Flying in Europe for USA Pilot.

[Dace Nicmane]

If you have a flight number, Google is your friend for stand etc info: just type in the flight number

Thanks, Simon, never knew this. It works only with the IATA code, though.

 

 

KLM is another big Boeing operator. Amsterdam is just round the corner, so that’s another option (charts).

[Robert Shearman Jr]

Wonderful; thanks for all the pointers.

 

I fly mostly short-haul flights so I have a feeling I'm going to end up doing a lot of Ryanair runs. I do have the PMDG 744 as well though, so I'll keep my eyes out for the shorter-end trips from some of the other options mentioned.

 

Hope to see & hear you all sometime soon.

[Johan Grauers]

You can still use flightaware to find the callsign and aircraft type. For gate, try this site: https://www.flightstats.com/go/FlightStatus/flightStatusByFlight.do Click on Departure/Arrival tab to find out the gate/terminal. Are you planning a domestic flight? Not sure how easy it is to find a 737 flight, as Airbus is more popular in the UK. BAW fly the A320 and only the heavy Boeings. However it shouldn't be too difficult to catch one of the neighboring centers online as well, e.g. Ireland, the home of Ryanair. Their charts are also freely available (link).

 

Ryanair's biggest base is stansted, and even if you discount Stansted they have significantly more aircraft based in the UK than in Ireland. Ireland is the head quarters, and the second largest base, but Ryanair have loads of bases all over Europe with aircraft in every corner of the continent pretty much.

 

 

 

There are plenty big 737 operators in Europe.

KLM

SAS

Norwegian

Ryanair

Jet2

TUI

Primera

Air Europa

 

are the first the come to mind, there will be more though that I've forgotten.

[Andreas Fuchs]

Hi Robert,

 

especially when flying in Europe we HIGHLY recommend using http://www.vroute.net (free of charge) to fetch decent and realistic IFR flightplan routes. Please consider using vroute, it will provide you and ATC with the best quality at "one click".

[Dace Nicmane]

Ryanair's biggest base is stansted, and even if you discount Stansted they have significantly more aircraft based in the UK than in Ireland.

But they don't fly domestic UK routes, do they? This may be just another difference for an American pilot. They may want to keep it at one country at a time for learning, but fact is, European countries are small and you end up flying from one country to another (and crossing a few other ones along the way), even for a short flight. Some countries don't even have domestic routes, e.g. Latvia didn't have any until airBaltic opened EVRA-EVLA this year (100 nm flown in a Dash).

[Johan Grauers]

Ryanair's biggest base is stansted, and even if you discount Stansted they have significantly more aircraft based in the UK than in Ireland.

But they don't fly domestic UK routes, do they? This may be just another difference for an American pilot. They may want to keep it at one country at a time for learning, but fact is, European countries are small and you end up flying from one country to another (and crossing a few other ones along the way), even for a short flight. Some countries don't even have domestic routes, e.g. Latvia didn't have any until airBaltic opened EVRA-EVLA this year (100 nm flown in a Dash).

 

A few,

EGAE to EGGP and EGPF.

EGSS to EGPF, EGAA and EGPH (although looks like summer only routes).

 

I have to admit I would never consider just keeping to domestic routes in the beginning, there are so few differences between the European countries, and as you point out, many European countries are significantly smaller than some US states and simply don't have domestic routes, or very few.

 

The US on the other hand is an outlier in the other direction, being both a very wide spread country and very sp[Mod - Happy Thoughts]ly populated.

 

I can also think of some domestic routes that don't stay in one country (although both departure and destination is in one country)! Examples are some norwegian routes that will cross through Sweden and EKCH-EKRN which is a Danish domestic route but p[Mod - Happy Thoughts]es through Swedish airspace on the way.

[Christopher Liu]

The UK is long and thin and the trains aren't that fast so there's quite a bit of domestic flying, including by low cost carriers such as Ryanair and Easyjet in additional specialist regionals just BMI, flybe and Eastern. Driving from London to Glasgow is 7-8 hours, Exeter to Aberdeen is 10+ hours drive, so most people will fly those long North-South journeys. And Belfast is over the sea of course.

 

As has been discussed at length already you can't really treat Europe as a whole because although there are many shared aspects it's individual nations with their own standards and ways of doing things so there's almost always one that breaks the rule of thumb, despite attempts at harmonisation by JAA and EASA!

 

UK STAR naming convention is a brilliant example of this. Another is the multitude of transition altitudes in use (so typically the UK starts using flight levels at between FL40 and FL70 depending on airport, Germany starts at FL60, Netherlands at FL40 etc)

Edited December 13, 2017 at 04:56 PM by Guest

[Dace Nicmane]

Sorry, I should have said London FIR instead of UK, as Rob was talking about flying under London Control (perhaps just to have full ATC coverage from start to end). Even so, to do e.g. Manchester-London, you need at least 2-3 CTR controllers online, so might as well fly to another country.

 

But they don't fly domestic UK routes, do they?

[Christopher Liu]

Yeah UK airspace on VATSIM is highly sectorised on account the traffic volumes, although if it's not covered by Manchester/Scottish and London FIR is online you'd probably get coverage from just one controller if you remained within England and Wales.

 

Germany is much the same, high traffic levels on the network so broken down in smallish sectors such as Langen, Bremen and München Radars.

[Dace Nicmane]

Yeah UK airspace on VATSIM is highly sectorised on account the traffic volumes

It's not sectorised enough for the traffic volumes

[Robert Shearman Jr]

Yah, to be more clear, my primary intent was to start with UK domestic routes just to minimize the different sources for online charts I had to have at my fingertips, but to branch out to the rest of Europe as I begin to get more comfortable. And I didn't necessarily mean to stay within one FIR sector, although I would hope to be able to find good ATC coverage for at least part of my first few flights, to get comfortable with the terminology differences.

[Thimo Koolen]

UK STAR naming convention is a brilliant example of this. Another is the multitude of transition altitudes in use (so typically the UK starts using flight levels at between FL40 and FL70 depending on airport, Germany starts at FL60, Netherlands at FL40 etc)

 

The TA in The Netherlands is 3000ft. The TL varies, but is generally between FL40 and FL55. This is depending on the local QNH and the temperature.

 

 

The TA can be found in all departure charts, the TL in the ATIS of said airport.

[Simon Kelsey]

Incidentally, on the subject of charts: http://www.ead.eurocontrol.int/publicuser/public/pu/login.jsp is the only link you need for charts from every Eurocontrol member state (including the UK).

 

You have to register for a login but it's free.

[Christopher Liu]

The TA in The Netherlands is 3000ft. The TL varies, but is generally between FL40 and FL55. This is depending on the local QNH and the temperature. The TA can be found in all departure charts, the TL in the ATIS of said airport.

I do understand about transition altitude and transition level varying to provide a >1000ft transition layer (so at lower QNHs the TL rises), but I didn't put it in my original post because I didn't want to overcomplicate things for novices; for most VATSIM IFR traffic there's no need to be 100% accurate with TL because you just readback what ATC [Mod - Happy Thoughts]igns you (altitude or FL) and swap between local QNH and QNE as you p[Mod - Happy Thoughts] through published TA. It's more relevant to VFR traffic that might be bobbing around the transition layer. The chart is very interesting though, didn't realise there was much variance in TL caused by temperature, incidentally I don't believe all European countries announce the TL in ATIS.

[Andreas Fuchs]

Agree with Chris.

 

When there is no ATC online, pilots will climb or descend to their levels/altitudes anyway without the TA/TL having much of an impact. Practically the same goes for situations when ATC is active: they will tell you to either climb/descend to a level or altitude. For a possible vertical limit of a standard instrument departure/SID you'll need to refer to charts in any case and it will be clearly written whether you need to climb to an altitude or to a flightlevel.

[Simon Kelsey]

between local QNH and QNE

 

Pedant alert: QNE is a height reading (the height indicated on landing when 1013 is set on the sub-scale), not a pressure setting. The altimeter setting used above TA is Standard Pressure Setting (SPS).

 

I agree with you and Andreas though

[Robert Shearman Jr]

incidentally I don't believe all European countries announce the TL in ATIS.

Right -- my understanding is that those countries that use fixed TLs, or those with TLs that vary by airport but not by weather, publish them on the terminal charts -- and those with weather-influenced levels announce them in ATIS.

 

I *have* done a lot of research; but I'm sure I'm gonna find plenty to stumble on once I get going, lol.

[Robert Shearman Jr]

Well, I did it, finally. One down, hopefully many to go:

http://www.vataware.com/flight/5a4e8f6a535233670b00001b

 

I had Gatwick Ground, Tower, and Director on, but nothing at the Control level, and nothing coming into Dublin, unfortunately. But, I did figure out on-the-fly where to find the charts for Ireland and why there wasn't one called "ABLIN1L ARRIVAL," so that was an accomplishment. Now if I could only remember how to do all that and still fly the plane, we'll be all set, haha...

[Dace Nicmane]

How didn't you find ABLIN1L? I gave you the link to the Irish charts a few posts back. Anyway, congrats!

[Robert Shearman Jr]

No, I *did* find the Ireland charts, but all the arrival paths were on one chart together. Took me a minute to figure that out, but I did.

[Dace Nicmane]

Yeah, they're grouped by runway. That's normal.

[Robert Shearman Jr]

I did a few Europe flights since we last had this discussion running, and things generally went well.

 

However, I just now sprung for the Navigraph chart subscription. Now there's nowhere in the world I can fly where I won't have single-source access to all the necessary charts. Yay!

 

The alphanumeric callsign thing still throws me for a bit of a loop, but, hey, that's my own hangup. I know I can actually fly with whatever callsign I want if I lower my OCD a little. LOL.

[Andreas Fuchs]

Btw. if you want to create callsigns, there's a nice callsign generator available: http://lukas1992.bplaced.net/randomCallsign.html

 

The buttons are labelled in German, but easy to understand:

 

- Nummer/Nummern = digit/digits

- Buchstabe/Buchstaben = letter/letters

 

So, you can quickly generate callsigns with 1 digit and 2 letters or 2 letters and 1 digit or 2 digits and 2 letters or 3 digits and 1 letter.

 

Hope you'll find that useful. This small website was created by one of our members at VATSIM Germany.

[Robert Shearman Jr]

So does that site use the same methods for [Mod - Happy Thoughts]igning callsign as the real world or is it just random?

 

Or are the REAL ones just random too?

 

(Yes, I know, I'm overthinking it, LOL. It's my own obsession with choosing a callsign based on mimicking a real-world flight between my chosen origin and destination.)

[Andreas Fuchs]

The website I linked is based on random callsigns, there's no system other than the user can choose how many letters and digits are requested.

 

The real ones are more or less random, too, but there's a system. They are trying to avoid having similar callsigns around at the same time in the same region, e.g. xxx2AD and xxx6AD.

 

At my (realworld) outfit each tail has a fixed alphanumerical callsign [Mod - Happy Thoughts]igned to it for all standard flights, consisting of 1 letter followed by 2 digits. But when we fly into busy airports that required airport/runway slots (basically we need to apply for one for each flight), the standard callsign is not used anymore, but a random callsign consisting of 3 digits and 1 letter. This way we can swap tails for these flights, in case of a technical problem or similar.

 

Airlines use the same alphanumerical callsign for each flight throughout the year. Lufthansa flights are using alphanumerical callsigns for their shorthaul routes around Europe. Longhaul flights usually keep their flight number, e.g. DLH220.