Tag: in-flight photo

Photo File – Looking Out Of 2018

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By me
All photos me too, copyrighted

Once again, regular as clockwork, the winter calm has come down on the Croatian GA scene. Even though the weather has been eerily cooperative of late – hardly any snow even – light aircraft ops have been few and far in between, most machines either having their long sleep in the hangar or flying up and down to the coast for the season. So, while I wait for things to start up again, here are a couple of highlights from my autumn/winter/pre-spring “getting paid to stare out the window” collection 🙂 .

A bit of anticyclonic weather here, some freezing temperatures there, mix it all in with a dawn arrival and voilà – one very happy first officer!

Getting up at 4 AM to go to work: not really a fan. Greeting the dawn like this as a consequence: like it very much! Layer cloud, rain, icing, fog and clear skies – and all of them happening at the same time. Damn I love this job!

For some reason, getting stuck in a dawn holding pattern went down pretty well with me this morning…

Bursting out of a deep cloud bank into a windy and turbulent seaside morning. With surface winds hovering around the 30 knot mark – and winds aloft in treble figures even at turboprop altitudes – the views were guaranteed to be impressive…

Enjoying a spot of late afternoon cloudsurfing near the Eternal City as a wall of nasty thunderstorms starts to build over Naples out in the distance…

Soaking up the majesty of Italy’s Gran Sasso mountain range as we zip past on our way west. Dominated by the Corno Grande – the country’s highest non-Alpine peak – Gran Sasso is perhaps most famous as the setting of Operation Eiche, an audacious 1943 airborne assault by German special forces to rescue Benito Mussolini, then being held under arrest in a hotel on the Campo Imperatore highlands (the depression in the center). Having reached the site in assault gliders, the attacking troops had quickly overwhelmed the defenders and shuffled Mussolini to a waiting Fieseler Storch, which – though dangerously overloaded – managed to eventually lift off and head for the Pratica di Mare airbase, located very near Rome’s present Fiumicino Airport. In a particular twist, our flight path that day had taken us along almost exactly the same route, a trip that took us 15 minutes in a warm cockpit with tea in hand – as opposed to the harrowing hour it took the Storch barely clinging to the air in bitterly cold winter (not to mention having Mussolini as a passenger and Hitler waiting anxiously in Berlin for news)… nowadays the entire range is a designated national park, known for its pristine nature and ski slopes – as well as the world’s largest underground particle research laboratory (the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso), and an out-station of the Rome Observatory tracking and cataloging orbital bodies passing near the Earth (Near Earth Objects, NEOs)

They say “Blue Monday” is the most depressing day of the year… “Blue Tuesday” however seems to be a far better deal! No room for gloom when you get to greet the dawn above the sleepy, anticyclonic Alps…

There are fine views of the Alps at sundown… and then there’s this one. Zipping past the several Tauern subranges as we sneak under a nasty jetstream blanketing most of Austria…

Bonus content: while all of these airliner views are fine and dandy, I could not in good conscience post them without shoehorning a bit of GA in 😀 . So, to balance things out, here’s one shot (+ video) from the good old C172 and the paying to stare out the window collection!

A piston single, a backwoods grass runway, a deep anticyclone and all the time in the world – feels good to be back in the old saddle! One of the first private airstrips in Croatia, Zvekovac (LDZE) has always been a GA favorite; located just 20 minutes away from Lučko (LDZL), it’s a perfect place for a short afternoon getaway (especially when there’s a barbecue in the mix somewhere)

Photo Report – The View From Up Here #3

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By me
All photos me too, copyrighted

Given that the local aviation scene is still throttled back pending stabilization of the weather (which is currently trying to make up its mind between winter snows and spring thaw), I though this would be the ideal time to revisit my old The View From Up Here photo series from 2011 🙂 . Having spend quite a bit of time aloft back then (ah, the joys of cheaper fuel!), I’d naturally accumulated a fair collection of photos along the way – photos that I had eventually cobbled together into a fairly popular two-part post (#1 & #2).

And while rising fuel prices in the intervening three years had taken their toll on my logbook, my camera and I have nevertheless still managed to catch some air with a semblance of regularity – this time substituting quantity with quality and doing away with the usual day VFR routine in favor of more exciting night and instrument practice. So, for the third installment of the series, here’s what my plane and I have been up to in the mean time… 🙂

The joys of night flying: the cockpit all lit up, quiet on the frequency, the reassuringly monotonous drone of the O-320 up front - and utter blackness outside. About to join our intended route after flying a (lengthy) instrument departure from Zagreb Intl (LDZA).
Ah, the joys of night flying: the cockpit all lit up, quiet on the frequency, the reassuringly monotonous drone of the O-320 up front – and utter blackness outside. About to finally join our intended route after flying a (lengthy) instrument departure procedure from Zagreb Intl (LDZA).

Enjoying the fresh breeze at 5,000 ft as we rumble northwards above Slovenia. Pretty soon we'd turn west towards the Julian Alps - visible in the distance - where we'd pop up to 7,000 and switch to IFR for our night-time return home.
Enjoying the fresh breeze at 5,000 ft as we rumble northwards above Slovenia. Pretty soon we’d turn west towards the Julian Alps – visible in the distance – where we’d pop up to 7,000 and switch to IFR for our night-time return home.

The fog I go on about so often seen from a slightly different perspective. Lying in a depression in the surrounding terrain - and built above an extensive underground water system - Zagreb frequently disappears in visibilities as low as 50 meters, while a couple of miles away one can enjoy clear sunshine...
The fog I go on about so often seen from a slightly different perspective during another instrument departure from Zagreb Intl. Lying in a depression in the surrounding terrain – and built above an extensive underground water system – Zagreb can frequently disappear in visibilities as low as 50 meters… while a couple of miles out one can enjoy perfectly clear air and deep blue skies.

Enjoying life, nature and free fuel as we play about in the skies of Varaždin in an Aussie-built GA8 Airvan. Having stopped in town for the weekend on a promo tour of the region, the crew of VH-EZS were delighted to fly a few demo flights for the assorted journalists - with myself naturally usurping the copilot's chair.
Enjoying life, nature and free fuel as we play about in the skies of Varaždin in an Aussie-built GA8 Airvan. Having stopped in town for the weekend on a promo tour of the region, the crew of VH-EZS were delighted to fly a few short demo flights for the assorted journalists – with myself naturally usurping the copilot seat on all of them.

Sharing the fun with DA-20A-1 9A-DAK as we try to formate in some beautiful scenery at 3,000 ft. It's 100 HP Rotax woefully inadequate for the task, DAK was flying pretty much flat out trying to keep up with our 320 turbocharged horses.
Sharing the fun with DA-20A-1 9A-DAK as we try to formate in some beautiful scenery at 3,000 ft. It’s 100 HP Rotax woefully inadequate for the task, DAK was flying pretty much flat out trying to keep up with our 320 turbocharged horses.

Having become bored of the oppressive and never-ending greyness on the ground - Northern Croatia having been blanketed by low cloud for weeks - I'd decided I might as well check on conditions higher up... definitely wasn't disappointed!
Having become bored of the oppressive and never-ending greyness on the ground – Northern Croatia having been blanketed by low cloud for weeks – I’d decided I might as well check on conditions higher up… definitely wasn’t disappointed!

And finally to top it all off, two fresh ones I’ve nicked from a recent post of mine 🙂 …

The joys of sub-Alpine anticyclonic weather... our flight back home had also included a touch-and-go at Slovenj Gradec airfield, located in a valley on the opposite side of Maribor's Pohorje mountain range. You can probably guess how that plan had turned out... (to compound the issue, LJSG has no met station linked into the rest of the system - so when we'd asked the met office at Maribor for a brief, all they could do was slump their shoulders and extrapolate from existing data)
The joys of sub-Alpine anticyclonic weather… our flight back to Zagreb had also included a touch-and-go at Slovenj Gradec airfield, located in a valley on the opposite side of Maribor, Slovenia’s Pohorje mountain range. You can probably guess how that plan had turned out… (to compound the issue, LJSG has no met station linked into the rest of the system – so when we’d asked the met office at Maribor for a brief, all they could do was slump their shoulders and extrapolate from existing data)

A large, unbroken stratus, beautiful sunshine on top, a light aircraft and a camera - what more could one want to be content? (except a pair of gloves) Skirting the edge of an extensive sheet of stratus as the perfect cap to the whole flight.
A large, unbroken stratus, beautiful sunshine on top, a light aircraft and a camera – what more could one want to be content? (except a pair of gloves) Skirting the edge of an extensive sheet of stratus as the perfect cap to the whole flight.