Iceland

For those who follow regularly this blog, you know that "rendre hommage" to new visitor countries is a custom here. The idea belongs to my better half who came up with other good ideas for this humble flightsim blog, it's great inspiration for setting up a flight around the world. If you see anything good here, it comes from her, the shitty screen shots as you might have guessed are my work.

I had never flown into or out of Iceland in my FS career before. What a shame, the idea came initially from the Air Iceland 757 WAR dvd.

Flight route


DHL 1881 was from Brussels to Keflavik, chartered to carry some heavy machinery parts on behalf of some big industry for their customers over in Iceland. Departure time was actually scheduled at 19:30 on Saturday evening but the parts only arrived around after 18:30 so the flight was delayed for an hour. Brakes were released for pushback at 20:40.

Company office right across


Weather at EBBR was mild winds from the southwest with low cloud cover at 900 and broken clouds at 3300 with a 6-mile visibility.

The enroute weather was looking to be troublesome over the North Sea with storms directly on our route. Whether a deviaiton was going to necessary would be decided once in the air.

Excitement building up


Take-off and climbout was smooth with no departure traffic, I had runway 25L for landings so the arrivals didn't interfere either. I flew the NIK2C standart instrument departure which requires a right turn to the NIK VOR at only 700'. Once the turn completed I hit the central A/P and speeded up to clean configuration as fast as possible.

Climbing out of Brussels


My GW was around 220K lbs, slightly heavy so I set an initial cruise altitude of FL 320 for planned step climb to FL 380. However, my planning was all wrong and as soon as I reached FL 320, the FMC had already calculated an optimal cruise altitude of FL 360. It stayed that way during the whole flight.

The skies were a bit crowded at this point and I had several close counters with other aircraft, the closest being the one pictured below with a Ryanair NG.

Close call with a Ryanair NG


The heavy headwind component rarely dropped below 90 knots on most of the way. I should have flown the reverse route.

During most of the flight, I played the Gran Turismo 5, exploring the new circuits and cars, pushing them to their limit. If you have a PS3 and you don't play GT, you have no idea what you're missing. Multiply FS by 5 and turn it into a driving simulator and you'll get a rough idea of how good this new Gran Turismo is.

Anyway, I kept an eye on the clock and when it was time to start my descent (per the calculated T/D) I tuned into the FS ATC, which once again was accurate with the descent instructions.

The weather at Keflavik which was already rainy with low visibility at my departure time hadn't improved (much to my pleasure!). The winds were 182 at 8 with an overcast at 300, 2.5 miles visibility and rain.

Once the clearance to runway 11 came, I headed on to the Keita 2 STAR which takes you to the KEF VOR just over the airport, after which you complete a typical teardrop circle to land turn 8 miles out.

Short final, ILS 11


I was lined up behind Swissair 8664 on final with an Iceair flight of which I can't remember the flight number right behind me.

My landing was smooth enough and with autobrakes 3 and reversers I slowed down easily to vacate the runway.

It took around 10 minutes to reach the cargo stand, 10 minutes during which I had the chance to check out this simple yet neat freeware Keflavik scenery.

DHL office at BIKF


Ok, 3 hours and 47 minutes goes to the log.

I see Nigeria is the last visitor country here, it was about time I did a flight in Africa...

Thanks for viewing