EMPOA News

Dear Mooniacs,

after thinking a lot about what would be the next highlight for EMPOA members and talking with a lot of people und pilots, what would be interesting for them, we finally decided to do something totally new, which has not yet been done in the EMPOA history. The EMPOA already brought you a lot of very interesting events besides our very attractive Fly-Ins to many different places through Europe. Starting with bringing Jerry Manthey´s maintenance class to Europe, we also established a Mooney Flight Training together with the MAPA Safety Foundation, which will also be held this year again and brought you many advantages, which are special to EMPOA members, such as the group-insurance!

Now we decided not to fly to one place for a weekend, but use the Mooney for what it is build: travelling far distances to interesting places. We decided to offer every interested EMPOA member the chance to join a a tour together with other Mooniacs & friends. As this is the very first tour of this kind we had to decide how this tour should look like and whom we wanted to attract. We had some very interesting discussions concerning this topic and it´s not an easy question, as the different Mooneys can be used for a very wide range of flying. Some Mooniacs are already very experienced and use their plane in every weather and already flew across the north atlantic and others are VFR-pilots, who are sometimes very new to this complex aircraft and might have the feeling, that they are not yet experienced enought to fly those big distances to other countries. Bringing those demands together in one tour would probably not be a good idea, as it would be very hard to satisfy everybody´s ideas, whishes and challenges. As the EMPOA should be interesting to every Mooniac, we decided to offer tours for both profiles. But we also would like to transfer the experience and the knowledge of the very skillfull pilots to the more novice pilot, because everyone started at some time without having this big bag of experience he has nowadays. So this first tour should be a chance to bring the differently experienced pilots together to help each other and to give everyone a possibility to learn and to further one´s personal development and flying skills. But the level of this trip should be doable for every VFR-rated pilot, so that pilot´s who wouldn´t do this kind of a tour alone without any help also join this trip without shame or having the feeling of being overstrained. We will offer an extended version of this tour in a shorter period for IFR pilots as well later this year. But let us now stay with this first VFR tour.

This is also the reason, why we decided to do this tour in a very tolerant amount of time. This gives us the chance to react on weather or any unexpected incidents without getting in trouble. So let me give you a brief description of what we thought about so far. We would like to meet on Saturday, 21th August, in the lovely town of Salzburg (LOWS). Salzburg is very attractive for every aviator, as Red Bull installed their famous Hangar-7 on this airfield, which is a kind of living museum, where planes of different ages are restored to fly again. Our further routing towards Istanbul will take us over Hungary and Slovania to Serbia. The first leg to the airfield of Nic (LYNI) will satisfy our hunger for flying and give us some chance to refuel and getting an idea about this country. The next day we will take-off for the next highlight of this tour: The cosmopolitan city of Istanbul will be our home for a couple of days. This city is so impressive that you can easily spend weeks there without having seen everyhing. As this tour should give us a chance to relax and enjoy the different places we will go to, we will have enough time for visiting this city. After leaving Istanbul we will have the chance to fly along the Aegean towards the island of Mykonos (LGMK). Our first destination in Greece - and also the southernmost point of our journey - will welcome us with the warm sea to relax on the beach and the wonderful countryside after the troubles of the big city. We will also stay in Greece for our next leg, as we cross the many islands towards the Adriatic sea, where Corfu (LGKR) will be our next destination. From Corfu we will head north again and fly over Albania and Montenegro to the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina: Sarajevo (LQSA). After beeing in war for many years, this city should be an insider tip now, as it should have recovered very well until today and should have become a very interesting and impressive town. From Sarajevo we will turn towards the coast again, as we will spent some time at the very beautiful shoreline of Croatia, where we will be invited and guided by some of our EMPOA members. Our final destination for this tour will take us to Hungary, where we will also be invited by one of our EMPOA members to accomodate at a very romantic hungarian castle near Fertõszentmiklós (LHFM). This castle will also be the place for having our final farewell dinner, after everyone has to leave for their homebase the next day.

Have a look at the route on the following chart:

So as you can see there are a lot of highlights in this journey and it will provide many very different impressions, which you will hopefully like. You can also download our complete routing including the schedule as a PDF-file.

What should be clear to everyone is, that this tour will definately not be a professionally guided tour where everybody can expect that everything will be done by the EMPOA or the organizers. All we will do is, to present you a routing and a touristic program and everybody, who is interested should feel free to join this tour. Of course we will also do some kind of briefing and will help everyone to reach their destinations, but everything concerning flight-preparation and trip-planning has to be done by every crew independantly. This declaration does not only have a lawful background, but should prevent, that all the work has to be done by the organizers (which will definately not be doable) and make everyone aware of the fact, that he also has to care for his own responsibility. We will be open to every questions and provide help, wherever we can, but please also respect our limits.

We will provide you with some further information as soon as possible. What would be interesting to us now is, who is interested in joining this tour. We cannot make a real forecast about the total costs of this tour right now, but of course we will try to keep the costs low. For a first estimate you should add around 100,-€ each night for accomodation to the flying costs and of course an adequate fee for the touristic program. But what you have right now is a time-schedule and a routing, so that you can check if this tour is suitable for you. Probably we have to limit the number of participants, so that we can still handle the administrative work, be flexible enough and still have the chance to help someone. Everybody who would like to join this tour, should sign-up through our registration-form as soon as possible.

If there is someone who would like to join the orga-team and contribute some ideas or recommendations for any destination, or might maybe be interested in planning the touristic program for one location, please feel free to contact us (tour-2010@empoa.eu) at any time. We are open to any input at any time. Of course any questions can also be asked through the given email.

We are very excited about this trip and hope to see some of you guys on this tour! Stay tuned for further details…

Fly safe!

Matthias Rode
Thomas Hamacher

Posted in Newsletter