None of the jobs available from LEBB convinced me, so I decided to plan a short hop to Vitoria, where a nice cargo job was waiting to be delivered to Girona. In addition, I found 5 passengers wanting to go to Vitoria, so I decided to fly to LEVT. However, the weather was kind of borderline. I should have flown IFR, but decided to go VFR since, over the map, it seemed to be an easy flight of just 20 minutes, following a highway. I was wrong.
Again, the high speed of the Baron on take off made me suffer during the traffic pattern. I was unable to find the visual exit point while I flew over Bilbao and this led me to follow the wrong valley.
The confusion increased even more due to the low altitude and high speed. I could not follow properly the highway leading to Vitoria and, as a consequence, ended up flying in turns trying to orient myself.
Finally I decided to do VOR navigation to LEVT, but again, due to the stress of high speed at low altitude, I confused the frequency by a digit, and for few minutes I followed the wrong station. The visibility was decaying quickly and I was next to hit some aeroturbines. Luckily, when I realised about the wrong VOR and fixed it, I was near LEVT runway 04, so I immediately landed.
Lesson well learnt. Don't fly VFR on
marginal VMC or non-VMC with the Baron, it's simply too fast and
difficult to orient at low altitudes, specially when following features
of the ground. And a magneto is broken, but I'm lucky it was only that.
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Distance: 30 nm
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