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Extended IR navigation flight

Hi all,

Next weekend I'm doing my extended IR navigation flight as the last part of my JAA IR training. The trip is supposed to be 8 hours.

Living in southern Sweden I thought that a trip to the southwest seems like a good idea and I found Antwerpen (EBAW) as a possible destination. The fees seems reasonable and the flying time from ESMI is just about right. The city of Antwerpen seems pretty nice as well.

I've never been there before though, so any info regarding EBAW, or any alternative suggestions are most welcome.

Thanks in advance everyone!

Best regards, Martin - just joined the forum

Antwerpen is a great place to fly to and I go there regularly when friends want to go with me on a flight. First of all, it is a short distance for me from Lelystad (EHLE) or Rotterdam (EHRD) to Antwerpen. Second, the airport of Deurne/Antwerpen has some nice approaches (ILS + VOR/DME) of which one of them (the VOR approach) goes right over the city and the houses to touch down on the runway. Pretty cool. The airport sits right next to the city, so it is a quick and short taxiride or even busride into the city centre.

I normally stay in the city centre right at the central station square in the Radisson Blue Astrid hotel. There are many other places to stay. The central station is nice to see.

To eat I can recommend my favorite which is Dock's Cafe at the Schelde. It is good for sea food and has a nice atmosphere. If you just need to eat something while continuing your flight, then go for the restaurant at the Deurne / Antwerpen airport. It is of good quality.

Another airport to visit nearby is Oostende (could be your alternate). However, you don't want to end up at Oostende to stay for the night, except when it is in the middle of the summer and you like to go to the beach. Outside of the summer season, it is kind of boring in Oostende.

Have a nice flight!

EDLE, Netherlands

Forgot to mention. Here is a cockpit view (forward to 2:50 minutes orso) of a night IFR landing into EBAW I did:



[Youtube URLs for some reason need a trailing space character nowadays, to embed in here - Peter]

EDLE, Netherlands

The trip is supposed to be 8 hours.

That's quite an unusual requirement for the JAA IR but I suppose you need to pack your logbook with 50/55hrs somehow so it's a good idea to do some "real flying" in the IR.

What are you using to develop the Eurocontrol routings, and what are you flying and how high?

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Aeroplus, sounds like EBAW is a good choice. At flyer forums someone suggested to use another airport during the enroute fuel and food stop instead of Hamburg. Do you have any experience of how long time the stop-over will take at EDDH? I'm planning with a 2 hour stop, it seems reasonable.. but I also know that it always take longer than planned :)

I thought of using Groningen (EHGG) as an alternative, but Oostende looks like a good alternative if weather permits.

The movie looked great, what type of acft is it?

Peter, I know that it seems like a lot and it's most likely more than the JAA IR requirement, but as you mention, it's good practice for the real IR environment. Everyone tells me that the first 40 hours during the training is nothing like the daily "IR flying", doing approach after approach with full procedures. So the trip is going to be lots of fun, we will also switch aircraft to a G1000 equipped with the GFC700 AP - to get used to that environment as well.

I've tried eurofpl.eu for now and also - both seems to work just fine.

The aircraft is a C172 with G1000 and GFC700 AP - so FL100 is the preferred FL according to my teacher.

Thanks for your help! Best regards, Martin

The best app for Eurocontrol route generation is FlightPlanPro.

It can generate routes, or it can access the Eurocontrol "route suggest" function which is sometimes useful. In fact it always does both and offers you the better of the two.

The ASA-Free website is not good. I used it extensively in my early IR flying (2005 training, and 2006-2007 actually flying) and it's very limited, partly because - as with the Eurocontrol Route Suggest function - the whole route is done at one level. The generated route is not validated i.e. you need to tick off the restrictions on the bottom of the page and re-route, and repeat until none are left. Very often, it never delivers a viable route. It's a facility developed for flight sim pilots.

The other main options are Rocketroute which offers the same routing functionality as FlightPlanPro (it uses the same code) and EuroFPL (which offers access to the Eurocontrol Route Suggest function only).

Homebriefing is still kicking around; not sure if they offer anything special beyond filing flight plans. This is a business run by Vienna ATC and was the original online flight plan filing service for Europe. They charge €4.50 per flight plan, unless in their area.

Personally I keep things as simple as possible and use FPP for the route generation and EuroFPL for filing the flight plan. My backup for flight plan filing is the AFPEX service which is available only to pilots who can provide a UK address. All this is free! You do need a backup for everything...

FL100 is OK since you don't need oxygen (on short flights; on multi-hour flights you are likely to get very tired) but you need to pick good non-frontal weather to be VMC on top enroute.

If you can come out of this with an IR on which you can actually fly A to B in Europe, you will have more than the usual new UK JAA IR holder

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Thanks for the advice. ASA-Free is now removed from the favorites :)

I forgot to mention FPP, I've tried it and it looks great - but I'm trying to go "iPad only", it's not working out as good as I planned for though. I see that FPP has an OSX client, I'll take a look at it.

I'll do the filing with our LFV Flight planning service (https://www.aro.lfv.se/), they are incredibly helpful and have a modern website to do filing throughout Europe and its free of charge (at least to Swedish pilots).

My extended nav flight will be the first time I'm spending hours at FL100 (if weather permits), might be an unpleasant surprise then.. (more tiring than usual)

Yes; the only method I know about of developing something like an "optimised" Eurocontrol route on an Ipad is Rocketroute (a website; they may have an IOS app).

This is one reason I carry a normal winXP laptop when doing longer trips. On shorter ones I have just the phone and Ipad2.

I wrote this up a while ago, on online flight plan filing. It probably needs updating, but it's hard to cover every option and keep it up to date.

The ultimate backup for flight plan filing is to hand in a handwritten ICAO flight plan form at the tower. It is an ICAO requirement for every airport which has an ARO to provide this facility. It's an "interesting" question what an ARO is, and in the UK most of the smaller GA airfields will not want to do this and will tell you to do what a UK pilot is supposed to do (use AFPEX). Their problem is that they no longer have the option to simply fax the bit of paper to Heathrow, and they will have to type it into AFPEX themselves. I think every non-UK airport (even one on a small island in Croatia) offers this but you can waste a lot of time on it e.g. 1-2hrs at some big airports, getting escorted by "security" into the tower, etc.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Aeroplus, sounds like EBAW is a good choice. At flyer forums someone suggested to use another airport during the enroute fuel and food stop instead of Hamburg. Do you have any experience of how long time the stop-over will take at EDDH? I'm planning with a 2 hour stop, it seems reasonable.. but I also know that it always take longer than planned :)

I thought of using Groningen (EHGG) as an alternative, but Oostende looks like a good alternative if weather permits.

The movie looked great, what type of acft is it?

I normally plan for approx. 1 hour for a stop-over. At the stopover time I file the next flightplan from my iPhone using my own AeroPlus Fightplan filing app. Or, I have that one already filed and I delay it a little if I need more time. The rocketroute app is great as well, and you might be able to try it out for free, but then you need to get a subscription. the AeroPlus flightplan app does about the same, but without the subscription. App is free to download and 35 eurocent per flightplan message send out. The aircraft is a Cirrus SR22 Turbo with Garmin Perspective glass cockpit.

Hope you have fun on the trip!

EDLE, Netherlands

What a great weekend it was for flying! We ended up flying ESMI - EDDH - EHGG - EBAW - ESMI in almost clear skies and tailwinds. We spent the night in Groningen and departed Sunday morning with OVC at 400ft (on-top at 1200ft), we and also hit some frontal weather back in Sweden, but except that CAVOK (could almost have done the trip VFR)

Antwerpen was a great GA airport, except for the fueling station that has overcharged us (about 4 times what the receipt said). We flew the VOR approach over the city, quite spectacular! The airport restaurant was good as well.

A big thanks for your suggestions and help. Only a few hours left until the check ride!

//Martin

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