Today, my route was to get to Hungerford by any convenient route, and then turn west and fly overhead Devizes and then Paulton (south of Bath) before turning back towards Bournemouth.
Sounds easy, but there were several NOTAMs today that presented a real problem. Between Bournemouth and Hungerford is a Military Air Traffic Zone (MATZ) which contains Boscombe Down and Middle Wallop airfields. Plan A was to fly through the MATZ via Middle Wallop. However there is an active NOTAM this week indicating that their helicopter display team is practicing in the Middle Wallop Air Traffic Zone, so my plan could not take us into their immediate vicinity.
Easy I thought, let's route via the Chilbolton radio telescope (left). Its easy to see from the air, is just on the edge of the MATZ, and it is far enough away from Middle Wallop to be a safe turning point en route to Hungerford. Nice, I thought.However, another NOTAM then revealed that there is a tethered hot-air balloon being flown up to 5500ft from Chilbolton this month, and all aircraft are to remain clear by 1 mile in each direction.
So that put paid to plan 'B'. Routing further south or east was not an option as that would put me in Southampton's airspace, and routing further west would put me in the middle of the Salisbury plain military danger areas (get shot down, or get sent to jail, or both), where as it happened a Hercules was dropping parachutists. Best avoided then.
Since the weather was actually quite good today, with scattered clouds at 3500ft, I elected to make an early radio call to Boscombe Radar and then advise them that I would be climbing over the MATZ (which extends to 3000ft above ground level) in order to be above the helicopters.
So that's what we did; and it all went reasonably well. We didn't bust any airspace, get shot down or end up in court. Which was nice.
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