It has been just over a week since having a check flight for my night and IMC rating. I was given the thumbs up to fly solo. The morning of the flight was very misty and central UK was covered in low lying frozen foggy condition. I arrived at Cranfield, chatted with the flight instructors over several mugs of tea and jaffa cakes. The C172 was prepped, fueled and the A- check completed with all pre departure paperwork done. My route was to Sherburn -in the Elmet. I wanted to fly there to meet the CFI, Mr Chris Stringer. He was the original person who certified the Union Aviation hand control for the C172. He has been helping us to get the same control approved for the C150 and C152 in all 31 EASA countries.
We were the only people to be flying from Cranfield that day. As we took off, the whole of Bedfordshire as far as the eye could see was covered in a thin layer of low lying fog and mist. I wish I had a camera. I kept looking back to check that the weather behind us wasn’t going to get worse.
Every now and then, I would check the weather METAR with the various ATC controllers we were connected to.
We took off at sunset, and the route was fairly straight forward. We tracked to Gamston DME, talking to Cottesmore, and Waddington. From Gamston we made a small heading change, through Doncaster Sheffield class D airspace, and received a special VFR clearance, although I could have accepted a IFR clearance – but just for fun we accepted SVR. With the tail wind we knew that the return leg would mean a longer airborne time to get back to Cranfield. Therefore, we did a orbit of Sherburn and headed back home. It seemed that we must have been the only people flying that evening. We talked to 4 different ATC services that had radar facilities and there were only 4 other aeroplanes we heard apart from us. The total flight was 2 hrs and 40 mins of which 2 hrs and 20 mins was airborne. Clicking on the map will open up a larger file so you can view the route. We did a ILS landing procedure back at Cranfield.
