I’ve always been a particular relations with islands, and flying made it even stronger. Some of my dream destinations, like the Toronto City Center Airport, or Santa Catalina (a.k.a. “Airport in the sky” – click here for a video) are islands.

During my training by Cannes Aviation I overflew the “Iles de Lérins” several time. I like these two so much that I went back there with my family to wander on them. I also used pictures of them for my “3 easy tips to improve in-flight photos” post.

A long time ago, I planned a trip to “La Rochelle”, on the French Atlantic coast. This is a continental airport, but there are many islands to overfly nearby. This well in advance planned trip got canceled for good reasons: the passenger’s wife got pregnant, and her doctor was not positive about flying in a light aircraft.

I flew a couple of times to Corsica, including a memorable flight from Cannes to Bastia IFR and back. The initial plan was to go there for lunch, but we got delayed for some maintenance reasons, and I just had time to shoot two approaches and come back.

Another island that I achieved to reach is England. Twice. Strangely, the two times I flew to Biggin-Hill out of Geneva, someone else flew the leg home, so I never took-off from England, except for one local flight.

When a friend of mine had his Cessna 172 blocked in Guernsey, we planned to fly him there once his maintenance was finished. This has been canceled once because of fog, and a second time because I got hurt at the ankle the day before.

So all in all, I landed on only two islands up to now (Corsica and England). Having relocated from Switzerland to Germany does not make islands flying easier. The North Sea is closer, but the Mediterranean is farther away.

To compensate before I can resume my flying, I get frequent looks at Sylvia’s “Island project“… which I like.