Pete and Guy chased a weather front through Germany into Eastern Europe on Thursday, landing at the former Soviet fighter station at dusk. Paddy and the GA Buyer staff reported that it had rained every day for the last month, with more bad weather forecast.

The AeroExpo was back to its original location, 50km from Prague with about 60-70 exhibiter aircraft. The Shark looked the most exciting new design, but top marks had to go to Mamba-Air who jammed 2 glamour models into its tiny CH-7 Compress helicopter – they must have been very good friends by the end of the 3 day event!
Philipp Steinbach, brains behind the Sbach 300 was exhibiting his new 2-seater Sbach 342, and gave Pete some advise on ducting air for oil coolers and shared some of the design detail of his amazing planes.

Several hundred aircraft arrived each day but the show was not without incident, a Mooney landing wheels up and weight-shift microlight crashing departing during a display. The impressive thing was the short time it took the fire service to pull the aircraft clear of the single runway.

The flying acts were surprisingly innovative, including an auto-towed vintage glider, Phillip in the awesome Sbach, gyrocopters, paragliders and microlights, an L39 Jet and father and son team with a formation act of SF-260 Marchetti and a radio controlled model.

We displayed 4 times but decided to beat the next active weather front with an early departure on the last day. 20 minutes out Pete suffered an engine failure due to an oil pump drive but safely landed at Plasy gliding club. He swapped planes and continued to Volkel for our afternoon display in Holland, arriving at home at the same time as Guy, who had hitched a ride back from the show site in a C182 into Stapleford Aerodrome. The next 50 hours was a 1700 mile driving marathon via Czech Republic and UL Power in Belgium for a replacement engine.

Huge thanks has to go to Paddy and Alex from GA Buyer, nothing was too much trouble. Also Lionel, Pascal and Patrick from UL Power for pulling the stops out to diagnose and fix the oil pump engine snag.