Today, I planned a long cross-country flight. It supposed to literally cover almost half of the country. The weather was not perfect, but acceptable, and I set out towards the east.
A significant part of the route went through controlled airspace, making my workload higher than usual. As I’m not yet used to talking to ATC so much, it was quite challenging.
At one point, the clouds moved lower, and it became dangerous to fly below them due to the close terrain. Since there were still some VMC (Visual Meteorological Conditions) corridors to climb, I asked ATC to allow me to climb to 5000 feet above the cloud layer. The weather about 20 nm to the east seemed much better, so I just needed to overfly that layer. Neither the online weather radar nor ATC observed any thunderstorms, so it should have been pretty safe. After overflying the hills, I finally found a VMC corridor to descend below the cloud layer, which located than 3000 feet above the ground there. The rest of the flight was pretty calm.
Vysoke Myto has three runways, one of which is paved with asphalt. The aerodrome also has runway and taxiway lights, and some hangars nearby. However, there was nobody there – I didn’t see a single person, neither on the frequency nor at the hangars. It was completely silent.
On the way back, I came across another abandoned military aerodrome with a perfect wide concrete runway. It looked like a twin of my home base (LKLN), even the hangar looked the same. I saw a stage and some temporary buildings, probably for some open-air event. Of course, I did not land; I just overflew the runway.
I decided to practice some more, so I made 7 touch-and-goes on different aerodromes on the way back.
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