With the closures at Cranfield over the next few months I needed somewhere to fly in the meantime at weekends, so I decided to have a checkout flight at Elstree with MAK Aviation.
Elstree is a really strange airfield which is surrounded by airspace. Luton to the north, Stansted to the east, London city to the south-east and Heathrow to the South. As you can see, it is really easy to have an infringement in this area. Cranfield is a much better airfield for local flights in my opinion as the nearest airspace is Luton to the south but if you head north then you are clear until Coventry.
On top of this the circuit at Elstree isn’t a proper circuit but more of an oval which is kinda strange and takes some getting use to.
The airfield is drastically busier than Cranfield also with around 100 general aviation aircraft being based there compared to maybe 15 at Cranfield.
The plane we was flying is a French built Cessna 172. This plane is strange for a few reasons, firstly the speed is in Mph with Kts on the inner scale. I never knew any planes had Mph as their main indicator so I found this quite weird. On top of this it also has 40 degrees of flaps, I remember reading about a couple of accidents that was put down to 40 degrees of flaps being selected. On top of this the flaps are electric so you count like 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi to get flaps 3.
For these two reasons extra care must be taken when flying this aircraft.
Anyway, we did a flight and did some basic climbing & descending, handling, practice forced landings, heading & altitude holding. We then came back into the circuit and on the first approach I had to go around due to someone still being on the runway. I then did one touch and go followed by a full stop landing. There wasn’t much to say about it, but it was good to get back in the air after a month.
Over the winter I am looking to complete my night rating. Elstree can’t do night ratings at weekends and Cranfield isn’t open at weekends so I am still undecided where I will actually complete this as it seems I will have to head to the airfield after work which is an inconvenience either way.
I must admit out of the two airfields I think Cranfield is better if you just want to do some local flights for currency.
