Bertie's Travelogue Part 2 - Marseilles to Lisbon

Well, I made it to Marseilles after a fairly uneventful trip down through France.It was a strangely real experience after a few hours at the controls, seeing the blue of the Mediterranean was really quite exciting as I was vectored in for a nice simple landing. Did you know Marseilles is the second biggest city in France as well as the oldest, dating back to 600BC? I didn't stay too long, pausing only for a quick bouillabaisse, a pastis and a look around for Popeye Doyle before climbing back on board and heading off to Sion in Switzerland.

Sion is up in the Swiss Alps and was my first experience of the "interesting" effect mountains have on an aircraft. I was thrown around a fair old bit and was having to keep my eye on both heading and altimeter all the time which,at the end of an almost 3 hour flight was a tad tiring. By now though, I was used to doing 6 things at once and the voices of the Air Traffic Controllers no longer provoked screams of "Alright, in a minute...stop being SO bossy" It was really rather lovely flying into Sion Valley and seeing the strip laid out inviting me to land. Sadly, I was way too high and the kamikaze dive was never going to work so I had to ask Traffic Control to send me round again (incidentally, one 'talks' by bringing up a list of options on screen relevant to any given situation).

A neat landing second time round and I made a big decision - I was going to change my aircraft. The Electra was all very well but was underpowered, cumbersome and, most importantly, had few sophisticated instruments. I wanted a bit more speed and, being a 20th century boy, I also wanted some technological conveniences. Popping into the local Planes 'R Us, I exchanged a few Euros and my trusty Electra for a rather fetching Mooney M20M Bravo with Garmin G1000 glass cockpit. I even managed to get the registration G_BERT!


Basically the G1000 is the bees knees of avionics and takes a lot of mundane tasks from the pilot. The software recommends downloading the actual manuals from the Garmin website in order to familiarise oneself! For me, it means yet another very steep learning curve but also the added benefit of auto-pilot so that I can at least read up on it as I fly.

The trip from Sion across to Bilbao was long, uneventful and boring and certainly the longest leg thus far. Fortunately the Mooney cruises at 150 knots, 25% faster than the Electra and that, combined with auto-pilot, made life easier. I haven't found out whether I can programme course changes into the G1000 yet so I am having to go manual for route changes and changes of airspace responsibility. I don't really mind because otherwise, I could just programme it and then forget the whole thing until journey's end. At the moment, I feel part of it and I'm starting to feel an affinity with the aircraft. I am very lucky that my PC spec. enables me to tweak the performace of the software so that I get a smooth, graphically realistic representation of the whole experience,. although even the aforesid tweaking needs a science degree. For those of a quizzical bent, here is a small part of the 'tweakability'.

I eventually arived at Bilbao (on my last drop of fuel) although sadly I have found no interesting facts about the city apart from the intriguingly designed Guggenheim Museum. Frank Gehry's spectacular edifice boasts to have no flat surface on the entire structure and houses works by Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, Vasily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee.

l had a lovely early morning start down to Lisbon.


Weather is pretty good so far and, here's a clever bit; the weather is real-time weather which is downloaded/updated for the region I am in every 15 mins! How impressive is that?

Perhaps I am getting blasé about Europe but I can't help but look forward to getting to more exotic places. After Faro, I have a landing at Gibraltar to which I am really looking forward. I remember visiting there a good few years ago and it's a fascinating chunk of concrete, sort of stuck on the end of the Rock. I seem to recall that the main road runs across it so some poor sod might end up with my tyre marks on his roof.I got to Gibraltar by cattle boat from Tangier in real life so it will be nice to do it the comfortable way.

The fact that I am talking of the future shows that Bilbao to Lisbon was another flat, boring, flight. I soon got fed up with lookingaround at the featureless landscape and ended up reading my Flight Simulator X trainig manual - a mere 722 pages!

Incidentally, I was watching a programme late last night on Sky where round the world flights were mentioned. One guy in the 30s had a 32 hour leg in an aircraft where he was so confined, his shoulders literally touched the sides of the plane. They showed him being helped out after and his head was covered in blood where the turbulence kept smacking it against the cockpit roof. In some small way, I felt a little bit closer to that brave but foolhardy soul and, as I contemplated future journeys across the Pacific, I thought about how the last 80 odd years have seen such changes in our world. There seem to be few daredevils anymore, only the deep remains unexplored and challenges of man and machine no longer abound. People related to those venturers and they became the celebrities of their day. Ordinary men and women lived out their fantasies through such exploits as people today also endeavour to emulate those of celebrity status. Personally, I would rather aspire to Lindbergh than Katona any day.

Flown this blog:

Paris - Marseilles 342 nautical miles
Marseilles - Sian 210 nm
Sian - Bilbao 505 nm
Bilbao - Lisbon 412 nm