Idle Queries.

[Ninurta]

Cheers Sky, I'm surprised that a plane leaving technically an island can fly to the mainland without be checked!

I watched a couple of these types of aircraft fly from Cannes France to Birmingham England and guessed Customs
would be involved in these cases. I was going to write about a 'lonely-Aerodrome-to-lonely-Aerodrome' flight could
be open to abuse, but the webcam at Sherburn Aero Club as I typed this implies otherwise!

Thank you.

I think some of those smaller airports are just the ticket for smugglers. This area is dotted with tiny airports with next to no oversight. There was one about a half mile from my last job site that could be used to bring in all manner of untoward objects and substances. It had a rather long runway for such a tiny insignificant airport, but I presume part of the reason for that was the sheer drop at the end of the runway.

Many years ago, a gentleman with a slavic name contacted me about the purchase of a portion of my land. The part he wanted was on a ridgetop, and his explanation was that he wanted a private airstrip so he could "fly in for hunting trips". I checked the owners of all the lands around there, and his name never came up - so where could he have possibly been hunting? Outsiders were looked at askance by the locals, especially if they had a slavic name in those days of the Cold War, so I'm pretty confident that he didn't have permission to hunt the farms of any of the locals there. The consensus in my family circles is that he wanted the landing strip for smuggling rather than hunting, so I wouldn't sell it to him. It didn't help matters for him that he wanted what was probably the only agriculturally productive part of that patch.

As an aside, my uncle DID find a fairly large pot patch in proximity to that landing strip area one day when he was out hunting. I don't recall whose land it was on, but am fairly sure it was a guerilla farm on the lands of an absentee landowner who rarely if ever came to check on their land. The pot patch mysteriously vanished one night not long after it's discovery.

And yeah, you DO need permission around there to hunt anyone else's land. Even my own family has always sought my permission before hunting on my land - which was really just a formality, as I've never denied it to them. All the same, they have always asked first. But there are always several absentee landowners in that area who never check on their patches, and an unscrupulous individual might be induced to use someone else's land in those circumstances for their own benefit in conducting illegal or questionable activities, so that such would not be traced back to their stalwart selves.

@"BIAD" - if you recall the "strange rock symbol" near my land that turned out to be a rare tar kiln from days gone by, just above that rock ("above" meaning "upstream" in this context), there is a rock overhang, what we call a "rock house" because of their use by early settlers as shelters, that would be just the ticket for setting up a moonshine still, and the owner of that patch lives in Montana, and never comes to check on it.

There is no telling what really goes on up in those isolated hollers.

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