Fellow Mooniacs,
as already mentioned in an earlier newsletter, the EMPOA is going to do another tour this year. This tour will take us through France this June (01.06.-05.06.20100) and is intended to be a lot smaller and shorter than our last one. As it will take place during the long weekend of Ascension day, it provides many pilots the chance to easily join the tour.
Today I would like to give you some more information about the EMPOA tour as we finally set up some more details about the routing and give you already the chance to register for the participation. Basically the whole tour can be flown VFR or IFR depending on your preferences. All legs are chosen to be flyable within max. 2h so there is still enough time for some touristic attractions on the ground.
So please let me say some short words about the routing and our destinations in one of the most marvellous countries of Europe - especially for pilots.

01.06.2011 - Deauville
We would like to start our little tour at the famous small harbour city in the north of France. Deauville is a beautifull little place at the channel and a lot of people from Paris come here to relax, go swimming and simply enjoy life. The airport of Deauville (LFRG) is located south of the city and will be the meeting point for us. We won´t set up a defined time to meet, so everybody has the chance himself to decide at what time he wants to come, depeding on your workload on that day. As during these times the days become very long already, nobody should get into trouble.
02.06.2011 - La Rochelle
The first leg with the group takes us from the Normandy on the northern coast to the atlantic coast to the small city of La Rochelle. La Rochelle is the capital of the Départements Charente-Maritime and a nice little place for a walk through the beautiful old harbour (Vieux Port) and the historic city centre. Alternatively you might wanna do a small trip to the small island of Île de Ré, which is located a couple of miles away from the coast of La Rochelle.To finally completely dive into the famous french way of life, La Rochelle offers a lot of culinary highlights. Especially the sea-food is something you shouldn´t miss here.
03.06.2011 - San Sebastian
On the next day we will look forward to a beautiful flight along the atlantic coast. The next leg of around 170NM takes us further south towards the spanish border. We will pass famous places of the Aquitaine such as Soulac-Sur-Mer, Bordeaux and Biarritz and will finally arrive at our destination of San Sebastian. San Sebastian is only a couple of miles away from the french border in the golf of Biskaya, but it completely feels different here. You will quickly notice, that you have already reached Spain. San Sebastian is located in a bay called La Concha (The sea shell) and you will shortly realize, where this name comes from. Maritime smooth wheather and sandy beaches will let our stay be like in a dream.
04.06.2011 - Lyon
San Sebastian will be the turn-around-point for our tour. The next leg takes us back in north-easterly direction. We will fly along the Pyrenees through an area which is known a lot among aviators. Not only Airbus has its largest plant in Toulouse, but also Tarbes, where Socata builds its general aviation planes such as the TBM850, is located not far away from our route. So everybody who is interested might wanna make a small stopover here and have a look at how these airplanes are build. But also everybody who likes wine will definately enjoy this flight. We will fly along many very famous wineries with its fantastic castles towards the region of Rhône-Alpes. The city of Lyon will be our final destination and also the place to have our next Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the EMPOA. The small GA-airport of Lyon Bron welcomes our little group at our last common destination for this tour.
As you can see, we have chosen some of the many very interesting places to go in France and we tried to keep this tour small enough, that many Mooniacs find some time to join this tour. Of course you can feel free to adjust your routing according to your preferences or arrive at a later point or leave earlier. In contrast to the tour through south-eastern Europe last year, we want to keep this tour as simple as possible and therefore leave everybody as much freedom as possible. Besides the fact that we decided for the destinations and the routing we will not provide any “official” touristic parts during this tour. This tour is primarily intended to provide a rough structure for a bringing Mooniacs together at some lovely places in France and give everybody the chance to meet and travel among friends and simply have a good time together.
For those Mooniacs, who decide to fly this tour completely as introduced, we already did a preselection over the local hotels, so that we can be sure that the group can stay together as a whole. As the hotels are mostly very crowded during these days we were only able to reserve a limited number of double bed rooms, who will be assigned by the “first-come, first-serve”-rule.
We are looking forward to everybody, who decides to join this tour. In case you might be a little bit unsure if you want to do this trip alone and might need some further help for the flight-preparation or during the tour, please let us know and we will do our best to solve your problems. If anybody is looking for a partner to build a crew, you should also send us a message, so that we can help in bringing people together.
So if you are want to join this tour, please fill out the registration form, so that we have an idea about the number and the intentions of all pilots. You will find the registration form through clicking the following link:
EMPOA on tour 2011 registration form
Please note, that the registration can only be completed successfully, as soon as the participation fee has been transferred to the EMPOA bank account. So please transfer 75,-€ per participating person to the following account:
Account-no: 24639551
Clearing-no: 69050001
Sparkasse Bodensee
IBAN: DE92 6905 0001 0024 639551
BIC: SOLADESILKNZ
You also have the chance to transfer your participation fee through PayPal to “paypal@ empoa.eu”
In case you have decided to join the complete tour and therefore also want to book the hotel package, please add further 535,-€ for a double-room and we will put your name on the reservation list. For an easier handling we currently only reserved double or twin bed rooms. In case you want to have a single bed room, please send a message to us and we will see, what we can do.
So this is it for the moment. We hope to see many of you during this tour and spent some great time together. In case you have some further ideas about this tour, which you want to share with us, we are glad if you let us know. As usually this event should be a community event and everybody is invited to contribute whatever he likes.
Fly safe!
Thomas Hamacher