Leg 2: Kührstedt-Bederkesa - Stade - Hamburg

And our journey continues! From Kührstedt-Bederkesa our sweet little Maule will take us to Stade for a touch and go, then to a full stop at Hamburg.

With some looks out the airplane we make a pretty short trip to Stade, a town directly west of Hamburg. The approach and touch and go landing at Stade were pretty uneventful. I also decided to just fly straight in and out without going into pattern, because that's who I am.

So we continue our flight to the nearby Hamburg Airport. Here's a look at Hamburg-Finkenwerda, an airport that belongs to the Airbus factory that resides there.

So we're cleared into Hamburg airport on runway 5 and traffic doesn't seem to be as much of a disaster as it was around Bremen. As I try to get on final though, the airplane gets struck with some mean windshear. It's not the first time I fly across Hamburg and this happens there regularly for some reason, but now I'm trying to land and it's not giving me a very good time. I eventually did get a good approach though, went down on a nice glideslope and met the ground softly.

So for some reason nobody died and we got down safely, ready for leg 3 of our trip that will take us to some place in Scandinavia, probably Oslo in a regional jet!

I sadly forgot to show you my progress on this leg on a map but I'll explain it on the next trip. See you then! :*

First Leg: Diepholz AB - Bremen - Nordholz Navy - Kührstedt-Bederkesa

Off we go! Without much talk, let's just dive right in, or up, to start our journey around the world and what better place to start from than an Air Base in a tiny German town in Lower Saxony.
We depart east from runway 08. Aircraft is ready, all things are set. This is the Cessna Skyhawk RJT-2209 ready for takeoff.

 Hm, maybe a life insurance would have been a good idea.

I'll go ahead and say it, the terrain isn't exactly what you would call stunning and neither are my graphics settings. To be fair: it's been very hot around here for the last few days and I'm not on a desktop computer because I simply don't own one. My laptop just isn't gonna be able to compete with some of the flight simulation rigs that some people have.
But I'm enjoying myself up here as we head north to Bremen, which is just 15 minutes of flight. Right after takeoff we already get to tune Bremen tower and communicate our intentions.

 And it's not long until we see the airport with a Boeing taking off.

Turns out though the air traffic controller might have bitten off a little more than he can chew at the moment as the traffic situation on and around the airport is getting a little hairy.

I have no idea how the guy second in line here would at all think there was a way he would land that final.

And it leads to the inevitable go-around.

"Oh come on, I can't just piggyback him?"

This has the desirable side-effect of putting us next in line for landing though so we get a pretty straight forward left traffic approach.

I am in fact aware that I circled pretty far away from the airport.

 But that glideslope though!

 But whatever, let's leave this whole mess behind us, push the throttle forward and run straight back out of this. One last look across our shoulder...

 Dicks.

... and we go north again, heading for Nordholz.

 

Here's the way we've gone so far:

As we head for Nordholz, we go above Bremerhaven, which also has an airport that mostly serves islands in the North Sea and IRL is on the brink of being closed because cargo related to the offshore wind power facilities will be handled on the Weser river right in front of the airport, making aviation activities close to impossible. The traffic that currently relies on Bremerhaven Airport will be relocated to Nordholz at some point in the future which itself is not seeing much use now as the Navy forces there have been downsized massively. Here's a look at Bremerhaven:

You can see the runway's PAPI lights. Shortly after flying over Bremerhaven, Nordholz Navy is already visible. We're heading with the Autobahn 29 to Cuxhaven, which is on the coast of the Elbe and the North Sea, north of Nordholz.

Imagine seeing someone drive like an asshole down there and up in the air, you don't even have a reason to get upset. That would blow.

Shortly before Nordholz the wind suddenly picks up quite a bit and I get into some trouble, my airspeed jumping all over the place and I'm being pushed into a right bank that you can't see on the screenshot but it was pretty chaotic.

Luckily it subsides for our approach. As I'm on the downwind, you can see the main runway of the facility and a small dirt runway next to it. The concrete runway belongs to the Navy airport, the other one is in the books as a runway belonging to Nordholz-Spieka, a different airport altogether. This seems to not be based very much on reality, where civilian aircraft can regularly use the Navy's runway the way I will do now.

 Let's get such a nice glideslope again.

Goddamn it.

After a bit of a weird approach (I screwed up turning to final and my glideslope was all fucked), we touch and go, turning south again to go to Kuhrstedt. 

Here's our progress so far:

Kührstedt is close enough to not even warrant going over a thousand feet. If you imagine that airfield looking anything like one, you're dead wrong. This is Kührstedt-Bederkesa:

Hell yeah, let's land like a man.

I spotted it real late and had to make a weird turn across a hill. It was ugly.

Well, how does a man land?

Rolling back onto the "runway" though, we end our first leg after about an hour of flying time!

A lot more fun than taking then train every time I visit my parents.

 So that's it for leg 1, Diepholz to Kührstedt! Some leisure VFR on a fine day to start off our journey, I like that. Nothing complicated and save for two pretty botched approaches I didn't even fly that airplane like an idiot and that's a pretty nice thing to say about myself. Thank you guys for reading and all that! I appreciate any comments you might have, any suggestions, requests, ideas, I'll take them all and I really welcome the input.

Next up: Another light aircraft takeoff from Kührstedt-Bederkesa (EDXZ), heading for Stade (EDHS), then Hamburg (EDDH). A shorter leg than this one, it will set us up on a major international airport to grab a jet aircraft and head for Scandinavia.

... in a quite decent flight simulator!

Hi everyone! I'm LostRealist, I go by that alias on a lot of places so maybe you know me, but if not, I guess that's all the better!
I'm a college student from northern Germany so I got nothing but time on my hands save for a few weeks during the year and I've been getting into flight simulation recently, to the point where I bought a stick and now I actually see how it would be fun to fly a simulated aircraft. It is, it is fun.
But I thought I'm kinda not having enough of a project just hopping from city to city in individual flights; I want a bigger goal, I want something to achieve.

I'll be playing Flight Simulator X by Microsoft, which to me was the most easily understandable simulation and it flies fine. I guess it gets some heat from purists and the like, what with ATC being a farce pretty much and the simulation not being very thoroughly realistic, but I enjoy playing it because everything works, it runs surprisingly smooth on my laptop (after SP1, of course) and it's fun and easy to get into.
So the goal that I was referring to up there will be a full flight around the world, from every major destination to the next and with some leisure VFR stuff if the time is right. I will switch airplanes and I will mix longer routes with shorter ones, major airports with small airfields and the likes. It will be a total blast is what I'm trying to imply here.

Uh, shit?

So before our long journey starts, here's how it's gonna work.
I will start at the airport which is closest to my current real-life location which will either be Damme (EDWC) or Diepholz Airbase (ETND). They're both a short trip away from the city I live now. Damme is a pretty nice place but then Diepholz Airbase is an Airbase and that's badass. The first leg of our tour will be a short trip from either of those places to Bremen Airport (EDDW) and then north to Nordholz Navy (ETMN), which is where the Naval Aviation Branch "Count Zeppelin" resides and that's just badass once again. From Nordholz it's also a short hop to Kuhrstedt-Bederkesa (EDXZ) which is a tiny little airstrip just two or three miles away from the village I grew up at. It's a trip back home! I'll probably make a full stop there and then start the second leg going from EDXZ to Hamburg Airport (EDDH) which will be the first really major airport I'll visit (I'm not gonna go ahead and declare Bremen a "major" airport). From there, our journey really takes off, I'm just not yet sure where.
I'm gravitating heavily to traveling the world eastbound. From Hamburg I would head for Scandinavia, maybe Stockholm or Helsinki, then into Russia and so on. Another option I've been pondering is going to Scandinavia and then west, across Greenland and then into Canada. I have a bit of a rough plan in mind going eastbound, but it doesn't include any way whatsoever to fit Greenland in there, which is a bummer. On the other hand it will let me visit Antartica, which is ten times cooler than Greenland any day of the week.
But I have two legs ahead of me until I decide which way to go. From Diepholz AB (yeah, I'm pretty sure it'll be the airbase) to Kuhrstedt-Bederkesa, we'll take off in a light aircraft, probably the Cessna Skyhawk that has the G1000 glass cockpit in it, because that's just straight up gold. I might switch for something else for the second leg, I'm not that sure yet. I haven't planned a whole route yet, I will make up the coming legs as I go along.
When it comes to all the surroundings, I will pick an airline callsign and stick with it throughout the tour and it will be one of the default FSX airlines. I haven't gotten into custom content at all yet and there's a pretty real chance that I won't, so sorry about that. I quite like FSX's liveries anyway. I'm still split on what airline I'm going to take but it's likely to either wind up being Orbit or World Travel 'cause those just make some sense. Every one of my planes is gonna have RJT-2209 as its tail number, which are the initials and date of birth of my girlfriend. The flight numbers are going to be derived from the leg that I'm on and maybe some other shit around it.
I will document my journey with logs and loads of screenshots, I'll try to keep you posted on everything of interest and maybe, just maybe I'll also shoot some videos with commentary at some point.

So join me on my flight around the world starting and ending at the Diepholz Air Base (yup, it's gonna be Diepholz AB). Estimated time of takeoff: At some point tomorrow.