This reminds me of loitering outside a chemist as a teenager, plucking up the courage to go in and buy a packet of Durex. I’m orbiting just east of Reading in my RV-7 going through the same kind of emotions as I steel myself to call Heathrow Radar and request a Special VFR clearance through the London CTR. I’ve never requested one before and I’m nervous.
Yesterday I was at home lazing in a deckchair enjoying the fine weather and wondering which newspaper column deadlines I was in danger of missing when I thought I heard a light aircraft overhead. Our house is in Hampton, Middlesex which is well within the CTR. Often when I’ve heard what I thought was a single-engine light airplane it’s turned out to be the ears playing up, and it’s just a Robinson navigating the heli route along the Thames, or a turboprop at high altitude in the airways.
This time, however, I was right because I saw clearly a high-wing Cessna single going overheard at what looked about fifteen hundred feet or so−at any rate low enough to make out the paint scheme. Rushing inside for my field telephone, I immediately got onto a tracking app and looked for the Cessna. Not difficult as hardly anything is flying, of course. It turned out to be a Cessna 150 out of Blackbushe. Fascinated, I tracked it across Richmond Park, Putney, and over southeast London.
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