Our eldest son and his family live on Guernsey and we visit them there every couple of months or so. Flying is a bit boring if the weather's cloudy, but I rather enjoy it when it's clear and it's interesting trying to identify the places we pass over. It's easy enough when taking off and landing, both in Manchester and Guernsey, and I've got some rather nice photographs of the coastline of Guernsey and the area around Hyde, where we live, and Denton & Stockport. During the flight, which we are told is at 17,000 feet (about 3¼ miles), I look out for features which I may be able to identify later - the Isle of Wight is obviously easy to recognise, and Southampton's on the mainland just to the north of that, but I've also got photographs of Derby, Northampton and Leicester which I've been able to identify from the areas around the football and rugby stadiums. Returning from our latest trip I noticed what looked like a landing strip, but it was only when I realised that what seemed like a kart track next to it was Donington Park race circuit that I could see that the 'landing strip' was actually East Midlands Airport. Here's a photograph I took (and I've enlarged it a bit to make it clearer):
The outline of the Donington Park circuit which you can see isn't the actual track, it's the gravel run-off areas on the outside of each corner.
We fly to and from Guernsey using the Channel Islands airline, Aurigny Air Services, and the aircraft on the Manchester flight is usually one of the airline's three ATR72 500s, G-BWDB, G-COBO or G-VZON. On the last trip we came home on G-VZON, and here are some photographs of that aircraft on the morning flight GR670 from Guernsey on 13th May 2015. It passed over Hyde at 9.39am.
