We have suffered particularly from headwinds on this trip. more so than we may have reasonably expected. This last leg was no exception. We woke up to a mistral at Avignon with the wind at takeoff 31 gusting to 50 kt, luckily straight down the runway. So a turbulent departure which become smoother as we climbed up. The 50 kt headwind persisted until just south of Paris and the forecast reduction to 20 kt only occurred as we crossed the Channel. An undercast and overcast cleared as we went north to CAVOK over northern France and then scattered cu reformed over southern England.
I contacted Phil on the sat phone to say we were running late and he was there to welcome us at Biggin Hill on our arrival. Tomorrow Juliet Bravo goes to RGV for her annual and Phil is flying us back from there to Carlisle so we off loaded all the baggage from Juliet Bravo into Phil’s car for transfer to G-PTEA. Then it was back to Phil’s for a cup of tea and later champagne and dinner with his family to celebrate the end of our combined tour.
There was the odd difficult moment but overall a great success. GASE obtained our overflight/landing clearances on the way back and apart from a blip at the beginning, these worked well enough.
In a day or three, I will write a postscript with some statistics for the trip to conclude the blog for Cape Town.
Avignon to Biggin Hill: 528 nm in 4 hr 12 min