Le Tour avec Le Machine!

It`s great being a private pilot. Suddenly there`s no need to travel using "no frill airlines" for your holidays, and rather then a "fly-drive" holiday, post-ppl trips turn into "fly yourself" holidays ......
And so I jumped at the chance when a fellow AAA graduate, Mark "the machine" Nulty offered a seat on his forthcoming trip. The Machine got his ppl in two weeks in San Diego whilst I was out there. It was an incredible feat, doing all the flying and exams, plus night rating in that time was surely a super human feat, and the way he kept bashing those exams passes out was just like a machine - and hence the name stuck. Mark owns a share in G-BPVA (VA for short) a lovely C172 in Barton near Manchester, and he had it booked for 10 days in early August for a trip south through France to the Cote D`Azure and back - and of course was needing a wingman.

So a route was born and here it is. We`ll depart Barton bright and early on the 30th July and head down to the Isle of Wight to Sandown for a bacon sarnie, before pushing over the Channel heading for an airport in the heart of France called Chatearoux Deols. This should take 4 hours flying time in all, and therefore we should have plenty of time to get adjusted to the "French ATC" if they aren`t on strike! This airport will be our first over night stop. We`ll be "winging" the accomodation and may bung a tent in the bag depending on weight or make do with B&B`s on route. We`ll also need to organise customs at this airport, as this is mandatory for any cross borders flight.
After a few glasses of vin rouge, the next morning we`ll depart south for Marsaille, a major international airport. Flying here at Sola, it shouldn`t be too tricky for us to get in as i`ll be used to the hurly burly of big jets. Both mine and Marks skills should complement each other nicely as he is well accustomed to short field take offs and landings from Bartons boggy grass runway. The only sticking point maybe the fact that VA only has a Mode A Transponder and not an altitude indicating Mode C one - we are hoping that by filing flight plans for each leg we will get approval for this and will have to make do with reporting level on a regular basis! From Marsaille we`ll head to Nice and buzz past Monaco and possibly into Italy for a day trip, before heading Westwards to La Rochelle. We`ll need to fill up VA with some gogo juice on the way so we plan to pop into Perigeux on our way.

The following day we`ll head up the westerly coast to an island just outside of Brest and to the airport called Ouessant we`re we`ll overnight and plan our trip the next day back to blighty. From Ouessant we`ll route to St Marys on the Isle of Scily, this maybe the most challenging leg as we will need to rely heavily on our GPS as it will be across a large expanse of water (lifejackets on!). If the weather is a problem then we will head to Penzance as an alternate. We`ll then head back to Barton via Haverfordwest and Caernafon in Wales.

In all we think the trip will take between 5 and 6 days. It`s a total distance of 1800nm`s so between 20-25hrs in the saddle depending on winds. I can`t wait. I`ve got two great trips to look forward to in the next 5 months with two great pilots and friends.......now i just need to save some money to finance it all!!!!!