18.02.2017: I promised myself that this year I will fly again much more, so today I took advantage of the nice weather for a winter flight over the mountains. Our airfield was only reopened a few days ago, with the limitation of one takeoff and landing per aircraft to preserve our grass runway, so luckily I did three landing at the end of December to be current for flying with a passenger.

There was a maybe 500 ft / 150 m thick layer of broken clouds with a basis of around 4’500 ft / 1’400 m, but once we had climbed through one of the many holes we immediately saw that the weather above was spectacular.

We were heading south towards the alps, the usual route if I just plain want to enjoy the scenery and the sun. As usual I climbed quite high, to around 10’000 ft / 3’000 m. The air was exceptionally calm, with only a few knots of wind, and a quick check on the information frequency confirmed that there were only very few pilots taking advantage of the weather.

We first went to check out skiing conditions, as we are planning to still go for a week of skiing in March, the slopes looked not too bad.

We then continued all the way to the Gotthard area, looking for the small hut friends of us own, where we spent New Years Eve….

…before turning back North towards the Lake of the Four Cantons….

…and then over the Klausenpass back toward Lommis.

Flying South it was very warm in the cockpit, but as soon as we turned North it became a bit chilly as we lost the warming effect of the sun. At 10’000 ft / 3’000 m the air was around -3^o C, so we pulled the cabin heating.

We flew over Mollis airfield, which has a paved runway thanks to having been a military airfield in the past. They are clearing the runway of snow in winter, with the result that there was a white rim of not yet melted snow plowed aside to the edges of the runway. This made the runway clearly visible from high above.

We then headed back to Lommis, sneaking below the still broken cloud layer through a larger hole.

There was also another reason for me going flying today. Somewhere in a Rotax document it is noted that engine preservation should be done in case the engine is not operated over more than two months. Our authorities now suddenly seem to interpret this as a mandatory requirement, even though for example the operations manual of the engine does not state this. It only reads:

Neither the “extreme climatic conditions” nor the “long out of service period” are specified. Not operating an engine in dry and cold winter conditions is not the same as doing this for example in a hot and humid location near the sea, such as in Florida, but that does not seem to be known to the authorities. So in order to avoid lengthy discussion at the next bi-annual check I am now trying to either go flying at least every two months, or to ground-run the engine to operating temperature if the weather does not permit flying.