Flying from London City to Geneva
One of my favorite aircraft are the British Aerospace 146 family (they come in -100, -200 and -300 flavors) and in later form the Avro RJ family (respectively RJ70, RJ80 and RJ100). Luckily, QualityWings has modeled this aircraft for both FSX and P3D.
As a flightsimmer it isn’t always that easy to find new routes. Luckily the website RoutesOnline.com often posts some routes for several types of aircraft (based on data provided by OAG). For instance, this post details the Avro RJ routes flown in 2014.
This post will detail a simulated flight from London City airport (ICAO code: EGLC) to Geneva airport (LSGG) using theQualityWings BAe 146–300 with registration number G-OINV.
Check the weather
First step: check the weather. Weather is usually encoded in METAR messages for each weather station (usually colocated at an airport). Those METAR messages tend to be quite unreadable for the layman. Luckily, there’s an app, I mean, a website for that.
For EGLC I usually Google “METAR EGLC” and end up at the EGLC page at AllMetSat.com: `EGLC 041750Z AUTO 26015KT 9999 BKN034 BKN043 10/02 Q0996`. This means the METAR information was taken at London City airport (EGLC) on the 4th of the month at 17:50 zulu time. Winds are coming from 260° (West is at 270°, give or take some magnetic deviation) at 15 knots. Visibility is more than 10 miles (9999). There are two cloud layers: one broken at 3400 ft, another broken one at 4300 ft. Pressure is 996 hPa (altimeters work using air pressure so it’s important to configure them with the correct pressure, otherwise you might fly lower or higher than ordered by air traffic control).
To be able to enter the correct information into P3D I use an app called AirMate which adds some more information (and uses some more P3D friendly units of measurements, such as pressure in mm Hg).
There’s a similar page for Geneva airport (LSGG). There’s a 19 knots wind coming from 220°. Temperature is 11°C, dew point is 1°C. Pressure is 1010 hPa (or 29.82 in Hg), visibility is 10 km or more, and there are three cloud layers. Light rain is possible.
Flight Plan
Once we know the weather we can use the wind information to start planning our route. As said in a previous post: air traffic control lets airplanes take off and land into the wind for performance and safety reasons. Only if wind speeds are low the preferential runway system is taken into account (or put another way: the PRS ignores low wind speeds to prefer standard runways).
London City airport has one runway: runway 09/27. The numbering system takes the magnetic heading of each direction (and drops the right most number). As the wind is coming from heading 260° we can expect to receive takeoff clearance from runway 27.
We can do the same exercise for Geneva airport: it has one runway 04/22 and the wind will be coming from the south west so we can expect to have to land on runway 22.
Once we have determined the runways we can start thinking about standard instrument departure (SID) routes and standard arrival (STAR) routes and the route in between.
What I usually do is I go visit skyvector.com and enter the departure and destination airport’s ICAO codes. After entering the cruise speed (290 kts / Mach 0.70) and the cruise altitude (flight level 270 or 27.000 ft using standard air pressure of 29.92 in Hg) I can see the expected distance in a straight line will be 396.6 nautical miles (nm) and an estimated flight time of 1 hour and 23 minutes.
Ofcourse, air traffic is heavily regulated and so are the routes an airplane can fly. It needs to follow certain “airways”: highways in the air. As you can see on the screenshot above, many of them are only allowed to be flown in one direction. So we’re gonna need to drag and drop a few waypoints.
As you can see in the top left corner of the screenshot above, I’ve used my fingerspitzengefühl to depart using a SID called “LYD” (which terminates at the VOR beacon called LYDD). The flightplan then continues until a waypoint called “LUSAR” where STAR “LUSAR1R” begins the approach into LSGG.
Now, it’s important to realise that SkyVector.com doesn’t know what exact SID and STAR you should use. So it’s important to check the SID and STAR plates of each airport to select the appropriate SID and STAR.
As we’ll be departing from EGLC runway 27 we can see that indeed the SID to use is “LYD 5T”.
Likewise for the arrival into Geneva airport, it will be STAR “LUSAR 1R”. This one will lead us to initial approach fix the VOR beacon St Prex (113.9 MHz). It’s important to note that STARs have certain altitude and speed constraints (such as “at or above 7000 ft at LIRKO waypoint” or “max 220 knots at waypoint GG514”).
A final step for the flight plan is the approach phase.
All this information gathered during flight planning is important as we’ll need to enter it into the airplane’s Flight Management System (FMS). We’re a bit “lucky” today is we’re going to fly an older aircraft: the BAe 146–300. It is already partly digitized, but not as good as more modern aircraft. It doesn’t capture speed during cruise so the pilots have to monitor the speed all the time. Its FMS is also a bit dated compared to the later Avro RJ models.
Flight
Entering the flightplan in the FMS takes some time but once it’s entered there’s nothing holding us back (I’m not simulating late passengers!). We request taxi clearance to the active runway and off we go.
At the holding point of runway 27 we ask the tower for takeoff clearance. Normally the Bae 146–300 have to limit thrust during takeoff to avoid overheating the engines but at London City the runway’s a tad too short to takeoff with reduced thrust. So max thrust it is!
Recap
You know what they say: failing to plan is planning to fail. It is very true for flying and recreating real flights in a flight simulator. If you don’t plan well then you won’t arrive at your destination, you might miss a turn, end up too high for the approach (there are specific rules to plan and execute a descent from cruise level) or even too fast (not every aircraft is good at slowing down during descent).
