Spring 2021 fly-in proposals

We had a great experience when visiting Vrsar back in 2012. It was the first of what has become many visits to Croatia, back then there was customs on the field, beer and wine but no AVGAS 😬 We stayed in Porec I believe.

+1 for Vrsar. Theoretically, could one fly an approach at Pula to cloud break and then fly to Vrsar?

Snoopy wrote:

Theoretically, could one fly an approach at Pula to cloud break and then fly to Vrsar?

Nah just descend and fly over water, turn right over that river estuary and you are on base leg
Northerly winds of course

Ibra wrote:

Nah just descend and fly over water, turn right over that river estuary and you are on base leg

Will ATC clear you for that? According to international standards they would not, as you would request a descent below the minimum sector/vector altitude.

Airborne_Again wrote:

Will ATC clear you for that?

Not a serious comment on my side, I forgot there is CAS at +1000ft and MVA is +3000ft and you need ATC clearance

If it isn’t CAVOK most of us won’t come. Instrumented rated or not.

Based on past fly-ins, certain things work and certain things kill the turnout. Much has been written on this but the biggest “killer” issues are

• rain and other bad wx – stops all VFR visitors and makes hanging out no fun for those who do arrive
• if grass, recent rain (but we aren’t doing grass ever again, for reasons like Venice where ~45 out of 50 possibles vapourised and the IFR-capable people just got stuck in mud)
• a location to which everybody has been on Easyjet for €30 (unless is it super-romantic like Venice)
• an airport with silly parking limits, like Tivat last year, max 10, which basically wasted the chance for 50% of potential visitors (because 50% usually cancel at last minute, wasting the booked parking places)… the much-debated solution is to take €€€ from each person, like most other events do (e.g. Cirrus take over €200), but we don’t do that here

An overcast/BKN/SCT of say 2000ft will cause some VFR-only pilots to drop out, but enables IFR capable people to get there so we still have a good group, whereas if we cancelled it, we would get nothing at all, which totally wastes one of the two main fly-ins during the year.

There is a huge choice of locations which tick the right boxes. The above is just a list of things which we have learnt to not repeat

A coastal location tends to be more popular – most people love the sea. And you get easy arrivals in less than perfect wx.