morning departure at luxembourg

beautiful morning light compensates for leaving bed at 4am...
tired we walk to work and wait if the weather is rewarding us and sometimes we get lucky!
lux and view onto trier...


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anchorage again...

back from vacation on a round the world trip from luxemburg via kuwait and hongkong to anchorage....

love the view from my room and finally found the right yoga for me 😀

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A summerwalk in Novosibirsk

Novosibirsk features the perfect weather now in the summer, long days, warm but not hot temperatures, usually dry with a little rain to keep everything green.

people enjoy their time outdoors and who has the possibility even drives out into the wast forests to their little dacias.

unfortunately our stay is rather short and not providing time to drive out of town, so a little walk inbetween flights has to do...

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new york again...

on the last circumnavigation via Dubai, Hongkong and Anchorage I had a short 23 hour stopover in new york again, and while I hate the chaos at JFK, i love to stay in the city for a few days. this time the weather was pleasant and after my compulsory stop at B&H I walked to the Rockefeller Center to take a look at the new Jeff Koons installation of a dancer and since there was for once no line at the elevator I went up to enjoy the late evening view...

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Baku - Aszerbaidschan

while Baku considers itself belonging to Europe, as proven regularly with the European Song Contest and other events, and despite the fact, that the city has been shaped and improved quite a lot in the last 14 years that i am visiting regularly, there are always some strange things about this city...

the last years saw the construction of the first highways in the country, and while people still drive completely mad compared to central Europe, the procedures and safety regulations seem not to exist here. as an example i photographed the strange sweeping ladys on the highways, a thing that would be forbidden and considered far too dangerous in central Europe:

in complete peace of mind they can be found just inches from the cars running at 130 km/h....

the on the other side the city gets more and more modern, stylish and to the opposite of what i thought, everything that is reshaped and refurbished gets treated well and seems to be kept in good condition, like the growing parks, main roads or freschly planted forests. thats why it gets increasingly attractive to walk the streets and parks, search for new cafe's and enjoy the sunlight outdoors - if its not too windy it is, because for a good reason Baku is also called the windy city and can be stormy and chilly at times!

here some of the more appealing views...

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luxembourg - mexico....

fun flight today!
due to strong jet-streams creating a lot of headwind we were routed from lux to mexico on a very northern route with exceptional beautiful weather and a nice view of island!
(over greenland i was sleeping and left the aircraft and view to my two wonderful colleges)

on the chart you can see several things,
first - the blue jetstreams, strong wind currents spanning the globe with windspeeds of 100 to 300 km/h;
second - the tracks of the north atlantic track system, which are calculated twice a day to provide minimum headwind or maximum tailwind, hence creating a minimum flighttime flexible route system;
third - the shortest way is not always the fastest - our company minimized todays flighttime by an diversion of additional 500 NM (900 km), but avoiding headwind and instead using crosswind aereas.

island pix taken just northwest of Reykjavik....
(love the islanders and their culture, will have to visist the island!)
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extreme weather - taifun....

while the flying machines get better and better and i am really on the lucky side flying 747-400 and 747-8's, with almost no technical problems, the weather still continues to be a challenging factor in aviation.
that is not due to climat change or weather getting more severe, as far as i remember back in my career it always was and will be the same challenges - especially severe thunderstorms, winds and the combination thereof like taifuns and hurricans.

the limit of flying is usually not the maximum windspeed, which in case of 747 can be up to 25 knots at 90 degrees on a wet runway (severe wind usually comes with water...), but more likely with the spread of average wind and gusts, which can exceed the operating limits of staying above reference speed Vref, which is minimum approach speed, and the maximum flaps placard speed Vfe, which is the limitimg speed for the established flaps setting.
to protect the flaps the 747 is equipped with a flap load protection system that reduces the flaps setting automatically if the max speed is exceeded. if that happens or the speed drops significantly below the minimum speed vref the stabilized approach criteria of our (and most) company demands a go-around.
wasting 2.5 to 3.5 t of fuel in a go-around rapidly brings you to the ulltimate decision of trying another time or diverting to the alternate, which in most cases means two tries and then diverting.
that of course always means a lot of extra work, especially after landing, when the organization of bringing the aircraft back to the originally planned destination causes huge ruptures in duty times of the crew, the need for mechanics and fuel as well as a lot of paperwork...

for passenger airlines it is even more demanding since they also see the need of booking hotel rooms for some 200 to 600 people, depending on the aircraft size, on short notice - imagine some glowing phone lines in the process and maybe you get a better understanding of the work involved if it happens to you someday!

less dramatic are thunderstrikes that happen regularly to aircraft usualy with no or minor damage. like a car all aircraft have to establish a faraday cage (also the new carbonfibre ones have some metal wires woven in for that!) protecting all occupants and the electronics as well. the usual strike enters through the radom of the weather radar in the nose and exits through the ionised air in the hot engine exhaust.
we simply leave a note in the techlog of the aircraft after landing and technicians search for the entry and exit to assess the damage and only in rare cases there are minor punctures to be found which can be patched easily, most of the time there is no damage at all.
in my flying life i get struck about every three years while flying an average of 550 hours a year and i'm still alive ;-)

pictures below are shot from my hotelroom in shanghai during an extended stay since our flight out was postponed by a taifun rattling the flooded city. it was practically impossible to leave the hotel with pouring rain and high windspeeds, the whole skyscraper bending and swinging a few centimeters!

and a nice thunderstrike from austria that caused a larger fire hitting a barn.

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ice skating...

i am slowly recovering from my data destaster and the process of sorting 35.000 pictures is slowly progressing...

in the meantime i am home and enjoying the cold weather with thick ice on the lakes in austria giving the optimal opportunity for ice skating.
the neusiedler see is very beautiful and impressivly large to do that!

here are some impressions from yesterday:
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