Day 6 A washout

No flying today. It had to happen, and it did. I awoke to a light drizzle. I checked the forecasts and radar pictures for Slovakia and Czech and made the decision to stay here another day. All of Czech was covered in rain, some light but some not, most of Slovakia was the same and with mountains still to cross of 3-4000ft and the cloud at 3000 it wasn’t hard.

The day has given me an opportunity to walk around the town of Per and contemplate the changes I have seen in Hungary since I first came here over 10 years ago. Back then what clearly struck me was how few roads were surfaced and how many horses were used as transport. In fact when I was working on the logistics setup for our newly purchased Hungarian factory, we even had horse and cart collection as a normal way for retailers to collect their products! Back then the factory we (Electrolux) had purchased came complete with a zoo, a hotel, a restaurant and a sports centre of sorts. The factory had been used for making some large electrical equipment during the communist times and so watch towers were every 50 yards around the perimeter fence. The locals were very proud of showing where they had removed Stalin’s statue from the town. Things have now changed a lot, I have seen no horses used for transport, but it is nice to see lots of people using bicycles. All the houses appear to have large gardens given over to producing local food and there is still a curious mix of old and new. The airport is new, it exists now largely to support the Audi factory nearby and still has a daily passenger plane dropping off 30 Audi employees in the morning and taking them home in the evening. The financial crisis has hit these new areas quite hard. Apparently 2 years ago, the airport was worried that it could not handle any more aircraft. Their parking area was often full with 6 cargo planes, with movements taking place all through the night. Yesterday there were 6 movements in total and today will be no better. They described the situation though as better than Balaton where so many airlines have dropped out that they closed the airport during the winter and are hoping it will pick up in the summer.

Walking around the town a number of things struck me. Everyone says hello (or something that I assume means hello) to everyone they meet. And the school rush consisted of lots of young kids rushing to school, looking and sounding happy and completely unencumbered with bags of books, parents or 4x4s. What a refreshing change that was.

With hindsight, it was perhaps a good job that I was stuck here for the day. I reviewed the plans and checked Notams. Firstly I discovered that neither of my options for the next 2 stops were going to have fuel, so planning restarted. Then innocently enough I saw a reference on the Notams to something called “Flying Rhino AIP Supp 2-13 applies” I checked up this on the Czech AIP site and found that this exercise did not confine itself to normal restricted areas, but effectively stops all flying from Ground level to FL280 in great swathes across Czech. This involved plotting over 100 Lat/long points on the map. They made it clear that all other traffic was prohibited from entering this airspace. The choice was wait until the weekend or replan. So I planned once again.