La Baguette and Die Sachertorte

I love both of them, especially the latter with a lot of whipped cream. I also love flying around large European hubs and as you probably know, LFPG and LOWW are among the most notorious.

I've been to Roissy more than a few times in real life and although I hate it as a passenger because of its disorganised terminal, I love it as an aircraft buff because of the variety of airplanes and carriers you can spot there.

Lauda flight 112 was an imaginary one since Lauda only flies to holiday destinations after being bought by Austrian Airlines a couple of years ago. 118 passengers on this evening hop to Schwechat, ZFW was just a hair over 117K lbs. I took off with around 18K lbs of fuel, more than enough for the hold or divert free world of flightsim.

Taxing to 26R

Roissy was full of Air France traffic departing to almost everywhere around the world as well to Provence (mainland France except for Paris).

During my pre-flight I could hear thunder, the weather was hectic in Paris, winds 303/7 with few clouds at 500 and scattered at 1800. 12C with thunderstorms in the area.

My enroute weather forecast was announcing tailwinds which is always good news.

AF T7 off to Bejing

After a lengthy taxi to 26R I was 3rd for take-off behind an Air France 777 and a Croatian A320. I like the layout of LFPG, it's easy to work with the runways when they are all parallel. As in real life, I set the inner runways for take-offs and the outer ones for landings. This way the departing traffic flow doesn't get interrupted and you get a nice flow.

Paris to the left

The initial climb was pretty smooth to my surprise, slightly bumpy but I wasn't out of trouble yet. As I neared 18000 feet, I hit some really violent turbulence which threw the plane around quite badly until FL200, above that everything went back to normal. I did this flight on Sunday so I guess the Parisiens didn't have a pleasant Sunday, weather wise.

Eiffel Tower and "Défense" district right below

The view was good though on the Lanvi 1B departure as you get to see the city of Paris just below turning back to the CLM VOR. Acutally, the view was the reason I flew the whole departure route, normally I take shortcuts just as in real life, i.e. direct-to's by the ATC.

The storm cells stayed with me until along the way, I didn't deviate, I just flew straight into them. No danger in FS.

Should we deviate? Naw...

Traffic was dense over Europe this evening, as I guess it normally is in real life too, the ATC didn't stop and it was hard sometimes to respond, getting that annoying sound simmers are familiar with.

I had initially planned for the ILS 34 via the Gamli 4W arrival. The weather hadn't changed and ATC cleared me to runway 34. I asked for a SNU transition which was promptly granted by the FS controller.

Final for the ILS 34, landing checklist please

Weather at LOWW was winds 329 at 5 with clouds 1800 few and 5000 broken. Temperature was 14C.

Short final

My landing was good this time again and I made an extra effort to quickly vacate the runway for the company 737 landing behind me.

Evening departures at runway 29

The taxi was long at Vienna, I won't complain though, it was a perfect opportunity to do some spotting. I couldn't fly to Schwechat before I got Active Sky because for some reason the default online FS weather only updates itself there briefly every hour. The result is you end up with the fair weather scheme when it's actually snowing! The other Austrian airports were in the same situation, not anymore though, my flightsim has been reborn with Active Sky.

Almost parked (photo shot by a dispatcher friend of mine!)

Where to next...? Plenty of options...

Thanks for viewing and feel free to comment!