francoflyers

Sue's Diary—Dogs vs Frogs

Spring has really arrived in the Limousin with blue skies and temperatures of 26° last week. The leaves are on the trees and everywhere looks beautiful. I am truly privileged to teach flying in this beautiful unspoilt part of France.

On the downside, Lucia is mowing the lawns daily as the grass grows so quickly.

During the last week, I have stayed close to the Limoges airport area as I have been doing some concentrated teaching with a lovely couple, Jason and Nicole.

This young couple originate from Australia and are currently living in The Hague.

Both served with the military in Australia, spending many hours in helicopters though not as pilots.

However, this previous experience helps with their training as they are already familiar with general aviation terminology as well as the basic flight instruments.

As Jason and Nicole have a baby son called Jack, they take turns at flying and childminding which seems to be working very well as both were ready to train in the circuit by mid-week and this is what we have been doing over the last few days.

Limoges Bellegarde is in class D airspace so we have to integrate with commercial IFR arrivals and departures as well as military training flights.

This provides excellent training for my students who become used to performing 360° orbits and extended downwind legs to make way for Ryanair or other IFR traffic. This gives them the confidence to fly into other large airports without undue concern.

Quite often, Ryanair and FlyBe flights have to wait until we have landed though the commercial flight crews usually give us a friendly wave.

I am delighted with the progress of my English Radiotelephony class for French pilots and I am now receiving enquiries from prospective students who are not even members of our club.

No problem. It is very rewarding to support French PPL holders in this way and I am sure that we will be able to accommodate a few 'outsiders'—by prior arrangement, of course.

The puppies are now six weeks old and have discovered how to bark!

We have a steady stream of visitors to see them as the dogs will spend another few weeks with their mother before transferring to their new owners. It is so nice to meet these people and to offer advice on bringing up these delightful dogs.

Now that the weather is warmer, the older dogs have been going for a daily swim in my neighbour's lake which is presently full of very noisy frogs whose 'mating' calls can be heard from a mile away!

Being bred for hunting, my dogs are swimming in all directions to catch the elusive frogs who are pretty good at diving out of trouble. However, the dogs never tire of this frog-hunting sport.

Sue's Diary—Bumps and Bruises

So much seems to have happened in the two weeks since I wrote my last diary.

On the first Saturday, the weather was poor so I decided to saddle up Khan and go for a long ride with the dogs in tow.

The countryside around here is remarkably unspoilt and natural so I rode for miles in the woods, over the rivers and around the pasture fields.

In fact, I was enjoying the experience so much that it seemed like a good idea to go for a fast gallop up a long field, temporarily forgetting that I am not so young and fit as when I was a steeplechase jockey!

So off we went with the dogs running happily behind us when the surge of excitement went straight to Khan's head causing him to give three huge bucks, depositing me on the ground, before galloping off at full speed in the direction of home.

So my golden day had turned a little sour as I was forced to  walk up a very steep hill and then wade through rivers on my homeward journey.

I finally arrived home to find that everyone had gone out looking for me on bicycles, horses and in cars.

Luckily, I was not badly hurt though a little bruised in both body and pride.

I have done a lot of flying recently, some of which has been quite interesting.

Elroy, Kate and their boys arrived for an Easter break and with the intention of seeing a lot of France by air.

One of our destinations was Nevers, to the North-East of Limoges.

Upon transiting the Avord area on the way there, the flight controller warned us that the winds were very strong at our destination airport.

We arrived to find a strong, gusting, crosswind but managed a good landing and then climbed to the tower to pay our very small landing fee. The controller spoke excellent English and gave us good advice regarding the best eating establishments in the immediate locality.

After an excellent lunch, we returned to our trusty Robin and flew south to the Clermont Ferrand area,

On the homeward leg, we crossed the huge Lac Vassiviere and then turned for Limoges.

We did not see another aircraft during the whole day.

Last Saturday, I went to the Limoges International dog show where 'Leko' won the open class and 'Blanchette' took third place in the female open class.

I was delighted to see one of the puppies from last year’s litter obtain her very first prize for her French owner. It poured with rain during the whole day so I did not even feel guilty for taking time off from flying.

During this week, I have been flying with Ben who arrived here for a flying holiday,

Ben had completed some PPL training in England so our first flight was to familiarise hm with the Robin DR400 and to view the reporting points around the Limoges CTR.

The Robin is very light and responsive compared to the Cessna and Piper aircraft Ben had previously flown and it also has a stick rather than a yoke. Pilots need to be very gentle with the aircraft though students usually become 'hooked' after a few hours as the DR400 is a delight to fly.

Ben was accompanied on our next flight by his father, Barrie, who is also pilot and the proud owner of a Stearman, a Yak and a Husky. 

We set off to see the famous Milleau Bridge but were forced to turn back, about 40 miles from our destination, when we encountered severe turbulence over the mountains. At times, we seemed to be doing aerobatic manoeuvres over the gorges.

On the way home, we had a thirty knot tailwind ands also required a bit of a detour to remain clear of a thunderstorm.

In all, we had an exciting day of flying despite feeling a little nauseous in the turbulence.

The following day was bright and calm without any turbulence so we enjoyed a gentle flight to La Rochelle where we had a superb lunch at a famous seafood restaurant in the old port.

Reluctantly, we returned home shortly after lunch because I had a student booked for the late afternoon slot.

As the French PPL syllabus is conducted completely in French, this causes some problems to French Pilots, when flying to Britain or other European countries, as the international language of aviation is English.

Many of the French club members have discussed this problem with me so I decided to help them  by running a series of one hour English-language lessons every Saturday morning.

Today, with a certain amount of nerves and trepidation, I presented my first English Radio Telephony class for the French students and Pilots at the club.

I was helped by Andrew Vine who is English but speaks excellent French which enabled us to get all of the information to the students without difficulty.

When Les King visited a few weeks ago, he kindly helped me to prepare the written course and audio recordings for which I must say "thank you Les" because today’s class was a great success.

The puppies are five weeks old today and now into the exploration stage—when the weather is warm they go outside into their run for a few hours of exploration, fun and play fights.

Tomorrow I start an intensive four-week PPL course with a husband and wife who are arriving from the Netherlands—life is never dull at NearlyHeaven.

 

Sue's Diary—Mayhem in the kitchen, calm at the AGM

The puppies are three weeks old today and have trebled their birth weight of 400 grams, which is excellent considering that Meg has ten mouths to feed!

At present we have only two puppies unsold. The others have new homes lined-up in Spain, Britain and several areas of France.

Now that the puppies are three weeks old, we have introduced cereals and milk as supplementary feeding. This causes mayhem in the kitchen as they manage to scatter their weetabix in all directions.

'Miracle' is nearly six months old and has now moved from the baby paddock to join the older horses in the larger field.

He is still drinking gallons of milk from a bucket but is more independent now and enjoys playing with the “big boys” as well as chasing the sheep whom he sees as the perfect-sized playmates.

Thanks to the extra hour of daylight in the evenings, I have managed to 'back' Pasha, the stallion who is the father of Miracle.

Pasha is now four years old and comes from a winning bloodline. It is therefore time to begin his training as either a showjumper or an eventer.

Phoebe has been training him on the ground and the time had come for someone to sit on his back for the very first time. That person, I decided, should be me.

The unexpected outcome of this 'terrifying' moment was that de did not even twitch his ear and just accepted me without a second thought. We have now progressed to walking and trotting around the paddock each evening when I return from the airport.

On the flying side, congratulations’ to Fiona Renton for completing her qualifying cross country. The local weather was dominated by a pressure system which caused poor visibility but this did not deter Fiona who managed to navigate without a problem.

Les King came on one of his 'flying visits' and, as always, offered his knowledge and expertise in helping me produce the English Radiotelephony audio which we will shortly be adding to the Francoflyers website, for the benefit of French flyers who wish to improve their English.

Les, not having flown much in the last year, needed to complete the balance of twelve hours flying for his SEP revalidation.

The original plan was to fly the Robin DR400-180 to England with another club member flying it back but, due to the poor weather forecast 'oop North', Les decided to stick around and complete the task locally.

On the first day, he managed a flight to La Rochelle in marginal VFR conditions and then paired up with newly-qualified Esteban for a trip to Muret, a small airfield to the South of Toulouse.

Last Sunday, being the first day of brilliant weather, they took a trip to Le Mans which was absolutely deserted with not a sound except for the 'roar of the crowd' from the world-famous race track next door.

On the way back, they stopped off at Châtellerault where a friend of Esteban's imports (in kit form), builds and markets the Alpi Pioneer ULM aircraft—www.silvair.fr

Les was lucky enough to be given a 'test drive' in this nippy and highly-manoeuvrable 2-seater which includes retractable undercarriage with electric flaps and trim.

Fuel consumption is around 17 litres per hour.

Like a high-performance sports car, the only real difficulty was getting into the thing.     

Stop Press

Last night's AGM of the Aeroclub de Limoges was a quiet affair and went smoothly compared with the mayhem of last year’s meeting—French people can turn very ugly when a meeting overruns by two hours and dinner awaits (faint cries of "fooood" were heard from the English contingent).

Our new President is Christian Dalbin who is presently joint Chief Flying Instructor and head of the engineering department.

Michel Kofyan has stepped down from this position to be Vice President of the Aero Club. Further news on this at a later date.