August 17, 2005
Going to Europe (part I)
My wife and I are going to Europe end of September. No, not by ourselves, the personal transatlantic flight will have to wait for adequate funding, but, I will be renting a C172 from a french aeroclub.
Some preparation is required for this, and, besides contacting the nice people at the Aéro Club Paris Sud, Toussus le noble, the most important thing is to obtain a validation of your FAA license.
This requires writing a formal letter to the french equivalent of the FAA and include the following:
- Photocopy of your FAA license
- Photocopy of the last filled in page in your logbook
- Photocopy of your medical certificate
- Photocopy of your passport
- Two passport photos
In the letter, you should state your request to obtain a validation, and you should indicate exactly where it should be sent to. It works best if you do it in french, but with a little bit of luck, it may work in english too. See the link below for the actual letter I sent.
Next step in the planning process is to obtain proper charts and airport directories. The European equivalent of the Jeppesens are the Bottlangs, and they're about the same price - in other words: way too expensive! Unfortunately, even VFR approaches and patterns to airports are somewhat unusual, and for noise abattement, the charted routes must be followed unless you wish to pay extra, so it is probably necessary to bite the bullet. Note that the Bottlangs need to be ordered from Europe, Jeppesen is so messed up they can't do it from here, even though their website has them listed. I chose to support the local airport shop and order it from them.
If you own a handheld GPS, make sure to take it with you and have the european database on it.
In part II, airspace and other bizarre rules of the air - coming as soon as my charts arrive.
Update:
Charts are on the way, but meanwhile I found Fly in France, a great website. It also seems that at least airport diagrams are available
Posted by Christian Goetze at 09:41 PM | Comments (2)