Hi guys!
This is my first trip report about a trip from Austria to Croatia I flew with two friends, one other pilot, last week. We rotated PIC for the flight there and back.
We departed from Vöslau on a nice Wednesday, after pushing the departure for one day as the weather wasn’t all that great on our planed departure day.
Our original routing would have been to fly south towards Maribor, continue towards Zagreb and then towards the coast and islands. Those mountains turned out to be covered in clouds according to the GAFOR for Croatia (can be found at met.crocontrol.hr/web/guest/gafor) so I choose to fly towards Maribor and then continue along the VFR routes in Slovenia making headway towards the ocean.
The GAFOR was forecast as open for the whole route, meaning ceilings of at least 2000ft AGL.
As Croatia isn’t part of the Schengen area yet, we had to call the police and have a customs and immigration check at our local field. Which was easy and completed in no time.
We flew in FL080 through Graz TMA, obtaining a clearance from them is easy, in my experience. Its also not what you would call a high traffic area, although we had one airliner on our frequency at the same time.
From there on we continued towards Maribor, they either had very bad weather lifting just before we flew in or some kind of fly in. Lots of N reg and swiss planes departing. The frequency was super busy and the local controller was a bit stressed out. Therefore we tried to keep radio traffic to a minimum to not add to her already high workload. Initially we had to have a little discussion with them whether they assigned us a flight level or altitude. From my experience now Slovenia only hands out altitudes to VFR traffic.
After Maribor we encountered a cloud layer, as the forecast and METARs were indicating a ceiling of at least 2000ft below, I choose to continue above the cloud layer, VFR on top. And we got a climb to 9000ft. Most of the time the clouds were not totally overcast and you could actually see the terrain below when looking from the top down. We also always had some direction in sight and fuel range which was open. This was an import criterion for me.
This was one of the parts with more dense cloud coverage:
Some time after switching over to Lubijana Info we had to descend to 7000ft at request of Lubijana radar, we were inside their airspace beforehand, probably Maribor didn’t properly coordinate our altitude with them, due to the high workload they had.
Sure enough the clouds broke open when we flew closer towards the ocean, revealing great CAVOK conditions:
ATC in Croatia was also easy and we had no problems in crossing the CAS over Krk/Rijeka. Very friendly, helpful, and well we were the only aircraft on that frequency anyways.
We were handed over to “Losinj Radar” by Rijeka, tried to reach them, with little success. I had read somewhere in the AIP that Losinj is an uncontrolled field during weekdays. I took that to mean its an AFIS/Info field. Turned out that meant unicom as after our third attempt to raise them some other plane answered and was very helpful with providing the current wind. Unicom is not allowed within Austria and I only encountered it in Spain and Denmark before.
Otherwise the landing was uneventful. Parking was a bit harder, turned out that all the parking spots placed on concrete were already taken. So if parking on grass is a problem for you, be advised of that. For us the only issue with the grass was that the soil turned out to be rock hard, with lots of actual rocks inside it. Not my idea of fun, so we tried to arrange some other parking, wasn’t going to happen. But we were able to install the tie downs after putting some more effort into it.
This field also has customs and immigration, was also easy. Having flewn for a bit over two hours and after our little excursion into the jobs of apron construction workers we rewarded ourselves with a large plate of Cevapcici right at the airfield.
We stayed in the city for two nights in an apartment, Pension Ivanka 120 Eur per night total, enjoying the beach, nightlife, harbor and coast. It is quite beautiful small town and island.
Mali losinj:
Quite a few pretty expensive yachts in the harbor:
And less expensive tourist cruise boats:
And some nice beaches along the coast, no sand but very clear and nice water.
After three days in Mali Losinj, we continued on towards Vrsar, a small airfield further north along the coast of Croatia.
Losinj had Avgas and getting the fuel was easy too. Only took as some time to pay. Had to go to three different offices when leaving, one for paying the landing fees, another to pay for the Avgas and the last one to file the flightplan.
On our way to LDPV we did some island sightseeing:
20 knots, vs 120 knots:
On our way we flew along Rovinj, a beautiful small city on the Croatian northern coast. We also went sightseeing there after landing. I would quite recommend it for quick, or even a longer, detour when you are already in the area. Nice old town, but also lots of tourists, at least this time of the year round.
We stayed another night in the small town of Novigrad, and enjoyed another beautiful sunset:
Departing from Vrsar was a bit of challenge, the runway is 700m long, has a 2% upslope, a crosswind, it was almost 35 degrees hot and there are some obstacles beyond the field. So we performed all the take off calculations, redid them, and rechecked them a third time.
Otherwise the field was easy, they have customs on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, but only Mogas, no Avgas. We know that beforehand and had taken up enough fuel in Losinj.
I always apply a 40% safety margin to the numbers in the POH, my friend the PIC on this leg did the same, within this safety margin it was close. So I walked the runway to check out the obstacles and the distance left towards them at the end of the runway. There was just enough room within those 40%.
My friend performed a short field take off and we had lots of room to spare.
Initially flying along the coast of Slovenia/Italy:
Our flight home was easy ATC wise. We requested an altitude of 10 000 feet, flew inside controlled airspace for almost the whole journey through Croatia, Slovenia and Austria and got directs all the way too. I guess I should stop filing flightplans along VFR routes, at least at these altitudes if I get or ask for directs anyways. Got one squawk code in the beginning, kept it all the way up until we arrived at our home airfield. We also got handovers all along the route.
My strategy for this has worked fine so far: If they ask you for your further altitude or routing after leaving their airspace, assume they are doing a coordination with the further unit. If they don’t do that, call them and ask them to coordinate. Which always lead to either a standby and they did it, a we already did or call that frequency and do it yourself.
Still inside Slovenia we saw a huge and strange cloud. Was hard to estimate a position of this cloud to avoid it.
We continued on towards through Kärnten (Corinthia), passing some very beautiful parts of the alps and lakes:
Continuing on towards Graz it turned out that the cloud we saw earlier wasn’t really a cloud at all. It was smoke from a pretty large fire in an industrial recycling center.
We had to divert quite a bit further north to avoid it.
After that it was just flying home along the mountains we know very well, and landing back home.
Four very nice days and I hope you enjoyed reading it too.
Best regards,
Fabian
Thanks for sharing!
Do I understand right that all flying was under VFR?
Great report! I enjoyed reading it.
Thanks for sharing!
Very nice quality on the photos. Kudos.
Re “Unicom”. That is actually a US term, not used much outside the States. Unicom is for comms between pilots and FBOs.
What you mean is Air/Air radio procedures (CTAF on the US). It actually works like this all over the world, with the exception of Austria and Germany.
fabian wrote:
we had to call the police and have a customs and immigration check at our local field
You must have been lucky.
Last time I called customs they came late, hid in some unmarked room so we couldn’t find them, then when we tried to depart (we were already at the holding point with the power checks done), Vöslau called us and we had to return, then they accused us of trying to evade customs checks. That made us miss our IFR slot, not to mention the appointment with customs at the other side.
I found that completely unacceptable behaviour by the Bundespolizei. Not entirely unexpected though, given what a friend who works for the police in Vorarlberg told me about them.
@tomjnx: I am surprised (and sorry) to hear that. Never experienced something like that in LOAV or LOAN. IME, in at least half of the cases, the police don’t come at all because they have other things to. In the other half of the cases it’s just a quick look at the passport.
@fabian: beautiful pictures! Did you edit them? If yes, how?
A very scenic flight 
One just cannot imagine Yugoslavia having had a “hard” version of communism, with such beautiful scenery
Appreciate the great feedback! :)
Jan_Olieslagers wrote:
Do I understand right that all flying was under VFR?
Yes it was all done under VFR. Had some look into, and discussions with people, about VFR on top of an overcast and came to the conclusion that with the advent of SERA this is legal throughout Europe, as long as you stay clear of airspace G. And keep in mind the distances to clouds prescribed for E and on.
For me the personal limit is that a descent through the cloud cover should be possible without the risk of getting to close to terrain. In our case the cloud layer was mostly so thin that you could see the terrain below when you were looking straight down.
blueline wrote:
beautiful pictures! Did you edit them? If yes, how?
Yes they were. The pictures are actually also from three different people and four different cameras. The ones from the city of Mali Losinj on the ground were already pre edited as I got them. The others were all edited at least in Lightroom to adjust curves (exposure and contrast) and saturation. As well as tweaking the white balance in many cases. Sometimes I also turned up the vibrance and clarity. Some were also further edited in Photoshop. Especially the pic of the overcast clouds, which was taken from a screen grab of the GoPro, straighten out with lens correction, some curves to pull up the cockpit which was at a lower exposure and noise reduction to get rid of the noise in the now brighter shadows.
If you are interested in any details, just let me know.
And thank you again for the tips you sent to me! :)
At some point there will also be a video of the flight, edited down to a few minutes. Had the GoPro running most of the time.
I also built my own neutral density filter for my GoPro case to get rid of the propeller. The disadvantage being that it pushes the GoPro to higher ISO settings, causing more noise in turn. Especially since I only got a Hero 2, not the best higher ISO performance.
So many things to do and places to see… Thanks for sharing.
As promised I just finished editing and uploading the video of this flight today: (about 8 minutes)
Some highlights are VFR on top, sightseeing above small islands in Croatia, flying over the mountains (Karavanken) at FL 100.
