We woke up to fine and sunny day at Heraklion. The original plan was to fly westwards to Bastia, a new airport for Phil, and then head north for Biggin Hill. However a thundery low had developed just west of Corsica with a poor forecast of embedded CB’s covering a wide area west of Italy into the French mainland as well as Corsica so it was an easy decision to change our routing and take the same way back as we had done outbound.
After a relatively (for us) relaxed breakfast, we were at the airport at 9am for fuelling and departed marginally late just after 10 am with Phil flying the first leg with a continuing headwind of 40 to 50 kt. The weather remained fine until north of Corfu when cloud started to gather and we landed at Split in cloudy and distinctly chilly weather with another teasing crosswind.
I had sent Split an email earlier requesting handling and refuelling and this was super swift, all done in half an hour so we spent the second half hour of our layover eating our picnic lunch (it was already lunchtime Greek time) and finishing off the last of Tracey’s excellent fruit cake.
Then we were off on the final leg to Biggin Hill with me in the left hand seat. Weather was a potential issue on this sector with scattered showers and thunderstorms with associated CB’s. We climbed to 30,000 ft which just did not overtop the clouds so requested a further climb to our service ceiling of 31,000 ft. This put us just at the top of the cloud layer where we were in and out of thin cirrus with the occasional thicker cloud. There was an area of poor weather in west Switzerland and NE France with a couple of thunderstorms not too far away from us but no weather deviations were required and eventually as the weather radar downloads suggested, the high cloud cleared and the ground came into view with widely scattered showers.
Then an easy run into Biggin helped by a useful tailwind at last where we landed soon after 3 pm where Tracey was waiting to meet us; we unloaded the plane and put her away and back to the Mill House for a welcome cup of tea, reminiscences of the trip and later dinner of Phil’s home grown lamb.
So ends another very successful adventure and the first in D-FLEX. I will do a final post in a few days time with a map of the route flown and meanwhile as Juliet Bravo’s annual is not complete until next week, Miranda and I will be taking a train back to Scotland. Oh well, we have to come back down to earth sometime!
Heraklion to Split 659 nm in 2 hour 54 min
Split to Biggin Hill 830 nm in 3 hour 15 min