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A few pics from a long flight across Africa. My Beech King Air was positioned at FBNG (Mombo Camp Airfield, Botswana) following a cargo flight from Angola, but with no cargo jobs nearby to FBNG, and wishing to get over to my newly-constructed cargo centre at HTDA (Dar-Es-Salam, Tanzania) so I could fly some more lucrative base-to-base jobs between Dar-es-Salam and FMMI (Ivato, Madagascar), this meant flying all the way across a large part of Africa with the cargo hold empty, taking in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania along the way. The good point about this however, was that in flying direct, I realised I would be following the Zambezi River for quite some time, with its major dams and lakes, passing over a few good points of interest, including Livingstone, Victoria Falls and Lake Malawi, and since part of the reason for having a virtual cargo company operating in Africa, was so I could check these places out, this was pretty cool. Sadly the scenery for Victoria Falls in MSFS is not as majestic as it is in real life, but it was still fun to take it in and it is nevertheless reasonably geographically accurate and visually pleasing, as well as being one of the places which is fairly instrumental in some major incidents in history. As per the title of this thread, this is the region where Henry Morton Stanley - his expedition being funded by the New York Herald's publisher, James Gordon Bennett Jr - discovered the whereabouts of the famous missionary explorer, David Livingstone, and greeted him with the well known 'I presume?' phrase. Although he was there ostensibly to preach, Livingstone's missionary efforts were in many ways a pretext for a campaign against the slave trade, he surmised that by making an explorer's name for himself, his anti-slavery efforts would carry more weight. Although he was forced on occasion to rely on such practices for survival, his intentions were for the time very honorable for the most part, having been inspired by Livingstone's own poverty-stricken upbringing in Scotland. Perhaps more famously however, Gordon Bennett's name became the inspiration for the famous expression of surprise, after he allegedly turned up drunk to his engagement party at the family home of the socialite Caroline May, then proceeded to have a slash in the fireplace, much to the horror of all the posh people in attendance. It was as a result of this that the marriage was called off and he fled to Europe in disgrace. As you probably know however, Gordon Bennett did return to the 'States and established numerous well known races for cars, balloons and aeroplanes, some of which continue to this day...

Hi, everybody! Today I went on a longhaul flight with the AS A330 and wrote a tripreport about it. DLH 594 EDDF/FRA (Frankfurt am Main/Germany) -> DNAA/ABV (Abuja/Nigeria) Airbus Industrie A330-300 D-AIKO, MSN 989 While we are just getting to our aircraft, the handler is already loading the food for the almost 6 hours flight into the Airbus. While the IRS is alligning, we can take a look at the OFP. Here is a short overview for the air traffic controllers: We take off on Frankfurts Runway 25C, then turn south to follow the ANEKI departure. From there, we actually just continue south, across the Black Forest, the Swiss and Italian Alps, Genoa, then across the Mediterranean Sea, passing Corsica and Sardinia towards Algeria. There we pass the Atlas Mountains, the cities of Constantine and El Oued, between Tamanrasset and Djanet further towards Niger. There we continue via Agadez and the former capital Zinder to Nigeria, where we fly over the city of Kano in the north. Then we start the approach to the 22 of Abuja. We'll take 40 tons of fuel with us. That is already well calculated, only about 31.5 tons are needed for the flight itself. But you never know how the thunderstorms will be over Nigeria, so an additional reserve will not hurt. Time to have a look around the plane. But all good, there is even time for a small photo: As we are unfortunately still in the middle of the Corona crisis, we don't have many passengers with us, only 153, but we can take a bit more freight with us, 23.7 tons. This brings us to ZFW of 162 t, which is quite a lot for the A330. In the meantime the boarding is almost finished and we are picking up our IFR clearance. A little bit surprising we get the RWY 18, and not the 25C. But good, it is quickly changed. After the boarding is completed, we also get the Pushback Clearance and are (almost) on time. From stand A50 we are allowed to push a pretty good bit up to N7: Meanwhile we start the engines, so that we can taxi to runway 18 without delay after pushback. We haven't even been to the holding point yet, they told us: "Lufthansa 594, wind 160 at 6, Runway 18, clear for takeoff!" And of course you don't have to be told twice, let's go! At a Vr of 165 kts we take off, Positive Climb, Gear Up! The climbout from Frankfurt was a bit boring because of clouds. Over Switzerland, however, the clouds have cleared up and a great alpine panorama was to be seen: But also some minutes later, over Italy, everything was full of clouds again. After not even 2 hours in the flight we reached the African mainland, here a picture over Algeria, shortly after we flew over the third largest city of Algeria - namely Constantine: ... After that, nothing comes except of sand for the time being: The Sahara. After some time clouds come up again, the ground becomes a bit greener and looks more inhabited again. A good time to enter our approach to the MCDU. As planned it will be the RWY 22 in Abuja, will be a really nice and comfortable approach. The outside temperature is 32°C, so it will be really pleasant... Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, has 2.7 million inhabitants and is located northwest of the airport. The airport... Wait, we just started our descent. The airport has 2 terminals and handles about 2 million passengers per year - it is the second largest airport in Nigeria after Lagos. It has a runway which is 3600 meters long, more than enough for our A330: And as we sink through the clouds, the landscape becomes greener and greener: And then we are already on the ILS, which leads us to runway 22: Flaps one - flaps two - gear down! Approx. 2000 ft AGL we come out of the clouds and the airport is already in sight in the distance! Well, and with soft -103 fpm we bring our A330 also on the ground! Unfortunately there are still no really good airports for Accra, Lagos, Abjua, & co, so unfortunately only the default P3D and GSX flair... Yeah, that's it from my side again! I hope you enjoyed the flight again! Many greetings Matthias