Twenty-six privately owned light aircraft. Sixty pilots and passengers. Eleven countries. Over 4,000 nautical miles. In three days, one of the most ambitious European private-aviation expeditions of the year departs from Luxembourg.

On 29 August, at Luxembourg-Findel Airport, nine aircraft will take off in a formal ceremony marking the official departure of the Private Pilot Expedition to Georgia 2026. Along the route, other European crews will progressively join the group from their home bases across Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Türkiye. By the time the formation is complete, twenty-six aircraft will be en route towards the Caucasus.

The route

The outbound route runs eastward across Central Europe — Wels in Austria, Jakabszállás in Hungary, Primorsko in Bulgaria — before entering Türkiye at Çorlu. From there the group continues via Istanbul Atatürk along the Black Sea coast to Batumi, Georgia’s arrival gateway. The final short hop takes the fleet inland to the Ambassadori Aviation Village in the Kakheti wine region, where the expedition bases itself for the ceremony window.

The return leg begins on 8 September and traces a different path home: from Batumi back across Türkiye, into Greece at Ioannina, down through southern Italy at SibariFly for a two-night rest window, across Corsica for a final refuel, and finally into southern France at Aix-les-Milles for the farewell dinner on 12 September.

The fleet

The aircraft on this expedition tell the story of European light aviation in 2026. On the certified side, Cirrus SR22s, a Diamond DA62, Piper PA-28s, Cessna 182s and others. On the ULM side, modern high-performance touring machines from Blackwing, Bristell, Shark, Risen, WT9, Tecnam and others — aircraft that would have seemed implausible a generation ago in both performance and efficiency. Cruise speeds across the fleet range from around 90 knots to nearly 180 — a broad enough spread to require careful staggered-departure planning at each stop.

What makes this initiative unusual

Three things set this expedition apart from what would normally be described as an aviation event.

First, it is a genuine expedition — not a packaged tour. Each pilot flies their own aircraft, under their own responsibility, at their own pace. The coordination that makes twenty-six aircraft function as a coherent group is voluntary and consensual.

Second, it has been organised entirely as a private initiative — conceived and coordinated by Luxembourg pilot Peter Sodermans, run under the patronage of the Honorary Consulate of Georgia in Luxembourg, and supported by a network of aviation and institutional partners including AOPA Luxembourg, AOPA Türkiye, SkyDemon and SafeSky. There is no commercial operator behind it.

Third, it is anchored in a specific occasion: the opening of a new aviation destination in Georgia. The Ambassadori Aviation Village in Kakheti will be officially inaugurated on 5 September, and the expedition group will be its first international visitors. That symbolic alignment — European pilots arriving as the first international guests of a new Georgian aviation destination — is at the heart of the initiative’s meaning.

Why the Honorary Consulate cares

The Honorary Consulate of Georgia in Luxembourg took the expedition under its high patronage because initiatives of this kind create exactly the kind of person-to-person, tourism, business and institutional links that formal diplomacy alone cannot generate. The pilots landing in Batumi and Kakheti in the coming days will meet Georgians in the most unmediated way possible — around a table, at an airfield, in a hotel lobby — and each of those contacts is a small but real addition to the fabric of the Luxembourg–Georgia relationship.

The take-off is in three days.

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Full details at expedition.privatepilot.lu.