2010_04_18 Gatwick Airport over-fly_0001.wmv

The Day The Airports Stood Still

We flew over Gatwick Airport on Sunday 18 April 2010, around 11am, in our simple single-engine prop Cessna 172 aircraft. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity as normally the airspace over Gatwick is controlled and general aviation enthusiasts are not permitted inside it.

But thanks to the Icelandic volcano shutting down the commercial airline industry over UK we got the chance and grabbed it with both hands.

You might want to drop the volume on this as the audio is only the sound of our aircraft engine.

Category:

Travel & Events

Tags:

• Flying
• aircraft
• Gatwick
• Iceland
• volcano

[Anders199]

@ikilicoglu

It WOULD Have been great fun to land in Gatwick, but the controller told us that her manager would not permit this, that we could not overfly anything lower than about 1000ft. We did get down to about that, and overflew as slowly as we could :-)

[Anders199]

@charlieiscool1000

We were allowed to fly over Gatwick because the jet aircraft were all grounded and it was otherwise closed for business. The volcanic ash did not affect the small prop aircraft so the female controller at Gatwick was very happy to give us permission to fly over the place with her direction on how we did it.

We were going at around 90mph over the runway.

[charlieiscool1000]

nice vid how comes u were allowed to fly over Gatwick even if it was closed they normally dont let ppl fly over the runways what speed were u flying at looks quite slow but seems u were flying at about 160 mph

[Anders199]

It would have been great fun to land, but we were advised by Air Traffic Control that no light aircraft were allowed to land and that we must keep to a minimum of 1000ft above the runway :-)

[ikilicoglu]

Why didnt you land? Would have made a nice headline "Gatwick open" lol