04.07.2012: Today I did the annual inspection of my plane, combined with a 100 hrs maintenance check. That’s nearly a full day of work if you don’t have the routine of doing it, which applies to me. Fortunately I could ask Silvan, our chief mechanic, whenever I had a question. Below he plane after finishing the engine work (oil change, new spark plugs etc.).
I did some short test flights after the maintenance check, everything is perfect. That’s good, as I also have the bi-annual check to renew my licence coming up, which is done by an expert approved by the Swiss Federal Office of Civil Aviation.
09.07.2012: Fortunately the expert for the bi-annual check was very flexible, so I got an assignment very quickly. He also lives nearby, so he came to Lommis to do the check. Everything was fine, with the exception that I never installed a type plate on my plane, which seems to be mandatory (this was not detected during the final check before the first flight). The plate has to contain information on the manufacturer, type, serial number and year of manufacturing. I will have one made a local shop, below as an example the type plate from our factory built plane.
01.07.2012: I have been away again for some time, and whenever I was hone on the weekends the weather was bad, so only today I managed to go flying again. Before leaving home I heard the sound of big radial engines, and then the JU-52 passed over our hose. Always a nice sight.
When I arrived at the airport Dani just got ready for the first test flight of the EAS sequence, dedicated to calibrate the air speed indicator, but I doubt that the results were usable due to the wind .
It wasn’t a long flight fur us either, just a little tour to the Rhine fall and along the lake, but at least back in the air again. Christian, a young pilot in Lommis, took some pictures of us taking off and landing again, nice to have some pictures of my plane during these phases of flight too.
Here one can see the new runway markings, which we had to install due to a new, silly regulation from the Federal Office of Civil Aviation. ICAO decided that it does not make sense to have harmonised standards for marking unpaved runways, as the environment can be very different between different ground surfaces, but our FOCA decided that due to an unspecified “safety problem” they have to regulate this themselves. That’s going to cost all small airfields a fortune, and nobody could tell what the “safety problem” really is. I proposed to the president of our club to go to court agains the FOCA, but he did not want to do that.
One can see on the picture below taken by Christian that I always try to land “on the spot”, that’s good training for when I fly to airfields with runways which are much shorter than ours (615 m).
30.07.2012: I have spent the afternoon working on updating the MOE (Maintenance Organisation Exposition) of our maintenance organisation to comply with the latest EASA regulations, even though it was very nice weather. Finally I just had to go flying, so I called my wife to drive home from work via the airport, so we could fly together to Wangen-Lachen (LSPV) for dinner. Wangen-Lachen, a small airfield that lies at the lake of Zurich (actually the Obersee, the upper part of the lake).
The weather was very nice in the plains, where we live, but in the eastern alps a cloud base at around 6’500 to 7’000 ft blocked most passes.
We first flew to Glarus, then turned around and flew via the Wäggitalersee towards the Sihlsee and then to the Mythen mountains.
There we turned around and then flew to Wangen-Lachen, where another homebuilt plane had landed just ahead of us. That’s one of the few Swiss homebuilt planes I have not seen before.
After dinner in the restaurant right next to the airport, which can be seen behind our plane, we flew back to Lommis.
As mentioned Wangen-Lachen airfield lies directly at the lake, on the picture below one can see the water just behind the threshold of runway 08. The water behind the runway is a canal to the pleasure boat harbour, which is located right next to the airfield. The approach chart contains a warning that one has to execute a go around if a sailing boat enters or leaves the harbour, as the threshold only around 20 m next to the canal and one might hit the mast of a boat.
Our airfield in closed after 19:00 local time, but we can get permission to land up to 21:00 and I did ask for that before takeoff. We are asked to no land between 19:00 and 20:00, if possible, so we landed back in Lommis at around 20:10.