Mike & Tom Fly To Majorca - 30th July 2011: Oxford to Majorca

Tom and I met up on a showery afternoon at Redhill to discuss the arrangements that we have made, the aircraft owner that I've recently been in contact with, the route in which we plan to take and any other business.

Fig 1.0 - Sat at Redhill airport discussing flying

Firstly we both made sure that we both wanted to do the trip, ensuring we can both spare the time and both able to financially back the trip as it will take substantial amounts of both time and money. We were both extremely excited about the trip, and I think if the aircraft were sitting outside we would have gone today!

But we didn't. We sat down and very very roughly planned the route on an iPad running an aviation gps moving map which was fairly limited in planning 900 nautical mile trip, but we got the right idea. As were now planning to fly from Oxford and not the coast there are further ways of crossing the coast. One way at Lydd which is a shorter crossing over water (but longer) and is cheaper with fuel or a longer crossing over water (shorter in total). We decided that the longer water crossing shouldn't be discounted straight away as were looking to rent a life raft.

The route were planning to take is as follows (please ignore the directness of this, when it comes to planning properly we will need to avoid danger areas, avoid airspace and TMAs, CTAs, CTRs etc this was just a brief overview of which direction we will be heading in)