(miles outside of) London Southend
Don’t these airfields realise how silly these geographically challenged names look? I remember visiting Lydd once and discovering it was now London Lydd. I sort of remarked “they’ll be calling Birmingham airport London Birmingham soon” and got some guff that Ashford was only x minutes from London by train, which seems to miss the point that Lydd doesn’t even have a railway station and it’s probably a £30 taxi ride to Ashford (each way).
(I think they call Lydd London Ashford now which is equally as silly since it’s not in Ashford either).
inspired by some of Peters trip reports. Flying out was beautiful, the return, less so… but thanks to the IMC/IR two people are alive to tell the tale!
That’s scary! You never told me about that… 
I do recall one meeting c. 2008 I had with a group of pilots who were going to fly from the UK to Greece. We went through the usual stuff; I told them about where to get the charts, etc. Unfortunately they ended up crashing in France in totally sub VFR conditions which, according to one of the group, they should have never flown in. They all survived. Much later, one chap brought me a smashed Garmin 296 asking whether I could retrieve the final track from it which fortunately was possible using an RS232 connection to Navbox.
I was going to fly to the Greek fly-in also but gave up due to bad wx – I had the IR then but it was not even possible IFR. Instead we got an airline flight down there.
OTOH a great deal is possible VFR below the cloud, which could not be done in a non-deiced TB20 using high altitude (Eurocontrol) IFR. You may just need to be flexible as to where you end up for the night, etc.
they call Lydd London Ashford now
More than a decade ago I had a date with a lady who had a Masters in Computer Science from the Open University. The most complex thing she had done was some javascript. She could have equally come out with an MBA and got a job as an airport manager… such is life these days, and anybody in business struggles with this “crazy society stuff” every day.
