After finishing my PPL training, I just had to wait 3 weeks for my licence to arrive, and then – slightly unexpectedly – another 3 weeks for my radio licence (BIPT – Restricted radiotelephone operator’s certificate for aircraft stations) to be ready, I could finally book my first flight as a private pilot.
Originally I was thinking about going to Spa or even Breda, but at the end my time slot had to be cut down to two hours as a result of a forced reschedule, because one of our other planes did not get its parts for maintenance in time. So at the end I decided to just do a local flight around the CTRs of Charleroi and Chièvres, and visit some sights on the way, aiming to arrive back around sunset. The flight went perfectly fine, the conditions were nice and smooth, the lights were beautiful, the landing was good, and in general I was just very happy to be finally able to fly on my own, without having to do anything extra for it (like get signed off by an instructor). If you look at the video you will see that while now I use SkyDemon exclusively for navigation and planning (although I had a paper map as backup, I did not prepare the navigation on it anymore), I still had a printout of the navigation log (from SkyDemon) and I still crosschecked the printout with the actual data, and did, e.g., the well learned HAT flow before every turn.
After the success of the previous flight, now I really wanted to go to Spa next (since I still have not made a full stop landing here on my own), but luckily I still checked the NOTAMs in the morning, because the airport got limited to home-based aircraft for a few days in the last minute (for reasons unknown to me). No problem, since I had a backup plan: going international!