Yet another flying video - this must be getting boring! Jude and I went down to the airstrip and took off at 20:00hrs the other evening. We headed east to look at a ruined castle that we had seen from the road. After a while we headed back to the strip into the sunset. I have left the sound on this video rather than put music to it as it adds to the atmosphere of the flight. If you want to see these videos in a better quality then go to Youtube.com and look up my username, which is "bmwbikerinfrance", there you can click on the tab "watch in high quality" just below the video.
Yesterday, Sunday 10th August, we decided to fly from our airfield to one at Brantome, about 40 minutes away. We were going with Wim who was flying the Weedhopper, a 3 axis microlight. The only problem was that the Weedhopper flies at about 80 kmh flat out and we fly at about 80 kmh at our slowest speed. That meant that we had to stay behind Wim and had to spend our time going left and right to look at things while he went in a strait line. You will notice in the video that we pass him twice.
On this landing we had just returned from Brantome to the north. As it was the middle of a hot sunny day we had flown at 4000 feet where the air was much smoother and not affected by any turbulence. As we descended to land at Cendrieux we had to fly over the large expanses of plastic that cover the strawberry fields, these create loads of turbulence. The trees around the airstrip don't help much either.
Jude discovered that her camera also takes video so she took these short videos on Saturday. Apologies for the lack of music and loads of wind noise - you cannot even hear the engine! The first video is the take off which was filmed over my shoulder.
This second one is a landing.
And last but not least is a bit of air to air of Regis flying.
If you want to see the videos in a higher resolution, then go to www.youtube.com and look for my username which is BMWbikerinfrance.
We had met Phillipe at a couple of the airfields in the area and he had invited us to a picnic at his home airfield of Castillonnes (LF4722) on the 20th of June. The map above shows that it is not far from our home airfield (top of the black line). The route took us underneath the class D airspace for Bergerac airport.
A view over my shoulder of us about to take off from our field at Cendrieux, looking north. After about 30 minutes of gentle flying at around 2000 feet, we spotted our destination ahead. Jude had made sandwiches, but we were told that we could not eat them as a French picnic was proper food. Our host Phillipe had never flown in a weightshift microlight, so I put him into the back for a flight. The take off shows what 100 bhp can climb like in a modern machine, Pillipe liked it! After 14 minutes we were back for a short (30 meter) landing. I was then offered the chance to pilot the club 3 axis microlight, known as a Hurricane. We were soon into the air. Not as fast as mine or as much fun, but a flying experience anyway. We returned after about 20 minutes flying. It was a very nice little machine to fly, but I would not like to go back to a 65 bhp two stroke engine.
For the picnic about 30 people turned up and we sat at the long tables in one of the pictures above. The French are experts at good food and very welcoming people. Everybody had brought food to share, bread, home made pate, tomatoes, cucumber, sausages, cakes, and many more things, they were nearly all home made. The red wine flowed freely, but I stuck to water as I knew that I had to return to our airfield later.
We had a fantastic day. I hope that this post satisfies those of you who have emailed me asking where the next post is!
