This past weekend, I have flown the Piper Arrow from Frankfurt (actually Aschaffenburg, EDFC) to Berlin (actually Schönhagen, EDAZ) to visit friends.
On Sunday afternoon, before heading back home, I treated my friends to a nice sightseeing flight over the city of Berlin.
Here is a snippet of the Berlin VFR area chart. You can see the adjoining Schönefeld (EDDB) and Tegel (EDDT) CTRs. Schönhagen airfield (EDAZ) is on the bottom left.
This flight is not trivial, mainly for two reasons.
1) As you can see, directly over the inner part of the city of Berlin, there is a circular restricted area (ED-R146) which must be avoided.
2) Over the last ten years or so, Berlin Tegel (EDDT) has become super-busy; it now probably is the second busiest airport in Germany. Any flight along the boundary of ED-R146 would put you in an obvious conflict with EDDT traffic (they usually have runway 26 in use). The only workable solution (on clockwise flight around the city) is to first cross EDDT midfield to the north, and then, as soon as there is a sufficient gap in the stream of arrivals, cross southbound again. This is what we ended up doing and it worked out well. But I do understand it is a tough thing to organize for the very busy Tegel TWR controller, so I wouldn’t want to bother them with these requests all too frequently. Thanks again to the lady working Tegel TWR this Sunday afternoon!
In contrast, Berlin Schönefeld Airport (EDDB), located in the southeast of the city, is very quiet these days and does not really constitute a problem for such sightseeing flights.
Here is the track that was ultimately flown:
As you can see, we had to do two 360s to the north of the centreline of EDDT before we were cleared to cross to the south between two approaching airliners.
Here we go with a few smartphone shots taken by my passengers.
The city, with the Alexanderplatz and the Fernsehturm (highest building im Germany):
Olympiastadion:
Charlottenburg and the Tiergarten in the distance:
Approaching Tegel airport:
Eastern parts of Berlin, with the river Spree:
And, of course, the closed Tempelhof airport, formerly EDDI:
