Flying – An Interest

It’s now January 2022 and retirement brings a lot of spare time it seems. I have been exploring a few past interests, one of which was flying.

Way back in 1995, my wife bought me a birthday present consisting of a pair of tickets for pre-lesson flight introductions, these are very basic naturally but you do get to handle the plane a few times and go through some basic taster lessons on the ground and in the air.

The lessons were held at Cranfield air strip in Bedford, England. The plane was to be a Cessna 152 which is a very popular choice for early fliers, it’s a basic single-engine high-wing plane, about as basic as you can get.

Below is a screen-shot from some video my wife shot while i was taxiing to the runway on the first lesson, the children are our son and daughter. The weather is pretty average for the UK in early summer i.e. cold and grey 🙂

Before starting these pages I did some research online to try and see what happened to the little Cessna. I was surprised with the results and research is very easy it seems with things like planes.

The registration is G-BLAC and the plane was built in 1980 so it was already 15 years old when I got into her. I found a great site for tracking plane history and following are some screen-shots of what I discovered.

In 2012, looking very sad and minus the prop.

In 2019 she has moved to Portugal and has the prop fitted again but looking very rough.

It’s 2020 now and she looks stunning in new livery and is back in the air.

2021 now, still in use and looking lovely.

This little Cessna is now 42 years old, still in use and appears to be well cared for in her new home of Portugal. Not many vehicles remain in use at that age and it seems small planes can give good value for money.

Naturally, I can’t afford either real lessons nor running a plane so other options were to be looked at, namely “Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020” software and the world of virtual flight…