Sunday 18 October 2009

Overwater Aerobatics and Formation Flight


7:00 am, Sunday morning, it's already time to get up.
On a normal day, I would stay in bed for like 10 min waiting for the next alarm to wake me up again. If you didn't know yet, french guys are quite lazy and I'm not an exception.
Today was different however, James was waiting for me at the Bournemouth Flying Club to go on a formation flight to Goodwood (Chichester Airfield).

Two flights in a row, what an awesome week-end that is !
We flew from Bournemouth Airport (EGHH), taking off on Runway 08 under some pretty bad weather conditions (Clouds SCT at 400 ft, 10k visi though) but it got better really quickly. We then went straight toward the East, overflying the beautiful Isle of Wight with G-ECON (Cessna 172) on our right wing, then Portsmouth, Hayling Island, Chichester and finally Goodwood (EGHR).

Goodwood is a four grass runway controlled airfield with some very nice aeroplanes. There was a beautiful Extra 200 waiting for its pilot to do some aerobatics.
It is actually an ex-RAF airfield and was also used by the USAAF in 1942 as a fighter airfield for the 308th and 309th Fighter Squadrons.
I don't know if there are some of the old Spitfire V5s in those big hangars but it definitely is a great place to visit.

This is the Bulldog T1 after landing at Goodwood.
As you can see, it wears the RAF three concentric rings symbol on the fuselage, and in fact is was used as a trainer aircraft not that long ago.

Powerplant is a 200hp Lycoming with variable pitch propeller, enough to enjoy some aerobatics as we did on the return leg back to Bournemouth.





2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great post. Great pictures with it too. You are so lucky to go flying so often.

LJ35 said...

Very nice pictures ! :-)