Slightly eventful trip. It had stopped raining by the time we got escorted through the terminal and marched 300m metres down muddy tracks towards the militry airfield until the GA apron.
Instrument flight plan filed (Stephen was flying) so we rose to 8,000 ‘above the Podgorica plain and Lake Skardu on the Albanian border. (Apparently a hippo from Belgrade zoo lives there somewhere in the wet lands.)
From then on we were in cloud and saw nothing as we flew to reporting points, visible only in the GPS. Albanian air traffic control kept an eye on our spacing by adjusting our height and speed, taking us up to 11,000′, our operational limit. I began to get altitude headaches and one of the other planes began to pick up ice in the cloud.
The ice was a bit of a mystery since the rest of the planes avoided more than some thin layers. The affected Cesna should be slightly faster than us but lost speed to about 95nmph from 125nmph. The routed further out to sea to try to find clear sky and were even refused a request to drop altitude by ATC when they reported heavy icing. (It was about -10C outside. Things were only resolved when we came down to 8,000 on approach to Corfu.
Corfu was only visible from about 5,000’ with multiple layers of cloud. ATC vectored us around the south of the island before a long visual approach onto runway 35, swooping over the pretty little monasteries at the runway threshold.
These two pretty monasteries lie at the runway threshold at Corfu
Inbound over the monasteries
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