I'd promised to take Jamie, his friend from Meteren Roy and his father Jeroen up for a spin around Meteren. In the summer one can expect an occasional thunderstorm, but usually they don't surface until the late afternoon. I was not at all worried about our scheduled flight from around 14:00 until 15:00 hours. All of Europe was showing clear blue skies, except for a small storm over Belgium moving towards the Netherlands. During my flight preparations in the morning, I kept a wary eye out on the precipitation radar. It predicted that heavy rain would hit the southern part of the Netherlands in the early afternoon.

So on arrival at Seppe Airport I checked the radar again, and it did not bring happy news. I decided to cancel our intended trip to Meteren and instead opted to make a short local flight. It is always remarkable how good a feel of the situation you are looking at your surroundings from a bird's eye perspective. On our take-off climb I noticed heavy rain activity ca. 5 to 8 miles south of the field (and coming our way...). So we made a long turn over Oudenbosch and rejoined the pattern for a full-stop landing, as I did not feel the need to fly in that weather. When we parked the plane and were still wrapping up in the plane, it started to pour down really hard. It lasted at least 15 minutes before it subsided and we opted to make a run for it. All in all another great experience (and again builds my confidence in myself to not make any compromises on safety).

Below you can see the actual radar image at 13:00 hours, just one hour before our flight. The rain mass (white and red) is moving north. Would I've flown to Meteren, we would've been right in the middle of it.