I'm baa'aack

Finally, after a 6 month hiatus I am back in the air. And not just any air, but the freezing air of Southern Sweden. After much mucking around and trying to figure out how to go flying in Scandanavia, I settled on Sweden and the Sturup Aero Club outside of Malmö, just across the Øresund from Copenhagen. Although I don't have a European pilot license, I am able to validate my Australian license (for private, daytime flying, for up to 12 months) in Sweden at no cost. Sweden also has the bonus of having cheaper aircraft hire than Denmark, even if it means a slightly more complicated and expensive trip to the airport. If I end up staying here longer and decide to actually convert my license to a European one (as opposed to say, simply get another 12 month validation by changing my flying location to Denmark instead and going through the Danish authorities and Danish planes), it looks like I will only have to do a couple of written exams and a flight test, nothing too serious.

View Larger Map ('A' is where Malmo-Sturup Airport is)
So now that everyone is back at work after the New Years break, and my wrist is in a state where I trust it once again at the controls of a plane, I went up for a checkflight this morning (with a 5am wakeup call). The checkflight was in a Piper PA28 - a low wing plane and not what I'm used to. But thankfully not too much different from Cessnas and I have flown them before. After a briefing with the instructor in order to familiarise myself with the procedures in Sweden (which are in actual fact so similar to Australia) off we went. What a great flight. My first overseas flight and a couple of landings in some crazy cross-winds. As they'd say in Denmark, it was blowing a pelican (can you use a figure of speech from country A, when refering to country B, and it be translated into language C?) Anyway, my first landing was almost perfect, the second was a little hard, but nothing broke at least.

So the differences between flying here and flying in Australia:

• The lakes that are marked on the map are actually there (as opposed to empty - not counting the last few months in Oz). Even though they may be totally frozen.
• Airservices Australia does not have a monopoly on producing maps and charts, and for VFR flying you only really need 1 map, rather than 4 different ones. Not only that, but maps aren't republished every 3-6 months just for the hell of it (ie., to make money for Airservices Australia).
• It is second nature to pilots here to do an overseas trip - whether it's over to Germany, or the Danish island of Bornholm.

The main thing that surprised me was that radio communications are almost exactly the same. The levels of English are great, and if anything, the requirements for what and how much to communicate are slightly less formal.

Thankfully (and this is probably the first time I have ever thought this), there are standard codes used to create weather reports, so I dont need to understand Swedish for that. Unfortunately though, some things are in Swedish, such as the emergency procedures stuck on the sun-visor of the plane and the various regulatory documents. But I guess they're not too important  ;-)

Yeah! Finally I'm flying again and yet again I have a great way to make my hard earned cash disappear. So, who wants to come flying???