It had been a few weeks since my last flight so I did hour building: Local flight from RAF Henlow to Northampton.
It was a very cold morning yesterday and I got to the airfield and pulled the C150 out the hanger, checked it out, gave it a few primes and tried to start it. Nothing. Another prime, and another attempt or two…. nothing.
Hmmm I didn’t want to flood the engine so I called one of the guys who has been in the group for ages. He came round and worked his manage and a good 6 primes later …. we had life!
Now the next issue is I had never fueled up at RAF Henlow (or anywhere for that matter) so I next had to be taught how to fuel the aircraft.
Now finally it was time to take off and the runway in use was 31. Hmmm, I’ve never used that runway so I then had to work out the procedure for this runway.
So I took of and climbed to 3000ft as the Luton CTA starts at 3500 right above us. Also as it was cold the performance was pretty good.
I then flew past MK making sure not to fly through the instrument approach for Cranfield and then up towards Northampton.
This area is quite strange as people can be on so many different frequencies. You have Henlow, Old Buckenham, Cranfield, Sywell, London Information and Farnborough North all in the same area.
The toll of starting the plane showed it’s head around Northampton and we got the LV light. This plane has a generator rather than an alternator and the plane was already at minimum load, transponder, radio and becon. For this reason I decided to head back to Henlow.
Luckily the flight back was uneventful and I flew back close to Cranfield just incase.
All in all a nice flight and another 1.3 hours in the log book and I am now just short of 85 hours. I wanted to be at 100 before 2018 but being realistic that is just not going to happen.
Today the country is covered in snow so there’s no flying happening today.
