Manchester to Paris Charles de Gaulle flight GPX tracklog

I don't fly that often so it took me a while to perfect the technique of logging my aeroplane journeys, but I've now cracked it and am getting good results so long as I've got a window seat.

Back in the early days of my Windows mobile powered HTC phones I had GPS available to me but unfortunately this was so early on in the smartphone era that use of all electronic equipment was banned during take-off and landing and use of a mobile phone was prohibited at any stage. Whilst the phones did have flight modes this obviously switched off the GPS.

Fast forward in time five years and after a long search I acquired the perfect GPS logger which I could use to geotag my photos - a i-gotU BT120 Travel & Sports logger. Whilst my little box of magic had a very sensitive GPS chipset, it was still having problems picking up a signal from inside the fusalage of the plane which is effectively a metal box / faraday cage. One flight I had the idea of balancing it on the window ledge, I was little nervous at first of resting a flashing brightly coloured device so much on display during the flight but as time went on and as the accptance of the use of electronic devices grew I was much more comfortable.

I soon started hitting another snag, aeroplanes suddenly stopped being designed with window ledges and having to hold it up to the window which was pretty inconvienient on any length of flight and ended up being a show stopper.

I've recently solved this issue with a stroke of genius whilst on a flight to Amsterdam - on this occasion I was testing out my Aldi GPS watch as it has has the best GPS reception of all my devices - I'd been thinking how I could suspend the reciever at window height when I realised I had an inbuilt mount, my shoulder! Problem solved, I stuffed the watch inside my clothing on top of my shoulder - I was now getting great reception descreetly. I tried it with my i-gotU and we are ggod to go there as well which is what I recorded this flight on.

I've another couple of flight traces to post; the pick of the bunch being a flight with an aborted landing due to another aircraft on the runway which had lost radio contact with the tower.