very good English, and are a mix of native English speakers (UK, Eire, NZ, etc) and Europeans. It can help if you have a smattering of French, German, Spanish, but it’s really not vital.
Airport staff:
You’ll be liaising with the following airport staff at Jerez:
· Comms office. These are the folks you fax your flight plans to. After faxing, you call them up, and they speak really very good English. No worries here, and they’re a helpful, professional bunch. Don’t file for off blocks less than about 40 minutes prior – it’ll take you that long to water the horse, walk round, get through security and preflight the aeroplane.
· Security guards (Vigilante de Seguridad if I remember correctly) at gate E when you walk out to the aeroplane to go flying. They do not speak English, maybe the odd word. You walk up to the outer gate and ring the bell, they let you in, and you go into the xray/metal detector building. The guard needs to see your flight plan, he calls up the comms office to check you have filed it, and if all is well, you do the X-ray and archway thing as you do at Heathrow. First time through he may want to see your license too. That done, make sure you have your hi-viz on, and you walk out to the inner gate. He lets you through. You are now air-side.
· Fuel agents. CLH aviation are the fuel agent, and they generally speak no English. My advice here is just to use the fuel placard mentioned in the briefing notes. I’ll detail it later. If you do need a top up of fuel in a hurry, there is a number to call and my Spanish is “Hola, lleno AvGas D-ERPC, por favor” and the response will be machine-gunned back at you in Spanish! This is where I fall back on the good old, “Los siento, Senor, no hablo Espanol. Hablar usted Ingles?” Apologies if my Spanish spelling is off; I have never formally been taught Spanish, but even I got by!
· ATCOs: English is king. Spanish pilots do speak in Spanish over the radio, and the ATCO replies in Spanish. Perhaps a bit naughty/unhelpful, but hey, it’s their country, and their English is generally excellent. If you visit the smaller airfields like Trebujena or La Axarquia (by Malaga), you WILL need to speak good Spanish, as the FISOs there apparently do not speak English.
There are also airsports (para dropping etc) at both of those airfields, so be careful.
The flying:
Once you’ve untied the aeroplane, de-chocked, taken the fuel label off the prop etc, put it all in the aeroplane. You can do power checks and vitals before contacting TWR/GMC. The ATIS will tell you whether to contact TWR on 118.550 or GMC on 121.600 (I think). GMC seems only to be used when TWR is getting busy.
You may NOT taxi off the GA apron until cleared to do so. You will be given a squawk, which you’ll probably keep for the whole flight.
For departures on Rwy20 you’ll probably be told to hold short at E-3, and for Rwy02 it’ll probably be E-4. The runway is *vast* in a light single, and if you can’t get safely airborne using only 2/3rds of it, you have other issues!
There are two VFR reporting points, one called Echo, to the east over a settlement called Jedula, and one called Whiskey, to the west. I never actually went to Whiskey, so not sure what’s there. Not a lot, I gather. Those two points are at the periphery of Jerez CTR (class D). For Echo, you get airborne, head for the racing circuit and then follow the motorway to Jedula, beyond which you will see Arcos de la Frontera and some lakes. Navigating in the area to the east of Jerez is seriously easy. Whilst airmanship might dictate otherwise (i.e. cloud base), the local procedure is that outbound pilots climb promptly to 2100’QNH (2000’aal) and inbound pilots descent and maintain 1100’QNH at or before reaching Echo (Jedula). Again, finding your way inbound to Jedula visually from the east is very easy. If you’re coming in from northeast, you get funnelled in: east abeam Moron, Villamartin, lake, Arcos, Jedula, motorway, racing circuit, oh look, there’s the airfield at 1-2 o’clock J.
Once you reach point Echo (or Whiskey if you go west), Jerez tower will hand you off to Sevilla approach, 128.500 generally, although Seville have a number of frequencies so you will be handed off a few times en-route because the terrain does make comms tricky in some places. I don’t know what it is, but the Seville ATCOs mostly sound like they’re bellowing into a large biscuit tin. You get used to it, but initially there will be a ‘say again’ or three.
Inbound, ask Seville for QSY Jerez Tower 118.550 overhead Arcos, when approved flick to 125.650, get the ATIS and then call TWR BEFORE reaching Echo. TWR may ask you to hold over Echo if everyone’s on their way back in at the same time. Not onerous, just be organised about it.
Airspace:
It’s pretty relaxed actually. Much more so than the UK. OK, so there is a lot of CAS which can be off-putting initially, but fear not.
· Seville TMA: It’s a mixture of class D and class E airspace. So, in theory the gotcha here is that when crossing the li’l dotted lines between E sectors and D sectors, you need to ask for a VFR transit clearance. Honestly, in practise the controllers couldn’t be less bothered about it. I did the supposedly right thing of formally asking for a transit clearance 10 minutes prior to crossing with the standard message format. ATCO said ‘say again’, so I repeated it. He replied ‘Roger’. That was it. Roger… I was told by the instructor that as long as they’ve got you on frequency, and preferably on radar, they absolutely don’t care whether you ask for a D transit or just do it.
· CTRs. Different story. You MUST NOT enter a CTR without clearance. Mind you, they’re fairly pragmatic about this too. For instance, Malaga has a lot of high ground surrounding it, and you have to be very high to get radio contact prior to entry into the CTR. There is written procedure in the AIP that says if unable to raise them on radio, you may enter at low level at PW along the coast making blind calls until PW-1. When I crossed Malaga CTR I couldn’t get them due terrain to the west, so I asked if Seville could co-ordinate the clearance for me. They did, and I made a point of thanking the controller for that. Malaga approach were expecting me, and all was rosy. They are there to help and they really are helpful.
· D,R,P areas. These are also strictly enforced, and there are a LOT of them. Joyfully, many are NOTAM’d on rather than permanent. Check the AIP *thoroughly* for details. Quite often the notified times cover perhaps a whole month, but in the text you’ll see that perhaps they’re only hot for 1-2 hours a day. This means that SkyDemon etc will tell you they’re hot all the time, but if you read the whole NOTAM text rather than just looking at the graphics on the map, you’ll see they’re only on at certain times during that month.
· One thing: if you fancy going out towards the Balearics, be careful. There is some stroppy airspace out there; VFR sectors that will have you doing a 50nm water crossing below 2,500’. The Balearics appear to be quite difficult to get to safely VFR. FiS do not have lifejackets as far as I know. Check the charts regarding VFR sectors.
The views and general flying around:
It’s beautiful, and Spain is a big country. The area outlined by Jerez, VJF in the south and that bit of coast, Malaga CTR to the east, Jaen to the north east, Cordoba (nice for a visit) and Badajoz way the heck up on the Portuguese border is totally beautiful. Sorry England, but you’re beat hands down on this one. If, like me, you like to be high up, Jerez is great. FL75 was a regular thing for me. What with LTMA, airways and cloud cover, you don’t get to FL75 VFR very much in the UK…
For navigation backup I used SkyDemon with my Garmin GLO sat on the coaming. Worked very nicely. To be honest, though, navigating with a moving map isn’t really navigating IMHO. I used mine to verify that my PLOG headings (which I still plot manually with the whiz-wheel) made good tracks with the 2,5,10 min vector on Skydemon, checked the DI and just flew the heading. It’s accurate and it works. DR navigation is easy out there because outside the towns there’s not a lot, so the towns are really conspicuous. I would advise against getting too dependent on GPS. Sure, use it to verify once in a while, but certainly if you’re hour building, use the techniques you’ll be using in your CPL.
Fuel away from base:
‘Red’. Why do they always call it a ‘red’ in English... ‘Red’ is the Spanish word for ‘network’, and you will see the term “the red of Aena” bandied around. It works like this: FiS have a fuel account with CLH aviation. CLH aviation are the fuel agent at almost all of Aena’s airports (Aena are kinda like the Spanish equivalent of BAA). When you want fuel, you’ll either be met by the bowser or will have to taxi up to the pump. Someone will approach you with a PDA in their hand. You give them the account details (which are in the Tech Log for each aircraft), there is some fumbling about trying to find the account, then you get fuel, you sign the PDA screen, out comes a receipt, and you’re done.
There are a small number of airports where CLH aviation presumably is NOT the fuel agent, and thus you have to pay for your fuel yourself, present the receipt back at the office and get the cost refunded as you would in the UK. One slight problem with this, which is vaguely alluded to in the contract: FiS get CHEAP fuel. I think they pay about €1.30 a litre for it, when retail seems to be about €2.30 or more!! So, standard practise across UK flying clubs is that fuel uplifted away from base is refunded at a rate not exceeding that which it is sold at base. Normal practise, and FiS does the same. The gotcha is that FiS gets fuel MUCH cheaper than you and I, so if you uplift fuel at Granada or XXXXXX, you will only be credited €1.30 per litre of the uplifted fuel, despite having already paid for it through your wet-hire agreement with FiS. I was told that Granada is a pain of a place to visit anyway (slooooooooow fuel service and quite changeable weather), so I just didn’t bother. There’s PLENTY or airports within the ‘red’ of Aena…
Last thing on fuel. The aeroplanes have fuel dipsticks. Definitely use them. I made a habit of checking fuel contents after fuelling, and again after the flight. Within about 5 flights I knew damn well it was consistently drinking 23 lts/hr. Gives you more confidence if you’re looking at a 3 hour trip. Don’t plan to push a 150/152 further than 3 hours – it stops at 4h10.
Landing fees:
All landing fees are an extra cost, even at Jerez. Landings during training flights (denoted by ‘X’ in the flight type box on the FPL form) are ~€12 each, as are touch and gos. Landings during time builder/rental/touring flights (i.e. where P1 is a licensed customer rather than a student on solos or a FiS instructor) are €22.90 each, as are T’n’Gs. Such flights are denoted by a ‘G’ in the relevant box on the FPL form. The landing fees at other airports within the red (sorry…!) of Aena vary according to the size of the airport. I have a copy of the pricelist. Cordoba was about €12 on a type ‘G’ flight. Malaga is about €120 on a type ‘G’ flight!!
You don’t pay the fee when you’re there, it is added to your account as a charge. It’s all done through accounts. Pretty slick actually.
Again, there are a couple of airports where you gotta pay in person. Not sure which these are, but if you keep to those on the pricelist in the FiS office, you’ll not have to pay in person.
Badajoz:
Mil/Civ airfield. There’s a squadron of Northrop F5s operating out of there. The day I visited they had decided to start their MIL exercises several hours prior to the NOTAM’d start. So they we’re slightly grumpy when I arrived and there were F5s whooshing about. Still, they had my FPL, they knew I was coming, and I had respected the NOTAM. Shame they hadn’t, but they’ve got guns so I didn’t argue!
There was some ATCO confusion on the way back too, but I’d done nothing wrong and eventually I popped up on SSR and the controller realised that I was where I was supposed to be.
You have to cross some expansive high ground to get there from Cordoba area, and Cordoba is your best diversion if the weather over the hills deteriorates. You want 4,000’+amsl for this bit or you’ll be ploughing the valleys with the wheels. Yikes. The day I did it there was a howling headwind, grim turbulence and a gusty crosswind. All a lot stronger than was forecast. It’s a nice long flight, though, and calm seas a good sailor does not make. 3h04m block time, and I really wouldn’t push a 152 any further than that. Only reason I was confident enough to push on was because I’d kept a thorough record of fuel burn, and I knew full well it was burning 23lts/hr rich. Slightly scary flight.
Almeria:
Beautiful. Just beautiful. You need the weather to play a bit for this trip unless you’ve got the range and are comfortable to go out to sea to the south of Gibraltar. I climbed FL75, got Seville to co-ordinate a clearance to cross Malaga CTR along the coast VFR (anyone that pedals that old belief that VFR is banned in Malaga CTR is just plain wrong – I’ve done it and I can show you the photos), and routed From Echo direct Estepona/Marbella over the mountains. Then it’s just a fantastic blam along the coast taking in the sights of the Costa del Sol. The controller at Almeria was very helpful, I got a Sigame (follow-me) van and marshalled to parking, the fueller was a top bloke, the weather was lovely. The only slightly tricky bit was navigating my way around the airport. To get airside I went through security with the airline passengers, then there’s a side door with the big C on it in the duty free area. Fabulous trip, and safely within range of a C152 as long as you can get over the mountains above Estepona/Marbella. You need FL75+ to do this safely as the terrain is rugged and if the donkey stops, you need options. If you can’t get FL75+ on the way back to Jerez, it’s a long trek to the south around Gibraltar to cross the coast at VJF and then track 005 for Echo. In a 152 you will be dry as a Martini by Echo if it’s windy. If you’re gonna do this in a 150/152, the tank vent needs to be dripping when you turn the key unless the winds are favourable.
A note about Malaga CTR transits. In the high season when there are lots and lots of airliner flights in and out of Malaga CTR, you will indeed almost certainly be REFUSED a VFR transit of the zone because the controllers are flat out working the holiday traffic. Do bear this in mind, and I think this is where all the old wives tales about Malaga CTR being IFR only come from. It’s understandable, too; One of Spain’s main industries in tourism, so they look after the bulk of the tourists, of which only a handful are us GA types who like scudding about in the skies in old bean tins. I’d bet that by about May, VFR transits will be increasingly rare, probably until October? To be honest though, on a nice summer’s day, what’s stopping you transiting ABOVE the CTR? It extends to FL75, so if your steed can wheeze its way to FL85 in less than the time it takes you to grow old and wise, you can transit above, remaining in the Seville TMA.
Cordoba:
A nice short(er) trip to a nice laid back airport. The Spanish government have a bunch of firefighting planes here. They look like Ag Wagons or the like, but they’re a LOT bigger, and turbopropped. They practise by dumping huge amounts of water to one side of the runway. You’ll be making blind traffic calls, and refer to the approach chart for circuit directions and VRPs. I flew a deliberately circuitous route (I was hour building) there via VJF and Jaen.
Gemasolar heliostat:
To the southwest of Cordoba there is the Gemasolar plant. It is basically a large tower surrounded by several hundred polished mirrors (I pity whoever has to polish those!!) which track the sun and focus it onto the tower. Consequently, the top of the tower is extremely bright. Safe to look at, but you’ll see it from maybe 50-70 miles away on a sunny day, even if the viz is a hazy 25nmi. If you do manage to get lost (unlikely) the heliostat is a good reference for a bearing.
Shutting down back at base:
Standard class D stuff, you may be handed off to GMC on 121.600 as you vacate the rwy if TWR is busy. Either way, request taxi apron. Park, shut down (logging times of course), check fuel remaining, pop the label on the prop for fuel with the current fuel status facing forwards. So, if it needs fuel, the red side needs to show facing forwards, and it has ‘vacio - empty’ written on it. Once the bowser has visited as it does periodically throughout the day, they will turn the label round, so the green side faces forwards, and it says ‘lleno – full’ on it. If you look across from the office to the apron, if the red side is facing the cockpit of your aeroplane, it’s been filled. Simples. I did have one trip where they only filled to about 80 litres so I had them out again as it was the Badajoz trip and I needed it dripping. Always check, but you all knew that anyway…!
Groundschool, briefings, orientation, ‘annual customer fee’ etc:
The first time you fly with FiS, you’ll be required to receive an hour’s ground briefing on how the office works, to make sure you’re aware of and have read the pilots briefing notes. This is charged at about €35 per hour.
You will also be required to pay €50, effectively it’s a membership fee. Yep, I know. I don’t know why either…
The idea is that every time building pilot receives a 15 minute route brief before each flight from an instructor. In practise I didn’t need this, but it is included in the rental rate so you don’t get charged extra for it. Seems fair to me.
Every time you fly you enter the block times on the tech log, and every day the tech log is copied to the computerised billing system they use. If your account goes negative, you are asked to put more money in before being allowed to fly again. Again, seems fair.
Weather:
On the whole very good, but not infallible. I went in February, and we did have three totally unflyable days, but I am told that is rare. What is more common is radiation fog in the mornings if it’s calm, high pressure conditions. That said, it burns off fairly quickly, sometimes you get a layer of stratus as a result, but it generally clears up well before lunchtime.
Daylight hours:
Even in February, sunset isn’t until about 1830-1900lmt. The mornings are quite dark though. That is because Jerez is on the same longitude as Land’s End, but is on CET so the day is shifted back by a good hour compared to Greenwich.
Legally, night time starts at sunset and ends at sunrise, so you DO NOT get the extra 30 minutes like you do in the UK. Night VFR is legal in Spain.
The aircraft:
They have a couple of 150/152s, three or so 172s, a Pa28 Archer (looks fairly ancient, Hershey wings, square cornered windows), a Seneca, and rumour has it one or two PS28 sportcruisers, but they weren’t there when I was there. They may have been away as their maintenance is done at Trebujena, just to the northwest of the airfield. I can only really comment on D-ERPC.
D-ERPC was a good little aeroplane actually. Recent engine, some sort of bizarre sports exhaust silencer nailed to the bottom(!), pretty well everything worked although the Garmin 155 database was well out of date and some of the segments on the radio display were a bit iffy. It climbed to FL85 willingly enough although the climb rate was tailing off a bit up there, but that is to be expected. It burns 23lts/hr, which means you shouldn’t plan to do more than 3 block hours without refuelling. As an aside, I’d heartily recommend a noise cancelling headset if you’re going to do a lot of hours in a 150/152. I went for the jugular and retrofitted a DC H10-60 with ANR and gel ear seals. It’s deathly quiet in there.
Summing up:
Fly-in-Spain’s customer interface could use a brush-up frankly. The pre contract information is 5/10, and the query resolution is 3/10. Arrival and welcome was 5/10 for me, but I did arrive on a Saturday to be fair, and the office is only properly manned during the week (but they didn’t tell me this in advance either). Smarten the place up, engage more positively with new customers.
Pre-arrival briefing notes, 9/10. Helpful, well written.
Aircraft: D-ERPC gets 9/10. I’m not going to mark it down for being a 152 (they’re all noisy and not especially fast – I knew that before booking!). It only gets marked down slightly for having an out of date GPS database and for a few of the radio display segments being knackered. Still, it’s not the only aeroplane I’ve flown that did that… It did make frequency selection a task of detective work sometimes.
Flying and airspace: I think it pretty well has to be 10/10. It’s great.
Non-flying things to do: you need to speak reasonable Spanish if you want to do bars and local restaurants.
There you go! Up to date information on Fly-in-Spain, all of course in my humble opinion. I’ve tried to be fair throughout and I’ve given credit where it’s due. I do not purport any of these words to be ground truth – I’ve given my opinions and the facts as I saw them. Your mileage may vary.
Would I go back? Yes, actually I would. But I’d try to deal with Claudio, who is a very straightforward and decent chap, and is there most days.
Hope this helps,
Windy.
This is a long post. Brew up and get some biccies before reading on
.Pre-booking information:
Well, this is kinda why I’m writing this trip report – there wasn’t much and I had a LOT of questions which my eclectic conversations with the boss did little to answer. Eventually it became a case of “The pilot briefing notes will answer all your questions, but I’ll only send you those when you’ve booked and paid the down-payment”. Not great to be honest, but read on; it does get quite a bit better!
So, after much deliberation, I decided to take a calculated risk and paid the down-payment to secure the booking. I was going.
Booking:
When you book, you’ll be sent a PDF contract to fill in as well as a quote for the rental you have requested. Now, Fly-in-Spain is run by a German (possibly Austrian?) chap, in Spain, and is staffed by a mix of nationalities. The standard of English on the contract paperwork is 6/10. Whilst it would be somewhat arrogant of me to expect German speakers in Spain to speak perfect English, the ambiguous/slightly inaccurate language in what is a binding document (the contract) is disconcerting when there is a lot of money changing hands based on the wording.
You put down your credit card details on the form, from which your advance down payment of, gulp, €1200 is taken. Alternatively you can pay by SWIFT. Non-refundable, and the contract says in a number of places that payments are almost exclusively non-refundable. Gulp. All credit card payments (and the term “credit cards” is deemed by FiS to INCLUDE debit cards too!!) attract a 3% surcharge, so your €1200 will result in €1164 being credited to your account. ALL cards, 3% surcharge. That is on top of whatever fees your bank/credit card company charge you for non-sterling transactions. I got properly screwed on bank fees, so perhaps I should have been more careful about how and how much money I exchanged at a time. Be aware of this, it can run to ~£200 over the whole trip…
Once your down-payment has been processed, you will be emailed the pilot briefing notes, which are actually pretty good and thorough. It would do FiS no harm whatsoever to send these out prior to people booking. The briefing notes answered a LOT of my questions.
In preparation, I would make sure your flight bag is in order.
· Some bits can be got from FiS, like fuel strainers and VFR charts, but headsets are rented for a cost, and as far as I know they do NOT have any life jackets or rafts. The aircraft I rented (D-ERPC) had an onboard ELT.
· You need Enaire charts LE5 and LE6, primarily LE6 but if you go up towards Badajoz or Albacete, you’ll need LE5. They were actually cheaper at FiS than they are in the UK, but I got copies in before I went. The pilot shop at Booker normally keeps these charts in stock.
· You’ll also need to make sure you have the ole’ HiViz. If you are caught airside without it on, you’ll get minimum a shouting at, and apparently, potentially, a €300 fine from the airport Police!! Just wear it; no worries.
· GPS if you like it. Make sure you have a bunch of chargers for whatever you take!
Accommodation:
I stayed at La Cueva Park up by the racing circuit for about €50 a night room only (although this was a mega off season deal, I gather €120 a night is the high season rate). Very nice hotel, but there are cheaper options. The Ibis is basic but cheap, and FiS have a couple of apartments for about €150 a week. There was a guy staying in one of the apartments when I was there, and he certainly had no complaints about it. To get the discount rate for the Ibis, you have to get FiS to book for you. I didn’t want what (at the time) appeared to be a slightly loosely organised business looking after the roof over my head, so I sorted my own accommodation.
There is a hotel just by Jerez airport, which might appear convenient. I am informed that this hotel is also a knocking shop. Won’t suit most (unless you like your endings happy, I guess)!
Rental car:
You need a car. Seriously. Well unless you’re flying into Jerez and fancy taking your chances at the brothotel.
I got a cracking deal with BA as I went in February (off-season). Return flights LGW to Malaga and a Fiat 500 for 8 days for £180 all in, so I didn’t take FiS up on their offer of a cheap rental car. To be fair, none of the others were driving old beaters, so I guess the super-cheap FiS rental car deal must be OK.
Driving to Jerez:
Driving in Spain is just like driving over here really except people have a habit of just stopping in the road/roundabout, bunging the hazards on and going shopping… They have speed cameras too and they’re well hidden, although the big signs ought to be a large giveaway that you’re about to drive past a camera. Google it before you go and don’t get caught out. Its €100 for <20kph over, and €300 plus if you’re well over. Beware that some of the tunnels near Algeciras on the dual carriageway to Jerez have 100kph or even 80kph limits for short sections. It’s easy to not slow down enough and I did see people get nicked for it. Didn’t slow down for the brief 80kph limit? That’s +40kph and €300. And they will demand your licence details from your rental company. And your rental company will charge you an admin fee for releasing the information to the police. And the Police will write to your home address. If you don’t pay the fine, you risk arrest on your next trip to Spain. Well, that’s the worst that could happen…
The Peaje (toll roads) are pretty good actually, and not that spendy. From Malaga to Jerez on the posh roads is about €9 each way. Cheaper than France and cheaper than M6T!
Arrival at FiS:
I arrived at 1500 on a Saturday afternoon after a long day travelling (0430 get up) and went straight into my briefing and check-flight. I’d probably advise against this because I didn’t fly that well honestly. I was tired. Still, no problems and I was signed off after a 1h20 familiarisation of the local area with an instructor, a couple of stalls and a couple of touch and gos.
FiS office and briefing rooms:
FiS isn’t the most homely of places, I gotta say. It is a bit unkempt, but then even FTE’s place doesn’t look quite as glitzy up close as it does on their website..! When I arrived, there were no office staff. There were a few students and a few instructors milling around, most of whom were busy, so I got a good ignoring for the first ten minutes. After a while I did manage to get talking to someone and an instructor then appeared who, to be fair, was expecting me. However, no aircraft had been allocated to me. Luckily (and I believe it was pure luck) D-ERPC was available all week, and my instructor checked with the boss and allocated it to me exclusively all week. Ok, fine, but slightly unnerving. €1200 up front and a 1000+ mile journey, and they hadn’t even managed to allocate me a plane?
In the office/briefing rooms, you will find two computers which can be used for MET, NOTAM, AIP/charts etc, and they are hooked up to the printer/scanner/copier/fax machine. You can print off VFR arrival charts, aerodrome charts etc for your flights for free.
There are a couple of vending machines for coffees etc, but they’re a bit geriatric.
There is a slightly battered VHF radio handset so you can listen to the ATIS.
FiS does have a company frequency, but I never once saw the radio tuned to it.
Instructors:
The instructors are a really good bunch. They all speak very good English, and are a mix of native English speakers (UK, Eire, NZ, etc) and Europeans. It can help if you have a smattering of French, German, Spanish, but it’s really not vital.
Airport staff:
You’ll be liaising with the following airport staff at Jerez:
· Comms office. These are the folks you fax your flight plans to. After faxing, you call them up, and they speak really very good English. No worries here, and they’re a helpful, professional bunch. Don’t file for off blocks less than about 40 minutes prior – it’ll take you that long to water the horse, walk round, get through security and preflight the aeroplane.
· Security guards (Vigilante de Seguridad if I remember correctly) at gate E when you walk out to the aeroplane to go flying. They do not speak English, maybe the odd word. You walk up to the outer gate and ring the bell, they let you in, and you go into the xray/metal detector building. The guard needs to see your flight plan, he calls up the comms office to check you have filed it, and if all is well, you do the X-ray and archway thing as you do at Heathrow. First time through he may want to see your license too. That done, make sure you have your hi-viz on, and you walk out to the inner gate. He lets you through. You are now air-side.
· Fuel agents. CLH aviation are the fuel agent, and they generally speak no English. My advice here is just to use the fuel placard mentioned in the briefing notes. I’ll detail it later. If you do need a top up of fuel in a hurry, there is a number to call and my Spanish is “Hola, lleno AvGas D-ERPC, por favor” and the response will be machine-gunned back at you in Spanish! This is where I fall back on the good old, “Los siento, Senor, no hablo Espanol. Hablar usted Ingles?” Apologies if my Spanish spelling is off; I have never formally been taught Spanish, but even I got by!
· ATCOs: English is king. Spanish pilots do speak in Spanish over the radio, and the ATCO replies in Spanish. Perhaps a bit naughty/unhelpful, but hey, it’s their country, and their English is generally excellent. If you visit the smaller airfields like Trebujena or La Axarquia (by Malaga), you WILL need to speak good Spanish, as the FISOs there apparently do not speak English.
There are also airsports (para dropping etc) at both of those airfields, so be careful.
The flying:
Once you’ve untied the aeroplane, de-chocked, taken the fuel label off the prop etc, put it all in the aeroplane. You can do power checks and vitals before contacting TWR/GMC. The ATIS will tell you whether to contact TWR on 118.550 or GMC on 121.600 (I think). GMC seems only to be used when TWR is getting busy.
You may NOT taxi off the GA apron until cleared to do so. You will be given a squawk, which you’ll probably keep for the whole flight.
For departures on Rwy20 you’ll probably be told to hold short at E-3, and for Rwy02 it’ll probably be E-4. The runway is *vast* in a light single, and if you can’t get safely airborne using only 2/3rds of it, you have other issues!
There are two VFR reporting points, one called Echo, to the east over a settlement called Jedula, and one called Whiskey, to the west. I never actually went to Whiskey, so not sure what’s there. Not a lot, I gather. Those two points are at the periphery of Jerez CTR (class D). For Echo, you get airborne, head for the racing circuit and then follow the motorway to Jedula, beyond which you will see Arcos de la Frontera and some lakes. Navigating in the area to the east of Jerez is seriously easy. Whilst airmanship might dictate otherwise (i.e. cloud base), the local procedure is that outbound pilots climb promptly to 2100’QNH (2000’aal) and inbound pilots descent and maintain 1100’QNH at or before reaching Echo (Jedula). Again, finding your way inbound to Jedula visually from the east is very easy. If you’re coming in from northeast, you get funnelled in: east abeam Moron, Villamartin, lake, Arcos, Jedula, motorway, racing circuit, oh look, there’s the airfield at 1-2 o’clock J.
Once you reach point Echo (or Whiskey if you go west), Jerez tower will hand you off to Sevilla approach, 128.500 generally, although Seville have a number of frequencies so you will be handed off a few times en-route because the terrain does make comms tricky in some places. I don’t know what it is, but the Seville ATCOs mostly sound like they’re bellowing into a large biscuit tin. You get used to it, but initially there will be a ‘say again’ or three.
Inbound, ask Seville for QSY Jerez Tower 118.550 overhead Arcos, when approved flick to 125.650, get the ATIS and then call TWR BEFORE reaching Echo. TWR may ask you to hold over Echo if everyone’s on their way back in at the same time. Not onerous, just be organised about it.
Airspace:
It’s pretty relaxed actually. Much more so than the UK. OK, so there is a lot of CAS which can be off-putting initially, but fear not.
· Seville TMA: It’s a mixture of class D and class E airspace. So, in theory the gotcha here is that when crossing the li’l dotted lines between E sectors and D sectors, you need to ask for a VFR transit clearance. Honestly, in practise the controllers couldn’t be less bothered about it. I did the supposedly right thing of formally asking for a transit clearance 10 minutes prior to crossing with the standard message format. ATCO said ‘say again’, so I repeated it. He replied ‘Roger’. That was it. Roger… I was told by the instructor that as long as they’ve got you on frequency, and preferably on radar, they absolutely don’t care whether you ask for a D transit or just do it.
· CTRs. Different story. You MUST NOT enter a CTR without clearance. Mind you, they’re fairly pragmatic about this too. For instance, Malaga has a lot of high ground surrounding it, and you have to be very high to get radio contact prior to entry into the CTR. There is written procedure in the AIP that says if unable to raise them on radio, you may enter at low level at PW along the coast making blind calls until PW-1. When I crossed Malaga CTR I couldn’t get them due terrain to the west, so I asked if Seville could co-ordinate the clearance for me. They did, and I made a point of thanking the controller for that. Malaga approach were expecting me, and all was rosy. They are there to help and they really are helpful.
· D,R,P areas. These are also strictly enforced, and there are a LOT of them. Joyfully, many are NOTAM’d on rather than permanent. Check the AIP *thoroughly* for details. Quite often the notified times cover perhaps a whole month, but in the text you’ll see that perhaps they’re only hot for 1-2 hours a day. This means that SkyDemon etc will tell you they’re hot all the time, but if you read the whole NOTAM text rather than just looking at the graphics on the map, you’ll see they’re only on at certain times during that month.
· One thing: if you fancy going out towards the Balearics, be careful. There is some stroppy airspace out there; VFR sectors that will have you doing a 50nm water crossing below 2,500’. The Balearics appear to be quite difficult to get to safely VFR. FiS do not have lifejackets as far as I know. Check the charts regarding VFR sectors.
The views and general flying around:
It’s beautiful, and Spain is a big country. The area outlined by Jerez, VJF in the south and that bit of coast, Malaga CTR to the east, Jaen to the north east, Cordoba (nice for a visit) and Badajoz way the heck up on the Portuguese border is totally beautiful. Sorry England, but you’re beat hands down on this one. If, like me, you like to be high up, Jerez is great. FL75 was a regular thing for me. What with LTMA, airways and cloud cover, you don’t get to FL75 VFR very much in the UK…
For navigation backup I used SkyDemon with my Garmin GLO sat on the coaming. Worked very nicely. To be honest, though, navigating with a moving map isn’t really navigating IMHO. I used mine to verify that my PLOG headings (which I still plot manually with the whiz-wheel) made good tracks with the 2,5,10 min vector on Skydemon, checked the DI and just flew the heading. It’s accurate and it works. DR navigation is easy out there because outside the towns there’s not a lot, so the towns are really conspicuous. I would advise against getting too dependent on GPS. Sure, use it to verify once in a while, but certainly if you’re hour building, use the techniques you’ll be using in your CPL.
Fuel away from base:
‘Red’. Why do they always call it a ‘red’ in English... ‘Red’ is the Spanish word for ‘network’, and you will see the term “the red of Aena” bandied around. It works like this: FiS have a fuel account with CLH aviation. CLH aviation are the fuel agent at almost all of Aena’s airports (Aena are kinda like the Spanish equivalent of BAA). When you want fuel, you’ll either be met by the bowser or will have to taxi up to the pump. Someone will approach you with a PDA in their hand. You give them the account details (which are in the Tech Log for each aircraft), there is some fumbling about trying to find the account, then you get fuel, you sign the PDA screen, out comes a receipt, and you’re done.
There are a small number of airports where CLH aviation presumably is NOT the fuel agent, and thus you have to pay for your fuel yourself, present the receipt back at the office and get the cost refunded as you would in the UK. One slight problem with this, which is vaguely alluded to in the contract: FiS get CHEAP fuel. I think they pay about €1.30 a litre for it, when retail seems to be about €2.30 or more!! So, standard practise across UK flying clubs is that fuel uplifted away from base is refunded at a rate not exceeding that which it is sold at base. Normal practise, and FiS does the same. The gotcha is that FiS gets fuel MUCH cheaper than you and I, so if you uplift fuel at Granada or XXXXXX, you will only be credited €1.30 per litre of the uplifted fuel, despite having already paid for it through your wet-hire agreement with FiS. I was told that Granada is a pain of a place to visit anyway (slooooooooow fuel service and quite changeable weather), so I just didn’t bother. There’s PLENTY or airports within the ‘red’ of Aena…
Last thing on fuel. The aeroplanes have fuel dipsticks. Definitely use them. I made a habit of checking fuel contents after fuelling, and again after the flight. Within about 5 flights I knew damn well it was consistently drinking 23 lts/hr. Gives you more confidence if you’re looking at a 3 hour trip. Don’t plan to push a 150/152 further than 3 hours – it stops at 4h10.
Landing fees:
All landing fees are an extra cost, even at Jerez. Landings during training flights (denoted by ‘X’ in the flight type box on the FPL form) are ~€12 each, as are touch and gos. Landings during time builder/rental/touring flights (i.e. where P1 is a licensed customer rather than a student on solos or a FiS instructor) are €22.90 each, as are T’n’Gs. Such flights are denoted by a ‘G’ in the relevant box on the FPL form. The landing fees at other airports within the red (sorry…!) of Aena vary according to the size of the airport. I have a copy of the pricelist. Cordoba was about €12 on a type ‘G’ flight. Malaga is about €120 on a type ‘G’ flight!!
You don’t pay the fee when you’re there, it is added to your account as a charge. It’s all done through accounts. Pretty slick actually.
Again, there are a couple of airports where you gotta pay in person. Not sure which these are, but if you keep to those on the pricelist in the FiS office, you’ll not have to pay in person.
Badajoz:
Mil/Civ airfield. There’s a squadron of Northrop F5s operating out of there. The day I visited they had decided to start their MIL exercises several hours prior to the NOTAM’d start. So they we’re slightly grumpy when I arrived and there were F5s whooshing about. Still, they had my FPL, they knew I was coming, and I had respected the NOTAM. Shame they hadn’t, but they’ve got guns so I didn’t argue!
There was some ATCO confusion on the way back too, but I’d done nothing wrong and eventually I popped up on SSR and the controller realised that I was where I was supposed to be.
You have to cross some expansive high ground to get there from Cordoba area, and Cordoba is your best diversion if the weather over the hills deteriorates. You want 4,000’+amsl for this bit or you’ll be ploughing the valleys with the wheels. Yikes. The day I did it there was a howling headwind, grim turbulence and a gusty crosswind. All a lot stronger than was forecast. It’s a nice long flight, though, and calm seas a good sailor does not make. 3h04m block time, and I really wouldn’t push a 152 any further than that. Only reason I was confident enough to push on was because I’d kept a thorough record of fuel burn, and I knew full well it was burning 23lts/hr rich. Slightly scary flight.
Almeria:
Beautiful. Just beautiful. You need the weather to play a bit for this trip unless you’ve got the range and are comfortable to go out to sea to the south of Gibraltar. I climbed FL75, got Seville to co-ordinate a clearance to cross Malaga CTR along the coast VFR (anyone that pedals that old belief that VFR is banned in Malaga CTR is just plain wrong – I’ve done it and I can show you the photos), and routed From Echo direct Estepona/Marbella over the mountains. Then it’s just a fantastic blam along the coast taking in the sights of the Costa del Sol. The controller at Almeria was very helpful, I got a Sigame (follow-me) van and marshalled to parking, the fueller was a top bloke, the weather was lovely. The only slightly tricky bit was navigating my way around the airport. To get airside I went through security with the airline passengers, then there’s a side door with the big C on it in the duty free area. Fabulous trip, and safely within range of a C152 as long as you can get over the mountains above Estepona/Marbella. You need FL75+ to do this safely as the terrain is rugged and if the donkey stops, you need options. If you can’t get FL75+ on the way back to Jerez, it’s a long trek to the south around Gibraltar to cross the coast at VJF and then track 005 for Echo. In a 152 you will be dry as a Martini by Echo if it’s windy. If you’re gonna do this in a 150/152, the tank vent needs to be dripping when you turn the key unless the winds are favourable.
A note about Malaga CTR transits. In the high season when there are lots and lots of airliner flights in and out of Malaga CTR, you will indeed almost certainly be REFUSED a VFR transit of the zone because the controllers are flat out working the holiday traffic. Do bear this in mind, and I think this is where all the old wives tales about Malaga CTR being IFR only come from. It’s understandable, too; One of Spain’s main industries in tourism, so they look after the bulk of the tourists, of which only a handful are us GA types who like scudding about in the skies in old bean tins. I’d bet that by about May, VFR transits will be increasingly rare, probably until October? To be honest though, on a nice summer’s day, what’s stopping you transiting ABOVE the CTR? It extends to FL75, so if your steed can wheeze its way to FL85 in less than the time it takes you to grow old and wise, you can transit above, remaining in the Seville TMA.
Cordoba:
A nice short(er) trip to a nice laid back airport. The Spanish government have a bunch of firefighting planes here. They look like Ag Wagons or the like, but they’re a LOT bigger, and turbopropped. They practise by dumping huge amounts of water to one side of the runway. You’ll be making blind traffic calls, and refer to the approach chart for circuit directions and VRPs. I flew a deliberately circuitous route (I was hour building) there via VJF and Jaen.
Gemasolar heliostat:
To the southwest of Cordoba there is the Gemasolar plant. It is basically a large tower surrounded by several hundred polished mirrors (I pity whoever has to polish those!!) which track the sun and focus it onto the tower. Consequently, the top of the tower is extremely bright. Safe to look at, but you’ll see it from maybe 50-70 miles away on a sunny day, even if the viz is a hazy 25nmi. If you do manage to get lost (unlikely) the heliostat is a good reference for a bearing.
Shutting down back at base:
Standard class D stuff, you may be handed off to GMC on 121.600 as you vacate the rwy if TWR is busy. Either way, request taxi apron. Park, shut down (logging times of course), check fuel remaining, pop the label on the prop for fuel with the current fuel status facing forwards. So, if it needs fuel, the red side needs to show facing forwards, and it has ‘vacio - empty’ written on it. Once the bowser has visited as it does periodically throughout the day, they will turn the label round, so the green side faces forwards, and it says ‘lleno – full’ on it. If you look across from the office to the apron, if the red side is facing the cockpit of your aeroplane, it’s been filled. Simples. I did have one trip where they only filled to about 80 litres so I had them out again as it was the Badajoz trip and I needed it dripping. Always check, but you all knew that anyway…!
Groundschool, briefings, orientation, ‘annual customer fee’ etc:
The first time you fly with FiS, you’ll be required to receive an hour’s ground briefing on how the office works, to make sure you’re aware of and have read the pilots briefing notes. This is charged at about €35 per hour.
You will also be required to pay €50, effectively it’s a membership fee. Yep, I know. I don’t know why either…
The idea is that every time building pilot receives a 15 minute route brief before each flight from an instructor. In practise I didn’t need this, but it is included in the rental rate so you don’t get charged extra for it. Seems fair to me.
Every time you fly you enter the block times on the tech log, and every day the tech log is copied to the computerised billing system they use. If your account goes negative, you are asked to put more money in before being allowed to fly again. Again, seems fair.
Weather:
On the whole very good, but not infallible. I went in February, and we did have three totally unflyable days, but I am told that is rare. What is more common is radiation fog in the mornings if it’s calm, high pressure conditions. That said, it burns off fairly quickly, sometimes you get a layer of stratus as a result, but it generally clears up well before lunchtime.
Daylight hours:
Even in February, sunset isn’t until about 1830-1900lmt. The mornings are quite dark though. That is because Jerez is on the same longitude as Land’s End, but is on CET so the day is shifted back by a good hour compared to Greenwich.
Legally, night time starts at sunset and ends at sunrise, so you DO NOT get the extra 30 minutes like you do in the UK. Night VFR is legal in Spain.
The aircraft:
They have a couple of 150/152s, three or so 172s, a Pa28 Archer (looks fairly ancient, Hershey wings, square cornered windows), a Seneca, and rumour has it one or two PS28 sportcruisers, but they weren’t there when I was there. They may have been away as their maintenance is done at Trebujena, just to the northwest of the airfield. I can only really comment on D-ERPC.
D-ERPC was a good little aeroplane actually. Recent engine, some sort of bizarre sports exhaust silencer nailed to the bottom(!), pretty well everything worked although the Garmin 155 database was well out of date and some of the segments on the radio display were a bit iffy. It climbed to FL85 willingly enough although the climb rate was tailing off a bit up there, but that is to be expected. It burns 23lts/hr, which means you shouldn’t plan to do more than 3 block hours without refuelling. As an aside, I’d heartily recommend a noise cancelling headset if you’re going to do a lot of hours in a 150/152. I went for the jugular and retrofitted a DC H10-60 with ANR and gel ear seals. It’s deathly quiet in there.
Summing up:
Fly-in-Spain’s customer interface could use a brush-up frankly. The pre contract information is 5/10, and the query resolution is 3/10. Arrival and welcome was 5/10 for me, but I did arrive on a Saturday to be fair, and the office is only properly manned during the week (but they didn’t tell me this in advance either). Smarten the place up, engage more positively with new customers.
Pre-arrival briefing notes, 9/10. Helpful, well written.
Aircraft: D-ERPC gets 9/10. I’m not going to mark it down for being a 152 (they’re all noisy and not especially fast – I knew that before booking!). It only gets marked down slightly for having an out of date GPS database and for a few of the radio display segments being knackered. Still, it’s not the only aeroplane I’ve flown that did that… It did make frequency selection a task of detective work sometimes.
Flying and airspace: I think it pretty well has to be 10/10. It’s great.
Non-flying things to do: you need to speak reasonable Spanish if you want to do bars and local restaurants.
There you go! Up to date information on Fly-in-Spain, all of course in my humble opinion. I’ve tried to be fair throughout and I’ve given credit where it’s due. I do not purport any of these words to be ground truth – I’ve given my opinions and the facts as I saw them. Your mileage may vary.
Would I go back? Yes, actually I would. But I’d try to deal with Claudio, who is a very straightforward and decent chap, and is there most days.
Hope this helps,
Windy.
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Midlands
Posts: 336
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Interesting post Windy. I'm way past the HB stage now, but did look at F-i-S at the time, but opted for the US (SoCal) in the end - seem to recall flying in Spain wasn't that much cheaper than the UK at the time (2007), but I appreciate things may have changed. I know the area very well and it is beautiful as you say. Is Hans (the German) still there?
HW
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