Choosing a landing runway is usually simple for me, take a look at the airports metar and choose the runway thats closest to the wind direction, or if there is atc, take a look at the atis and plan the approach from there, but the other day i was landing in Lisbon (LPPT), on vatsim, the airport was uncontrolled at that time, so no atis, but the winds were coming from 290º, now lisbon has 4 runways, 2 of them, runways 17 and 35 are for the most part deactivated and usually serve as a taxiway, so were left with runways 03 and 21, now 21 is closest to 290, right? so i thought, but after taking a look at flightradar i noticed that aircraft were landing 03, others on vatsim were also as well, in fact simbrief had choosen 03 for me, i just decided to land 21 because i looked at the winds. Am i doing something, is there any other way to find out the landing runway from the wind direction.  290-210 = 80  <  (360+30)-290 =100, so i would deduce runway 21 to be the landing runway.

17 hours ago, Laranja said:

290-210 = 80  <  (360+30)-290 =100, so i would deduce runway 21 to be the landing runway.

METAR reports True wind direction. even though it is only 3 degree Westerly variation at Lisbon, meaning magnetic wind = 293 degrees.

Let's assume wind velocity was 10kts, so magnetic wind is 293/10kt

RWY 03= 026 magneting bearing

RWY 21= 206 magnetic bearing

Landing on runway 03 = 0,5kt tailwind component

Landing on runway 21 = 0,5kt headwind component 

Runway is 3.700m long. 0,5kt is a complete non-factor.

But keep in mind there could be several reasons why ATC preferred to use RWY 03.

Edited September 11, 20214 yr by SAS443

Could be a maintenance thing, or something going on in the surrounding area which prevents a SID or STAR being used, but it can also depend on the time of day too. Look at a map of Lisbon and you'll see there are more residential areas to the south of the airport than there are to the north.

This means if you have to take off or go around, where you open the throttles up to TOGA, you make a lot more noise climbing out over a residential area using 21 than you do using 03. So if it was at night and there was a noise abatement choice of runways, as the airport operator, I'd pick 03 as being the least likely to generate noise pollution over residential areas.