Aero Expo 2006

After attending the "Fly" exhibition at Earls Court earlier in the year, I decided to book a slot to fly into Wycombe Air Park (Booker) for Aero Expo 2006. My slot time was set for 11am and all my preparations had proceeded well to make an on-time arrival look likely.

I was sharing this trip with Steve who rode in the right hand seat and acted as radio operator and navigator, although I've flown the route so many times now that a map is almost redundant.
We followed the Low Level Route to Winsford, over to Lichfield, down to Daventry, then Henton NDB and direct to Booker. The weather between Lichfield and Daventry closed in with visibilty going down to around 6 or 7 kilometers but perfectly flyable.

We were dead on time for our slot time and as we dialed up the ATC frequency it became clear many other aircraft were also arriving at 11am! Were were told to expect a right base join but eventually ended up overhead after the circuit became very congested. Not to worry, we landed on 24 tarmac and followed a very nice 180 Arrow to the parking area where the marshallers had directed us. A people carrier arrived after a ten minutes or so to transport us to the check in area and we were soon in the exhibition area.

I enjoyed a look at the Cirrus SR22G2 and had a good brief on it's features from Nick Tarratt a Director of Cirrus UK who fired up the avionics and was very helpful in giving me an understanding of some of it's capabilities. He could only touch on what it was able to do in 15 minutes or so! Very impressive and I want to take a demo flight when I can.

Cirrus Aeroplane complete with its "glass cockpit"

I also looked at the new version of our 1972 Piper Arrow and although the avionics were updated the airframe was exactly the same even though 30 plus years had passed. I guess if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I'd still like to have one of course but I think I'd like a new challenge with either the Cirrus or Piper Saratoga which I also sat in and thought felt very good and business like with high quality written all over it. These aeroplanes have 300 hp engines and would be a good challenge to operate but the Piper at over $650,000 is a little out of my price range! Still, it's good to dream.

The new Arrow looks just like the old... apart from another glass cockpit and lots of switches and knobs to play with.

The Turbo Saratoga was my overall favourite although the Cirrus ran it very close. These are brand new aircraft and make our Arrow look very tired in comparison.

Piper's six seat Saratoga impressed me a lot!

The exhibition halls were full of businessess plying their trade. You could buy flight equipment, global postioning receivers, standby power units, in fact anything to do with flying. There were cut outs of engines and as well as aircraft for sale you could also pick up a helicopter if you so wished. There were flying schools represented too where a rating could easily be booked.

Overall it was an interesting trip out and we departed for Manchester mid afternoon to find the en route weather was much improved from what we saw on the way down earlier in the morning. Would I go again? Yes.