It’s a typical Wednesday afternoon, sitting at my desk writing emails, joining calls and fighting fires then in the background my phone beeps with a message from the flying chat group. Something along the lines of “Just seen the weather forecast for the weekend, it’s looking flyable, anyone around?” then all of a sudden there is a cacophony of beeps as the rest of the group starts brainstorming ideas where to go, about 10 mins later its quiet again.
Thursday goes by without a single beep
Friday afternoon roles around and off we go again, “wx is looking good tomorrow guys”, “how about Cromer”, “How about Skeggy”, “How about Fenland”, “Not been to Sandown for a while”, “Beccles does a great breakfast”. But no decision. Then about 9pm it kicks off again, let’s meet at your place and decide from there or we could meet in the air, what time tomorrow…. The questions and ideas are never-ending.
One brave soul says let’s meet in the air at 9:30am and go to a completely different place, in this case, it is Stones Farm in Essex not too far from the Eastern TMZ of Stansted. Yeah, let’s do it.
First thing on Saturday I looked on Sky Demon and gave the owner Martin a call to request PPR. Glad I did as it’s got other airfields within the circuit and you could easily set down in the wrong place. A quick call to Brian who is coming in from a different airfield to convey the briefing and confirm we will meet in the air near Wimpole Hall at 10am ish.
I get to the airfield, pre-flight the machine get everything ready, turn the key, and press the button – click. The battery is dead because I forgot to switch it off last week. Luckily, I had the jump pack in the pod bag and before long I was off the ground. The electrics are all working fine and the LED is green so it must be on charge.
We met up in the sky which is surprisingly easy when Pilot Aware is running and flew to the designation. I decided to fly at about 7000ft and look at the clouds from above and catch the last of the summer sun, the tailwind up there is pretty good too. Martin’s briefing paid off, we landed at the right place but could easily have turned from Base Leg to Final a few hundred meters early and gone to the wrong place. Greeted at the airfield with an excellent intro to the area then pointed along a farm track to the village farm shop which just so happens to have a top-notch farm shop. Couldn’t refuse the ploughman’s which certainly provided ample energy needed for the 5-minute wander back to the planes.
We got suited up and shouted those two special words “CLEAR PROP” and click….. So much for the battery being charged on the way, it was dead! Out comes the jump pack and a few minutes later the wheels left the ground.
Here I am back at my desk, a new battery has arrived and will be fitted when I shut down the laptop this evening. Just goes to show that a lead acid battery must never be run down to zero as it simply won’t hold charge again – lesson learned! For anyone interested, it’s a VARTA YT12A-BS I am using in the GTR from Tayna.
Can’t wait to get back to Stones Farm and try out the pub in the village. Until next week, or Wednesday afternoon when the phone starts beeping again. It’s the definition of Déjà_vu.
Happy Landings,
Jinx