Sanliurfa to Nevsehir, Turkey

3 - 6 June 2008

The surreal scenery of Cappodocia

Yussuf drove us to the airport, where I quickly got access to the apron to replace the right magneto gasket, which due to vibration was leaking more and more oil, and furthermore had rotated such that the ignition timing was off. Access to the magneto nuts is rather difficult on a Mooney and special spanners are required. Fortunately the tools we had bought in Sanliurfa worked fine and after 4 hours the magneto was back on and the timing checked.
I went to the briefing office to file the flight plan and pay landing and parking fees. They were not used to general aviation aircraft in this brand new airport, so although they had had 3 days to work out the bill, they had trouble operating the computer software to generate the bill. After 45 minutes I paid the bill of 52 Euros and they promised to mail me the receipt to my home address. As is common in Europe, my IFR flight plan got rejected by Eurocontrol, so I changed it to a VFR flight plan as the weather forecast was fine.
After all that, it was almost 2 o’clock when we got airborne. Angela complained about the bumpy afternoon air, but the turbulence was not really that bad. Half an hour before landing in Nevsehir, we had great views of the majestic Erciyes volcano (3916 m), the second highest mountain in Turkey after Mt Ararat.
As soon as we were on the Nevsehir tower frequency, we heard numerous VFR light aircraft arriving and speaking with German and French accents. On the apron there were about 8 other light aircrafts with Swiss, German, British, Belgian and Luxembourg registrations. To our great surprise, one of them was another Earthrounder friend from Geneva, Antoine Gini in his Piper Malibu. He was part of an organized Turkish air rallye. We had planned to email him to scan some approach charts for Ljubljana and Maribor in Slovenia that I had given him before leaving Geneva in September. But this way, we could just ask him to give us the charts. We also met Alan Lathan from Jeppesen, Frankfurt whom I knew well from our numerous special chart orders for our long range trips. He had just retired a few months ago.