Hi Stuart! Stuart Buchanan wrote: > --- Ralf Gerlich wrote: >> Hi all, >> >> in the well-established tradition of reporting one's milestones on the >> way to a license I would like to give a short account on my first >> cross-country solo, which I flew today. >> >> As a reminder: I am currently undergoing training for what is called in >> Germany a sports pilots license (SPL) for aerodynamically controlled >> microlights. I had started this training pretty exactly a year ago and >> my practical exam is coming near (last week of April). What has taken me >> so long? Lack of time! (Martin has been nagging me the past months to >> finally get done with it! ;-) > > Congratulations Ralf! > > It sounds like it was a wonderful flight and a very special milestone away > from the circuit. I can't imagine what it must be like to fly into such a > large airport in a microlight. Presumably you have to be paranoid about > wake vortexes?
As I said, it's merely a large airport for a microlight. Friedrichshafen was estabilished early in the 20th century, originally as a place for the training of Zeppelin-crews, became an airfield for the German Airforce in WWII and in the post-WWII-era had been used in parallel for a small range of civil scheduled flights and by the French Air Force personell, which was stationed in southwestern Germany in the post-WWII-occupation phase. Due to the army past, the airfield already had quite a long runway. After the French troops had left, the airport was restructured as a civilian regional airport, which is now used by a few scheduled airline flights (mostly medium sized turboprops of a local airline and two daily Ryanair B737 flights). So yes, in comparison with your local grass strip, Friedrichshafen is a large airport. However, most of the airline flights happen in a short timeframe early in the morning and in the evening. Therefore even though there is a fair amount of airline traffic, you seldomly come across an airliner landing or taking off directly ahead of you. However, if that event occurs, it might happen that a just-landed Dash-8 has to wait in front of a taxiway intersection just to let you pass. ;-) At least I haven't noticed any wake vortex paranoia yet ;-) It's also an advantage to learn flying on such an airport - even though most of the training takes place on nearby uncontrolled airfields: No nervousness when coming to a controlled airfield. > Good luck with your practical exam. Thank you. Cheers, Ralf ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
