Lunch at the Pilot’s Hub, Redhill Aerodrome

It’s been a little while since Lee and I had a trip by air, and as we were fortunate enough to have a day of good weather during a rare three days off this week, we decided to fly down to Surrey for lunch at Redhill Aerodrome. I’ve followed Redhill Aerodrome’s 1930s-aviation-themed cafe, The Pilot’s Hub, on Twitter for some time now, and their tweets have obviously worked their magic on me because they’ve made me really keen to visit!

The weather was glorious – not a cloud in the sky. You’d be forgiven for thinking that this would mean perfect flying conditions, but alas it was not the case! We were knocked about quite violently by thermals for the duration of the 1hr 20 minute flight and it wasn’t particularly pleasant. We took it in turns with the flying as it was such hard work. We perched our hats over our headsets to give us a bit of shade, which did make a big difference actually.

On the way down we got clearance to go through the zone of RAF Benson, which is where lots of military helicopters are based. I love the way the extended centre line of the runway is marked out in the crops!

Here we are on final approach into Redhill. As you can see, it has grass runways rather than tarmac.

Gwenn the Dimona all parked up!

This was our destination – the Pilot’s Hub! It’s soooo much better than the greasy spoon style cafes that you get at a lot of airfields, and I love the logo.

From our table, we had great views of the parked aircraft (including ours, three in on the right of the pic below, with the canopy cover on to keep the cockpit cool!) and of the police helicopter, which is based at Redhill and was quite active while we were there.

For lunch, I had a delicious smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwich, which came with lovely thick bread, salad and crisps.

And Lee had this amazing-looking burger. Lots of things on the menu had an aviation theme (e.g. ‘Sausage Barrel Roll’!), and this was called ‘the Spirit of St Louis Burger’.

It was great to have lunch so close to the aircraft!

Highly photogenic food, in a highly photogenic environment!

Me in full-on summer mode.

To finish up, we had Magnum ice creams. I had a white chocolate one, which was just what I needed in the summer sun.

We were able to pay our landing fee along with our restaurant bill, which was handy. This was an interesting find on the way to the loo after lunch!

Finally, a few shots of the inside of the Pilot’s Hub. There was all sorts of interesting aviation memorabilia, including some bits mounted on the bar of the plane in the pic above it…