719th fly-in: Amsterdam Schiphol, Netherlands (EHAM)

[Kumiankka]

link to fly-in index thread

Quote

Our next fly-in destination is here - on Sunday, October 7th set course for Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, Netherlands (EHAM), home of Dutch flag carrier airline KLM. KLM is the oldest still-operating airline in the world, celebrating its 99th anniversary this Sunday, and Amsterdam Schiphol has been their main hub for most of that time, with the airport's history stretching back all the way to the airline's founding. Today Amsterdam Schiphol is Europe's third busiest passenger airport, serving destinations all around the world, with traffic ranging from the heaviest of superjumbos to tiny general aviation planes. Interestingly, all of Schiphol's six runways are named, from the Polderbaan located further out, across a highway crossed over by a taxiway bridge, to the shorter Oostbaan mostly used by general aviation traffic. If you missed our last year's visit to Amsterdam, now's your chance to make up for it! Custom scenery options are the same as last time - either the freeware package linked below, or Aerosoft's payware package.

Have a nice trip - goede reis!

 

 

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[Mindyourstep]

Here you can see what long runways are actually in use for commercial airliners during the fly-in: https://en.lvnl.nl/environment/runway-use.

The old short 22/04 Oosbaan is in use for G/A, business jets etc. (during normal weather conditions).

 

[ghun1]

great site, thank you @mindyourstep. It would be great if you could see this information for major airports all around the world.

 

[Mindyourstep]

Well, I was doing a few legs from Brussels to Amsterdam, and back again, and back again...

Brussels, SID from rwy 07L: HELE4H:

A bit of Rotterdam Harbor and Hoek van Holland

...but it was quite early. I arrived at Schiphol (without WorldTraffic 3) so totally empty, like I was in 'the Langoleers' (Stephen King). The first one to arrive after me was KA719 on the 1932(!) runway designated for non-commercial flights in Schiphol-Oost:

View from the 5th floor of the Hangar-10 offices, where the engineers of SPL/CC (KLM engineering & Maintenance) reside from 9 to 5 in weekdays...really nothing much to do over there (I had my first job over there in 1997). You can see a tiny G/A landing on rwy 04 (KA719)

 

beatiful machine....and nice smooth landing:

Still a bit quiet, I decided to do another KL1726 to Brussels and back again.

Passing Antwerp Harbor and industries...

On my second turn to Amsterdam I joined HB078 in the air, I'll guess coming from Switzerland or something. I tried to slow down to give eachother some space between our slots, because we planned the same approach. Still above Zeeland we were almost nose-tail:

This is how the people at the terrace at Café-Restaurant 'de Heerenkeet' reacted while looking in the sky:

Approaching together, before landing right on top of each other...

We both hooked cozy at gate C11 and C18.

(...)

Later that day I came back as the Dutch Coast guard:

and noticed the apartment block I live in, suddenly demolished (supposed to be in red circle):

[ostkamp]

Hello all,

with Formula 1 racing long over (it took place in Japan early morning my time) I had a start around 12 UTC (14 local) at Marco Polo Venice Tessara Airport (LIPZ). Since it was a long run, I took JRollon´s CRJ 200 again for which I had found a nice KLM livery (albeit a fictional one) matching the main airline of this Sunday´s planned destination Amsterdam Schiphol (EHAM) in the Netherlands.

Venice Tessara airport is located at the North side of the Laguna on terra firma. Here we see images using tdg's scenery package. By the way, I have now managed to download all @tdg over 200 scenery packages and setup a Little Navmap flightplan (though not yet ordered) for them since the guy maintaining the Google Map seems to have not continued with map updates in 2018.

Calling the better pushback truck . I made sure to have the fuel pumps and cross fuel flow switches turned off since due to some bug in X-Plane or the CRJ 200 the fuel otherwise magically disappears when the plane is moved and the fuel in the loaded fuel tanks swaps over into the other tanks. So the procedure is load fuel, get taxiied, and once finished and everything has stopped fully turn on the engines.

Taking off. In the background behind the runways we can see the water terminal of the airport where the water taxies stop, if I understand this correctly.

This is how it looks like in real life from another viewpoint (link points to Wikipedia image)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venice_Marco_Polo_Airport#/media/File:Water_Terminal.jpg

I had some issues with the FMC which sometimes left the route - probably I have been flying too fast at the beginning of flight and it might have been unable to complete some turns between waypoints in time. When I came near the entry point of the STAR I got caught by it entering an unexpected holding pattern which must have been part of the FMC procedure . I had to exit manually from there due to lack of FMC knowledge at this point.

Due to weather, runway 06 was the correct one to use at Amsterdam Schiphol. I got setup the localizer ok but failed on the glideslope and thus switched to a hand flown visual approach.

Short of touchdown. Din05 had already landed his Tornado by then.

While I was taxiing to parking position, @ghun1 passed by with his Jet.

I got parked, had a 20 minutes cake break and after rejoining I tried to watch the approach of @RAFish who also came in from Venice - I got to see his callsign in the vicinity of the airport on approach but then just a few seconds before touchdown disaster struck his aircraft went into a spin and crashed down within almost no time. He said he lost his flaps due to overspeeding just a little bit. I hope he had more fun with the final approach of his turkey  since it seems to have been Thanksgiving in Canada.

Din05 and I went for a short visit on the islands of Texel (EHTX) to the North, but I had the wrong aircraft for the grass runway and overshot the runway. From there I respawned and took a better suited Piper Arrow III for another short hop to Ameland, another island more to the East. This image shows Texel international airport:

With Din05 landing

Taking off from Texel (EHTX) to Ameland (EHAL).

Getting parked at Ameland and calling it a day.

I also managed to captured the list of todays major flights as registered by x-flightserver:

PID     - Callsign Airplane        DEP/time        DEST/time       min         nm
XP4334  - CHASER   1/B763/H-G/     EKCH (12:30)    EHAM (14:18)    108     342.11
XP7326  - DINO5    1/TOR/M-S/C     LIPZ (12:36)    EHAM (14:18)    102     506.54
Xp5766  - DURIAN   1/DC3/L-S/C     EHRD (12:18)    EHAM (12:36)     18      24.91
XP7323  - GAO001   1/CRJ2/M-S/C    LIPZ (12:29)    EHAM (14:44)    135     506.41
XP3793  - GHUN1    1/B763/H-S/C    LEBL (10:55)    EHAM (14:03)    188     670.30
XP10019 - HB078    1/B738/M-S/C    LSZH (12:51)    EHAM (14:26)     95     326.58
XP9493  - JOHNB    1/EC20/L-S/C    EDLZ (12:05)    EHAM (13:23)     78     135.11
XP22    - KA719    1/BE58/L-S/C    EDHK (10:45)    EHAM (12:29)    104     229.32
XP9902  - KL1726   1/B738/M-S/C    EBBR (10:54)    EHAM (12:11)     77      85.37
XP8981  - MARPIL   1/B744/H-S/C    EPWA (11:28)    EHAM (13:19)    111     596.20
XP7514  - MERLIN   1/C17/H-S/C     EKCH (12:16)    EHAM (14:03)    107     342.10
XP10216 - NEWBIE   1/B-29/M-S/C    LFAC (12:25)    EHAM (13:45)     80     132.38
XP574   - RAJO     1/BE58/L-S/C    EDDL (13:01)    EHAM (14:07)     66      96.99
XP574   - RAJO     1/BE20/L-S/C    EHAM (14:40)    EBOS (15:50)     70      97.15
XP574   - RAJO     1/DC3/M-S/C     EBOS (16:05)    EHAM (16:48)     42      96.83

See you later!

 

[ghun1]

I enjoyed my flight from Barcelona, LEBL, which started off with a rain shower. x-plane made that look spectacular with the clouds coming from the rear of the engines. No incidents along the way and landing was straight forward. I felt a little embarassed when I was told I had a good landing as just for once I had used autoland for a change 😊

 

Then I took the very nice Bell429 for a look around before calling it a day.

 

see you next time

Gary

 

[Kumiankka]

For me this was a fly-in full of all kinds of different little glitches, from the moment I started out at Kiel Airport when the sim suddenly crashed to desktop for no apparent reason. Luckily the bug didn't reoccur after starting up again, all the other issues were a little different in nature.

 

Departing Kiel Holtenau in a Beech Baron

 

Proceeding to Amsterdam VFR along the scenic coastal route

 

Maneuvering around some clouds

 

Passing a large wind farm somewhere along the Dutch coast

 

Arriving in Amsterdam

 

Short final to the Oostbaan

 

I then switched to a Coast Guard Dornier Do 228, planning on another coastal tour. A helicopter (maybe ghun1) was hovering around the airport and followed me to the Zwanenburgbaan.

 

Departing EHAM

 

Got a view of Newbie's approach to Buitenveldertbaan on the way out

 

Passed above this interesting-looking castle, which a quick google reveals is the "Fort near Edam", part of a 19th-century line of fortifications built around Amsterdam

 

Shortly afterwards, disaster struck as both of my props suddenly went into full reverse. Neither the throttle or prop levers were having any effect...

 

I might have made it if I had cut the mixture right away, but by the time I realized what was going on there wasn't enough altitude to recover and I ended up as a smoking wreck in the middle of one of the polders around Amsterdam.

 

I wasn't ready to give up just yet, and loaded up the default 747 for a flight to Helsinki-Vantaa Airport. The only major glitch here was the excessively shiny surface finish, an unintended side effect of a quick fix I applied to the plane's normals file, which was otherwise showing the default United livery's outlines through the KLM paint.

 

After a long taxi to the Polderbaan, across one highway and one canal, I took off and set course for Helsinki.

 

Climbout from Amsterdam

 

Sunset somewhere above Sweden

 

Descending towards Helsinki, with the rising moon reflecting off the waters of the Archipelago Sea

 

Final to EFHK (which doesn't have such fancy names for any of its three runways)