East Midlands Airport is only a few miles away. Mostly that doesn’t cause any problems, although about half of the flights carry cargo rather than passengers and cargo flights tend to use older – and hence noisier – planes. A lot of the passenger flights are charters rather than scheduled which is fine if you want to go on holiday but not so good if you want to go somewhere for work.

The EMA runway is oriented east-west and is off to the south so while flights can be seen soon after take-off and some of them bank to the right to head north over Derby they don’t normally fly directly overhead – with one exception.

Ryanair training flight at roughly 3000 feet

Ryanair do flight crew training at EMA which seems to consist of doing repeated touch-and-go landings and take-offs in succession, with fairly tight circuits in between. Usually these circuits go clockwise – landing (into the wind, presumably) heading west – but if the wind is blowing more from the east then they reverse the direction of traffic on the runway and fly anti-clockwise instead. That means they planes are heading west when they fly overhead, as per the photo above.

The FlightRadar24 real-time flight tracking website shows these circuits very nicely. In this screenshot the plane is pretty much directly overhead.

FlightRadar24 flight track for RYR100T

They only fly these circuits in the daytime, and only on weekdays, and far from every day, so I rather like seeing the plane come overhead. Although it’s quite low it’s going slowly so not very noisy.

The leaves suddenly seem to have dropped from the trees and now the site is more obvious from the lane. The hedge alongside Chellaston Lane was trimmed recently and looking over the hedge (which is still around 2m high) it’s possible to get an impression of how the house will look from the lane. Despite my best efforts the camera auto-focussed on the hedge so the background isn’t as clear as it might have been. (In my defence I’d like to point out that I was holding the camera at arm’s length over my head since otherwise it would have just been a photo of the hedge with nothing in the background.)

View of the site over the hedge on Chellaston Lane, looking due north

While not all the features are particularly clear (better if you click the photo to zoom in) you should be able to make out, from left to right:

• The grey steel frame of the house
• The thin white pole which supports the time-lapse camera (between the wind turbines)
• The splash of yellow which is the dumper truck parked on the floor of the old barn
• The blue tarpaulin which is covering the stacked floor boards and joists on the floor of the old cow shed
• The wooden pole which carries the electricity supply in on overhead lines from the right
• The old steel hay barn in the next door field

The lighting in this photo highlights the wind turbines in the background. Those are located at the Severn Trent Water site at Spondon, 3 miles away, and they’re big – 80m to the top of the tower with blades 52m in length (so 132m from the ground to the top of the blades). More details here.