Airborne At Last

I was up early on Sunday morning as the weather promised to be favourable for a flight down to one of our local airfields at Welshpool.

All looked good on the Met Office web site and the notams (information briefs for pilots) were clear so I set off to get everything prepared for our flight. On arrival at Barton the sky was clear and blue, the plane had fuel and just needed checking over. So far, so good.

Steve called to say he’d be arriving at 10:15am so as soon as he made it to the plane we were ready to go.

We got strapped in and prepared to start the engine. I pressed in the starter and the propeller just barely moved as the battery struggled to "light the fire". Oh well, try again. Same result! I looked at Steve and we both thought our flight was over before we’d moved. "One more try" I said, with no real hope that the result would be any better. However, this time the engine fired and we were in business. Several weeks of inactivity had almost drained our battery, but not quite!

The weather can change very quickly and by now the blue sky had been replaced with an overcast of cloud and a brisk north-easterly wind. Still, no problem as we taxied out to Barton’s grass runway 09 Left. The headwind component should give us a good early lift off and climb gradient and this was confirmed as I saw an initial climb rate of 1000 feet per minute on the vertical speed indicator.

We routed over to Warrington to enter the Low Level Corridor, a piece of airspace that enables us to transit the Manchester and Liverpool control zones. A southerly heading took us down towards Winsford before we climbed from 1250 feet to 2400 feet and turned on track for Welshpool.

The weather ahead did not look as good as where we had come from and we had to descend to 1500 feet to stay under the cloud. The visibility to the South also looked poor. We decided to carry on for another ten miles and assess the conditions again. Five minutes later we had concluded that to attempt to go on into an area of high ground under the current weather conditions was not possible. I started to turn back towards the southern end of the low level route as Steve gave me an initial heading to steer of 040 degrees.

As we reversed our route the weather improved and we flew back home having been thwarted by the conditions only 15 miles from Welshpool. An overhead join to runway 09 left with a left hand circuit saw us established on final approach but despite my attempt to slow down as much as was safe, we were catching up a microlight ahead and had to go around. It’s all good practice though and another circuit had us again on final approach a couple of minutes later. This time I completed the landing and we rolled off the runway and put the plane back in the hanger. Hopefully the battery had a good charge and will be more likely to hold up for this weekend’s flying.

So all in all not a bad hour’s flying and satisfaction that we at last made it up into the air. We retired for chilli and chips in the clubhouse and met a couple of group members to discuss future flights. A trip to France could be on the cards for May. I’ll keep you posted.