WEATHER
Flight track and diversion
‘I dialled up and said ‘look, I’m in trouble’ and they said come straight in... let me land there and a rather shaen ino and got o’
it was just like flying into a brick wall at a thousand feet; the aeroplane went up and I hit my head three times on the ceiling, the headphones came off, I saw nothing, just the runway, I don’t know what it was, it was horrible. “It was clear air turbulence at 1,000ft and this thing was going everywhere; it was terrifying, actually; I’ve been flying for ten years and flown a lot in big aeroplanes in that sort of turbulence, but nothing like this; I did think that my chips might have been coming up. “I was the right way up, but thinking
Nottingham takes half an hour. I load up Tino and he loves it, runs along the beach for a couple of hours, then we have an ice cream and fly back. “But the other day that crazy weather
was around; obviously I’d been watching very carefully what the weather was doing, it seemed to be over to the West from where we were and the journey back from Skeggie had been absolutely fine. “I’d come over Melton Mowbray, with the
easterly wind behind me, nice and quick, and was just about to turn onto the final approach for Nottingham when I got the news from East Midlands that the wind there was actually westerly, about 30mph gusting to about 45mph and I thought ‘hell, what’s this all about, that wasn’t on my forecast’. “This thing had come in and as I turned
‘what the hell do I do’, so my immediate reaction was to go east, away from it. I spoke to East Midlands and a lovely lady there was very calming, sometimes these ATC people can be a bit scary, but she was great, she knew I was in trouble and she mentioned Langar which is just up the road from me at Tollerton. “It’s actually a skydiving place, a little
airfield which we have to avoid with parachutists dropping out of the sky all the time, so she gave me their frequency, I dialled up and said ‘look, I’m in trouble’ and they said come on straight in, and that was it, they very kindly let me land there and a rather shaken Tino and I got off. “I went back to the aeroplane the next
day to have a look. There’s a locker at the back where we keep all our equipment, and it was like a grenade had gone off in
there; I don’t know what had happened to Tino he had obviously been tethered at the back and must have been wondering what had been going on. I put the harness back on, put him back in the aeroplane and he was happy to continue. “I didn’t have any injuries, just a sore
head, that’s the way these things go, but not to see anything is extraordinary, it was frightening, terrifying, but hey you challenge yourself sometimes and it was all a good reminder just how powerful nature is. You know, if you get caught in a rip off a beach you know that feeling of being powerless, and that was what we experienced that day.” Clearly he handled a tricky situation well and making the diversion was a good call. What did surprise Jonathan when he got to Langar was that the wind was blowing the expected easterly, 1800
different to the
wind at Tollerton yet the two were only a stick’s throw for Tino apart. So what happened? We asked The
Met Office to look back at their charts and satellite images for the time (about 18.30) when Jonathan was lining up for finals at Tollerton to work out just what happened that evening. At that time (Tuesday, 13 September) southern and central parts of the UK were under the influence of a very warm airmass for the time of year, brought in from the near Continent on a
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