Third flight – Siena-Cannes
Author: Adrian
Last night there must have been another big storm in Siena. We missed it but everywhere was soaked as we arrived. We wisely chose to skip a tour round the Piazza. The rain last night though has led to fog this morning. The visibility on the journey to the airfield was down to 500m or less with low cloud, but it was lifting as we arrived.
We climbed away from Siena northwesterly. Plans to overfly the town first were scuppered by low cloud over the town but we climbed clear of the clouds, initially towards Pisa up to 3000ft then further to 8500ft.
Problem one: Pisa wouldn’t let us overfly the airfield, even right up high. So we hastily planned a route to the east of Luca. We remained clear of clouds the whole way – there were some biggies, but they all seemed to be just off our track which was a plus.
Problem two: Milan Information. In France and the UK the “info services” are very useful. Here it was a disaster. It took me a dozen calls to even be acknowledged, the controller kept going ape at people stepping on each other. He cleared another Brit direct to La Spezia then told him he was in the La Spezia danger area. We were trying to get clearance through that danger area but gave up.
Calm was restored when we were handed to Genoa and we were quickly cleared on exactly the route we requested. We were even handed over to Nice.
This is where it went a bit wrong for me. I left the descent a bit late, then didn’t trim the aircraft right for the final. The result was a quick bounce followed by a go-around, something I’ve not done in years. Oh well, the second approach was fine.
We fuelled up on arrival in Cannes then moved the aircraft gingerly onto the grass parking. There don’t seem to be any formalities here, we were let through a gate and caught a cab to our hotel.
The pictures from this leg of the trip are here!
