Flying south again

Monday 27 and it was time to return to Africa. It was a difficult time on the train station saying goodbye to my family but one and a half hour later it was check-in-time on Copenhagen Kastrup. Once again I met a friendly crew on the SAS MD80…

In the cockpit I saw the tall Copenhagen TWR knowing it was manned by those Danish well reputed controllers.

Line up in sequence runway 22R…

I “almost” knew the crew already. The captain was a former Air Force pilot who went to F5 Ljungbyhed the year before I came there. We had a lot of friends in common. And the first officers father was the captain on a flight to Bangkok I attended many years ago. And his best friend is a supervisor colleague of mine at the Malmö center. The world is small…

It was a low level flight. One of the a/c systems was out of operations so we flew to Frankfurt on FL 230. It was a nice flight in beautiful weather and with a very silent radio frequency. Not many aircraft on those levels…

We saw the airport early and flew a STAR that lead us on a downwind for a left hand circuit runway 07R. Frankfurt has a new, third parallel runway that is almost completed so it is going to be 07R, 07C and 07L.

On final with the new runway partly visible in the left part of the picture.

Nice landing  by the first officer right on the center-line.

During taxi we saw my next flight. No, not the 747 airborn. Look closer…

Three aircraft and the one in the middle is Air Namibia’s Airbus 340.

Frankfurt is a very busy airport with lots of aircraft from lots of airlines…

After some walking around (and train riding…) I found my aircraft, now being moved to a gate.

I tried to reach the cockpit again but there was some training done in the cockpit so I had to wait…

Somewhere over Algeria I was able to join the crew for some talks.

I spent quite some time there. The pilots were very curious about the ICAO work in Namibia and especially the surveillance project. Most of the African airspace is information airspace and they were looking forward ta having modern surveillance control in their home country. They were impressed by the possibility of Namibia being the first country in the world with Wide Area Multilateration covering a whole country. It will be a big step – from procedural to world-class surveillance. Let’s hope we can get there as quick as possible…