La Morgal  

Date of Visit = July 1998

Pilot: = Chris Belton

e-mail = chris@yarboo.freeserve.co.uk

Field Report = This is a minor airfield belonging to the Principality of Asturias in Northern Spain. We were told it was a nice little airfield with a campsite. There's a hard runway, plenty long enough for light aircraft. There's a flying club, and the emrgency services base a helicopter there, but it's quiet. The field is annexed to the municipal leisure centre, but the campsite no longer exists, and we were told that camping on the airfield would lower the tone... Finally the security guard agreed to turn a blind eye, provided we put the tents up last thing at night and took them down first thing in the morning - and removed the washing from the propeller! You can buy snacks at the leisure centre (and there's a swimming pool), and there's a village within walking distance.

Photo: John Hardy

La Morgal (I think it's called "Lugo de Llanera" on the Spanish ICAO chart) is between Asturias airport and the town of Oviedo. We hacked down the coast, low level in the clag, from Bilbao, who had told us about the field. The flightplan, still compulsory for most flights in Spain, let them know we were coming, but we never actually asked for permission, and it didn't seem to matter. Contact numbers are a problem with these small airfields. Minor airfields are listed in the AIP along with their coordinates and the name of the owner, but no address or phone number.

The murky weather had come to stay. It was my friend's first visit to sunny Spain, and he was not impressed. We spent the time going through microlight magazines in the flying club, finding details of other small airfields to visit. There is a rumour that they only have fifteen days of sunshine a year in Asturias! To head south over the mountains required good VFR, so after two days we eventually decided to route low level along the coast and cross the mountains at the lower end, with the coastal strip of Villaframil, NNE of Lugo, as an alternate. As it turned out, we were nearly stuck in La Morgal for yet another night, and all for want of a mobile phone. The public phone in the leisure centre gobbled pesetas so fast there was no chance of a weather forecast or of filing a flightplan. To her embarrassment, the manageress could not help: her own phone was kept padlocked by the “authorities”! Eventually, she drove us to the firestation and persuaded the firemen to fax off the flightplan.

We struggled on down the coast in the murk, and turned south down a valley which became too narrow to turn back... If only we had stopped at Villaframil. We could have been sitting eating seafood in the restaurant. This was press-on-itis. We just managed to squeeze through the pass at the top, went IMC for a matter of seconds, then broke out into the brilliant sunshine which covered the rest of Spain. I thought we had died and gone to heaven. I wouldn’t do that again! Perhaps the moral is to avoid the area in poor weather unless you are prepared to sit it out for as long as it takes.