Staying in practice: Low approach in Stuttgart (EDDS)

Disclaimer: This video is just a recollection of our flight. It is not an instructional video and I don't claim that we did everything perfectly by the book. I'm sure that there are some small errors in there. Nobody's perfect, but I think we did OK on this one ;-).

But now the story: Our club's tow plane, a Robin DR-400-235 with callsign "D-EHIO", got a new engine this winter. For the first 25h this meant that every flight needed to be at least one hour long and done with fairly high power settings. Ideal for some fast cross-country flying!

On this flight back in March we collected the plane from our maintenance shop in Mannheim (EDFM) to fly back to Herrenteich (EDEH). To prolong this normally less than 10 minutes long flight we decided to go for a low approach in Stuttgart (EDDS), one of the major airports in Germany. They are very acceptive for GA flights and will always try to fit you in between the airliners, even in times of heavy traffic.

I deliberately left most of our internal chatter in the video. This shows a bit our thought processes and how we help each other. Patrick and I work together pretty well in the cockpit and although all we do is single pilot VFR, we still try to do some simple CRM (crew resource management) in the cockpit to make our lives easier. If you have another pilot in the cockpit, why not use him?

Most of the time the pilot flying (PF) handles the actual flying, the radio calls and looks out for traffic and weather. The pilot not flying (PNF) handles all the radio and navigation equipment. He keeps the charts ready, programs the GPS, dials in the next frequencies, changes squawks and looks up information when needed.

There might be a better way, but this works for us. Suggestions are welcome!

P.S.: The last comment, "Das war schon besser als das letzte mal.", or "This was better than last time." refers to the first test flight after maintenance the week before. There we battled a slightly misadjusted trim and elevator which led to us running out of nose down trim in cruise and out of up elevator on landing. But we got it right this time ;-).