One day, Laurent, a friend of mine, came up with the idea to participate at the fly-out to Toulouse and the visit of EADS (European Aeronatics, Defense and Space Company) and Airbus.
I had already read about the flyout, but I knew I could not go, because June would be a quite stressful month at school, with a lot of examinations coming one after the other. Therefore it was nearly impossible for me to join them, even though I knew it was a unique opportunity to see the construction of the Airbus A380!
The fly-out was scheduled to begin on Thursday, the 22nd of June and last until Sunday the 25th. Laurent reminded me that Friday the 23rd is a public holiday in Luxembourg and there would be no school this day, so we would not miss any classes and could join the "adventure"! The same evening we made our plane reservation and started planning how to get to Toulouse.
A few days before the flyout, I was asked if it were possible to make a quick stop at Cognac on our way to Toulouse. In fact one of our planes (LX-AID) was left there after the Cognac Rally, because of adverse weather conditions. This would only bring us off-track for some 200km, so Laurent and I decided to take the third pilot with us.
Thursday the 22nd was not the best day for a flight to Toulouse. It was even not sure whether we could leave Luxembourg. We tried it anyway. There was a broken, nearly overcast layer at around 3000ft MSL, but we still managed to get through it. At FL60 we were over the clouds in VFR conditions as we continued towards Cognac.
As some of you probably know, Cognac is a military airfield, where civil aviation is restricted to specific conditions and times. As we had telephoned them one day ago and had green light for landing, we did not expect any problems. But as we approached the control zone, the controller didn't let us in; we were simply not on his list of the permitted arriving aircrafts. So there was no other possibility: we had to deviate to an alternate airport. In our case it was Angoulême, which lies about 40km east of Cognac.
Since we had headwind, it took us about 3 hours 25 minutes to get there and the flight consisted of 740km!
The pilot for LX-AID had to take a taxi to get to Cognac Military Airbase to his airplane.
After refuelling Laurent and I took off and headed to Toulouse. We landed at Toulouse Las Bordes 1 hour 25 minutes after that. Unfortunately we had some troubles with our front wheel, but we were helped by the local maintenance and that for free!
South of the airfield is an Ariane Rocket! So it was not difficult locating the airport.
That's the way we managed to get to Toulouse in 4 hours 50 minutes, travelling over 1050km.
On Friday morning we gathered at the hotel for our first breakfast.
After that we were picked up by our bus and brought to EADS Astrium at Toulouse, where new satellites are built and tested. We were told a lot of interesting things about EADS, especially of the Space Section of the Company. After the initial presentation EADS offered us a second breakfast.
Afterwards we could see the satellite construction facilities, but we were not allowed to take photos, because some projects, like military satellites, were secret.
Now we knew how satellites are built and we wanted to see them in action! So we drove to Spot Image, a section of EADS which takes live images of the world.
The man at Spot Image showed us the trajectories of their satellites. We could assist to a live tracking of a satellite overflying the east of Europe.
In the afternoon we went to Airbus. Some of us (including me) had a private visit of the construction halls of the A380, the biggest halls on earth!
As you can imagine, we were not allowed to take photos inside the facilities, but believe me, an A380 is quite a big machine and if you see three of them in one row you can imagine what the dimensions of these buildings are!