10 year anniversary flight – exploring the Kent coast

Although out of my control, I have been feeling guilty for a while now. Kevin, who is a work colleague of mine asked me back in August 2019 if I would take him and his wife Sally for a flight to celebrate their 10 year anniversary in September. We pencilled in a date and the plans seemed to be going smoothly.

Originally we were due to fly in the Cessna 172 on a Monday morning, the route was planned a couple of days before and the forecast was looking glorious. The day before the flight, I received a call telling me that the aircraft suffered a technical fault on a flight earlier that day and that it needed to go in for maintenance and would not be available for me to fly. Frustratingly the PA28 was on it’s annual service at the time and the other 4 seat aircraft a Robin DR400 was booked by another Pilot. So with no aircraft available we had to cancel the trip on what was a perfect day for flying.

Our bad luck didn’t end there. With Kevin still keen to make the flight, we booked in another 3 unsuccessful attempts to fly with either the weather or a waterlogged runway scuppering our plans.

The latest attempt was on Wednesday 29th January 2020, and with an extended period of bad weather and heavy rain leading up to this date, I wasn’t holding out much hope of the flight actually going ahead, yet again, expecting to have to explain to Kevin that the winds were too strong, the cloud base was too low and the runway was waterlogged.

I called the airfield fist thing in the morning for an update and to my surprise the runway was partially open (the first 1/3 of the runway was still waterlogged) and the weather although a bit windy was perfectly flyable. So we all headed down to Headcorn.

As Kevin and Sally had bit of a longer journey than myself, I arrived at the airfield before them and had time to get the PA28 G-SEXX checked out and fuelled so we were ready to go as soon as they arrived.

After I had conducted the passenger safety briefing, we got the engine started and obtained the airfield information for our departure.

I had plotted a route to explore as much of the Kent coastline as possible with the time that we had the plane available to us.

We departed from runway 28 to the West and made left turns leaving the circuit on the downwind leg tracking initially towards the east passing overhead Ashford.

On reaching Ashford we called London Information on the radio to get a Basic Service and then continued south east towards the Port of Dover.

As we approached the coast we made a left turn taking us slightly out to sea giving us a great view of the Port of Dover out of the left window. We then hugged the cost passing abeam Deal and Sandwich.

At this point I sprung a little surprise on Kevin and Sally. The PA28 is not the best aircraft to off an inflight food and drink service but in celebration of their anniversary I had prepared a bottle of Prosecco and some glasses as a little treat while we were flying along.

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We then continued around the coast with views of the seaside town of Margate. At this point we were starting to run short on time before we needed to get the plane back to Headcorn, so I took a shortcut from the initial plan and turned inland towards Canterbury.

We made a quick orbit of Canterbury spotting the cathedral before heading on back towards Ashford where we started our descent towards Headcorn.

We change frequency back to Headcorn Radio to obtain the latest airfield information and positioned for a left base join to the circuit.

The airfield was extremely quiet and turned onto final approach with no other traffic to worry about. The only thing to remember was to touch down 1/3 along the runway to avoid the waterlogged areas.

The landing was smooth and we then taxied to our parking stand and shut down the aircraft.

Only at this point did I realise that I had forgotten to press the record button on my camera that captures the cockpit instruments and the front window but at least the other 2 cameras recorded fine.

So we got there in the end and although it was a little late, we managed to celebrate Kevin and Sallys 10 year anniversary.

Congratulations to you both!

Watch the video on my YouTube channel: