Lille - Isle of Wight!

21st July 2019. With widespread thunderstorms having curtailed the planned overnight fly-out to Lille, aviators who’d been left without weekend plans spent a sunny Sunday flying to the Isle of Wight. The pilots skirted around temporary RIAT airspace via the Oxford overhead and made it to their destination Bembridge in under an hour.

Swapping French cuisine for seafood at the Beach Hut Cafe, the team availed themselves of a selection of mismatched deck chairs and enjoyed tasty crab ramekins and open salmon sandwiches with wonderful sea views. After lunch they got a minibus over to Sandown airfield, where the Royal Aero Club Air Race was just getting underway, the most exciting moments of the race, reserved for the last minute, when all eight competitors simultaneously completed their three laps of the south of the island in a final tense scramble for the finish line.

​On the flight home, there was just time for a quick orbit of Downton Abbey, aka Highclere Castle, to finish up the day in true Take Flight style.