Flight Log: Cascais LPCS -- Gran Canaria GCLP 10.01.2018/11.01.2018

10 January 2018, Cascais — Gran Canaria:

At 8 a.m. our very friendly handling agent welcomed us again at Cascais airfield and each of us had a puff pastry to keep the wolf from the door. We were delighted. We were then driven to the plane and carried out all our preparations in peace. Today, it was all about trying out the survival suit before taking off. We then crawled, somewhat constricted, into the cockpit with all the relevant equipment. We gave Marie three litres of oil and inspected the whole plane very carefully beforehand. Everything was OK. Finally, we were able to get into the plane at 9.10 a.m. and were given permission to start up. We started at 9.46 a.m., this time on runway 35, in other words towards the north over the famous hills of Cascais. Although it was relatively early in the morning, communications with the controller were perfect. At an altitude of 5,000 feet we were even given a very good shortcut towards Africa. The Portuguese controller accompanied us on this route; there were lovely cumulus clouds in the sky below us and a temperature of between 0 and 5 degrees at flight level 100 (10,000 feet, about 3,000m).

Once the Portuguese controller had gone out of range, we were handed over to the controller in Casablanca. Here we heard lots of different languages to start with, above all French, but sometimes English and to our huge amazement Kurt was suddenly greeted with Salem Aleikum. But he refused to reply in the local language and had to radio in English. All in all it was a very friendly atmosphere and Kurt wondered whether the female controller was wearing a headscarf, a veil or whether indeed her whole body was covered up while she was accompanying our flight. She was incredibly friendly and pleasant to deal with. The disadvantage was that she didn’t understand us. In fact, nobody understood us for three quarters of an hour. That had nothing to do with the people, but the range of the radio equipment. In the meantime, we communicated with a TUI plane (Boeing 737) and asked TUI to pass on our message to Casablanca. In other words, something of a relay. That worked perfectly. Once we’d almost reached Lanzarote, the Casablanca controllers got hold of us directly again. Once we’d reached Lanzarote altitude, Gran Canaria’s controllers took over. It was amusing to see the island of Lanzarote – a paradise for hang gliders – from such an altitude. It wasn’t long before we had Gran Canaria in sight and used a visual flight procedure to land behind a Boeing 737 on runway 03 to the left on Gran Canaria. After landing, a friendly team of handling agents – a woman and young man met us as always. They welcomed us and organised a tank truck. The team came with two cars, two people and a little aviation fuel tank to fill up Marie. One of the pump attendants seemed to like talking to the crew, not to tell us what to do, but more to ensure we were in a good mood. We said goodbye in a friendly manner, although he’d inadvertently sprayed about 10 to 20 litres of aviation fuel onto the runway instead of into Marie. Never mind. We got into the taxi and went to the hotel. That was the end of that day’s flying. Time to turn in.