We left Biggin Hill in cloudy, raw weather at 9:45 am after loading all the luggage and saying goodbye to Tracey with me flying the first leg. Soon we climbed into clear sunny skies and it essentially remained like that all the way to Split. We flew at 27,000 ft and gradually as we went southeastwards, various cloud layers started to build beneath us, climbing up to our level and necessitating a climb to 29,000 ft as we crossed the Alps, with the odd snowy peak visible below us. Over the Adriatic, the weather cleared to some extent although there was light rain on landing at Split.
A quick turn around and we were airborne after refuelling within the hour. Cloud became more scattered as we flew south with a fair number of snowy peaks to be seen over Albania, Greece and Crete and a sizeable CB with tops at around 31,000 ft out to our right as we approached Crete. The sun set and Phil made his first night landing in D-FLEX on runway 09; as we found out in 2014, this is quite difficult to find with a 40ยบ offset approach and again there was some debate in the cockpit as to exactly where the airport was.
After landing, we were marshalled to some remote spot, and with a 45 minute delay for refuelling, we decided to leave this until tomorrow. Then it was into Heraklion to our hotel and out for dinner in a very jolly local fish diner with some ice cream, sweet puff balls and fearsome raki thrown in ‘on the house’ for pud (only a very small amount of raki taken given tomorrow’s programme).
Biggin Hill to Split 854 nm in 3 hr 25 min
Split to Heraklion 678 nm in 2 hr 40 min