Business Trip

It wasn't my business trip, it was my father's. Working as a contractor for an Italian tyre company (you can surely guess the brand!) my dad travels to Milan a few times per year. I thought I might do one of these flights for the blog.

After doing 2 flights with the Aeroworx B200, I was already missing my 737NG so this route came as a perfect excuse to fly her. Flight TK 1873 is the daily morning flight from Istanbul to Milan, Malpensa operated by Turkish Airlines. 737s serve this route, at least they used to a couple of months ago. Block time was 2 hours and 30 minutes.

I didn't want to get stuck in the usual morning traffic at LTBA so I hurried up on the pre-flight and was lucky to take-off without waiting. There were a few other company flights coming and going. Traffic was much lighter than I had expected.

I've set the runways as in real life with 18R/36L for take-offs and the parallel 18L/36R for landings. 06/24 is landing only but I closed it completely since it's undergoing maintenance right now. My setting seems to work well, as far as FS standards go of course.

Ready to go, 36L

I used the archive weather of Active Sky for the first time, excellent feature I must say.

Turkish Technic hangars to our right

Departure weather was winds 027 at 12 with broken clouds at 11400 and scattered at 15100. The temperature was 13C. I took off from 36L and continued on the Fener1K SID.

Climbing out of Istanbul

Around 10000 feet I reached the clouds and ran into moderate turbulence, I think this is pretty accurate to Active Sky's credit because Istanbul is very windy since a couple of days.

I wasn't in front of the screen for the most part of cruise flight so no screen shots for that stage of the trip. The flight took me over Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, over the Adriatic into Italy.

FS ATC was pretty accurate on the descent instructions and the initial one came at about the same time as the FMC T/D, I love it when FS ATC works realistically, relatively speaking of course.

Descending into Milan

I was cleared to 35R, just as I had planned per the weather forecast and proceeded on the SRN1K arrival which takes you on a downwind leg for the runway 35R. 35L is the departure-only runway in my LIMC scenery configuration, speaking of which, I love ISD's freeware sceneries which are exceptionnally well done.

Over the SRN VOR

Malpensa weather was calm winds with clouds 4000 scattered and light rain, 16C. The rain came just as I dropped below 4000 feet and went on for a couple of minutes. The visibility was poor so I engaged the second A/P just in case I had to do a CAT3 approach. ATIS was reporting good visibility but you never know with FS. Further down the glide slope the rain and clouds cleared off so I went manual at the 1000' callout.

Short final 35R

My landing was quite well thanks to the calm winds and I vacated the runway as fast as possible to make way for the Cargo Lux 747F coming in behind me.

The details in this scenery are just marvellous. For the record, ISD's LIRF scenery is very well done too.

On our way to stand G10

The taxi to the stand was quite long so I took the opportunity to do some spotting at LIMC. Plenty of wide-bodies such as Air China, Delta, DHL to name a few, along with the usual European single-aisles.

"Hope to see you again, bye bye"

My next flight will include Vienna, whether it will be the departure or arrival airport is not determined yet.

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