10.05.2014: I have not been in the air since a month, what a shame. To be correct, I have been in Berlin, Prague, Brussels and again in Berlin during the last four weeks, but have flown to all these places with Swiss, instead of my own plane. As I again won’t be able to fly during the next few weeks due to holidays, as well as another sequence of business trips, I decided to go flying today. It was just a short flight of a little more than an hour, but that’s better than nothing.
20.05.2014: We are spending our holidays in Denmark, and had the chance to visit my friend’s workplace in the old tower of Copenhagen airport. He works for the Danish Meteorological Institute (which by the way have an excellent website for pilots), preparing the METARs for EKCH.
His workplace is a plane spotter’s dream, with a spectacular view over the whole airport (in those cases when the weather is nice…).
His office is in the old tower of the airport, they built a new one for air traffic controllers and use the old one for various services. Below the new tower, as well as the bridge to Sweden in the background. The closer one of the bridge towers is around 12 km away, a good help to estimate visibility.
We spend quite some time up there, watching planes arriving and departing, such as the one from Air Greenland below. I have been to Greenland three times in the 1980’s, and even though this is quite a while ago the memories are still very fresh.
Kastrup airport is just at the border of the Oresund, the channel between Denmark and Sweden, and there are quite large ships passing in front of the airport such as the cruise ship below. When they pass they can’t us runway 22L for landings, as the planes might hit them, not the usual operational restriction one expects at a major international airport. I checked the Jeppesen VFR manual, and there is indeed a remark:
We also observed a plane from the Royal Air Force and tried to check on Flightradar24 where it is going, but it did not show up on the screen.
The view gets spectacular when it gets darker, which happens very slowly so far north, as all the lights of the airport start showing up.
10.05.2014: While travelling around the country we passed Stauning, where the Danish Flymuseum is located. I have already visited the museum once some years ago, but it is really nice so we stopped again.
They have a replica of a plane built by Jacob Christian Hansen Ellehammer, which they claim was the first powered aircraft to fly successfully in Europe.
The museum has a large collection of Danish built planes, such as this B&S from 1911 below, as well as one of nearly each type build by Skandinavisk Aero Industri.. Some ore in flying condition and are flown at a yearly fly in.
They also have some homebuilt planes, again mostly Danish designs.
One day during our tour around Denmark we heard a weird sound of something flying overhead, just to find out it was a gyrocopter. They are rare in Switzerland, actually there is currently only one flying, a homebuilt one. That’s why we are not used to their specific sound. The guy who built the one from a kit in Switzerland had to go to court against the Federal Office of Civil Aviation, the Swiss authorities, to have it registered.
