Fly SAS

I had had enough of calm winds and clear skies at my arrival airports and was hoping for more challenging weather for a while. This time I was lucky and had strong winds at the departure airport and low visibility at the arrival one.

Flight SK 3675 was from Vienna to Copenhagen. I thought SAS would have a daily real world flight between the 2 cities but apparently I was wrong (or I couldn't find the flight) so instead I just filed a fictitious number.

After 2 flights with GA aircraft I was missing my airliners, I chose the SAS 737-800 with Niclas Andersson's (a.k.a Mr Sas) outstanding photo real repaint. This is one of my favorite NG repaints and I love flying it. For the record, Niclas has also a Star Alliance livery which is equally awesome but I prefer the cooler, classic SAS colors. You can get the textures in the Avsim Library.

It was a cool morning in Vienna, 9C with strong winds, 310 at 22 gustling 33, few clouds at 1700 and 2500 broken.

On a side note, my cousin is attending university in Vienna so I might check the weather with him later today to see if Active Sky was accurate.

Spotter shot, earlier in the morning


As the winds were blowing from the northeast, I took off from runway 29 on a Lanux1C departure. My LOWW setup uses 11-29 for departures and 16-34 for arrivals.

I had 135 passengers on this Sunday morning flight, TOW was a hair over 132K lbs with a fuel load of 14K lbs. Arrival weather was announcing low visibility but within our RVR limits so a divert wasn't planned. (It never is in my FS anyway!)

Taxing to runway 29


Schwechat wasn't very busy this morning, the usual European operators merrily coming and going...

My stand was close to runway 29 so the taxi time was quite short. Derated thrust would do as I was not really heavy. Now that I think of it, I'm not sure derated thrust is used in gustling winds, I should check that in my manuals.

Lining up


The gusts made the take-off challenging with speed oscillations, my Vr was around 142 knots but I rotated at 150-155 to be on the safe side. We don't want to ruin the flight with a tailstrike.

The climb was bumpy too.

Passing through the clouds


Cruise flight consisted of me checking the enroute maps to see which countries I was flying over. After Austria I entered the Czech Rep, Germany and finally Denmark.

Nothing to report about cruise flight, pretty much uneventful with a mild tailwind from the south.

Descending into Kastrup


FS ATC gave me the descent instructions at about the same time as my FMC so I followed it. FS ATC was on a good day today and was quite cooperative.

A weather check revealed that conditions hadn't improved at Kastrup and the visibility was still around 1 miles with a 300 foot ceiling. Cool, just as I had planned. I was cleared to 04R and flew the RNAV CDA 2M arrival.

I'm hearing hardcore enthusiasts shouting out that 04R isn't used for arrivals at Kastrup. But EKCH is one of those hard airports to replicate with AF2. I didn't want to use 2 separate files and I found the best setup to be 04L-22R for take-offs and 04R-22L for landings per the terminal layout. 12-30 is completely closed.

Entering into the soup


The winds were reported 110 at 11 so a crosswind landing was on the menu, making the low visibility approach even more fun. The ride got bumpy as I entered the soup

I made a stupid mistake though, I forgot to engage the 2nd autopilot and passing 1500 feet with still no visual, I was cursing myself for my negligence.

Still no visual on the runway


The runway still hadn't come into sight passing next to 04L, fortunately just before the minimums callout the approach lights came in sight and I found myself calling out "landing" with a slight grin and went manual from there on. FS can be very rewarding indeed!

I hope the F/O keeps quiet in the pilot's lounge on that silly mistake!

Very short final 04R, isn't this a beautiful sight?


Despite the crosswind my landing was pretty good, a greaser I might say. Traffic was coming in behind me so always the gentleman simmer I am, I vacated the runway as fast as possible.

Kastrup was unsurprisingly full of SAS aircraft. I taxied easily to the gate as the terminal area here isn't very complicated. The chrono was reading exactly 90 minutes as I was shutting down.

SAS country


I always get the impression that I should fly more often to the arrival aiport featuring in my flights. Copenhagen was no exception, I should definitely fly here more often!

For my next flight I'll be heading to the Phillippines, a completely new discovery for me as I've never "set foot" there in FS. I might try out the C210 for that one or maybe a cargo haul with the 757, we'll see...

Thanks for viewing