Addis Ababa fly-in experience

So we all know that IF community had arranged a fly in event to Addis Ababa, an airport which I had not even thought of visiting before the fly-in. That fly-in was a success as so many people visited that airport with one runway for departures and arrivals(the other runway was under NOTAM restrictions). So here is my experience…

I was a member of a group flight as we decided to be the members of the rush awaiting us in HAAB. We took off from OMDB headed to HAAB. After 3hrs, i reached the control area of the center. I had a STAR and asked for descent from it. But the centre had some other plans.

The centre had built an approach chart to the runway which was made to be followed by other pilots using vectoring instructions for altitude and heading. After asking for descent by the STAR, the centre said that it was unable and gave me the vectors. The vectors were very smooth. All the planes seemed to be obeying the atc instructions due to which the traffic was smooth and there was not much chaos atleast for the pilots. After flying the given patterns and reaching FL180, i contacted the approach.

The approach was a little chaotic because many planes were taking off from the same runway we were landing on. This time there were some who were disobedient and received warnings from the approach director. We were constantly receiving speed requests from the atc which helped to maintain the distance between two flights one after another. After some time, on almost being aligned with the runway and descending to 10,000 i received permission from the approach and set the VNAV and resumed my approach. After reaching 5000, i was told to contact tower. Thus i did and was immediately cleared for the landing. I went in did a decent landing, contacted the ground on the taxiway, taxied to parking and parked my plane. Literally a great experience, thanks to the IF team for making our experience better. Also thanks to those who read it all the way down. Have a great day!

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I was also very impressed overall by the service provided at HAAB yesterday.

I wasn’t flying but I was on the ground listening in on tower frequency. Well done IFATC.

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I flew in at the busiest time yesterday and the service provided by IFATC was great. Approach did and excellent job handling all the traffic and made use of holding patterns very well. Thanks to the IF team and IFATC for the event.

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When I flew in, center was no longer available, but the quality of service was still impeccable. It may have looked very disorientated on Live flight and because there was just a lot of dots in the sky but there was proper order. IFATC sequence in the time that I was with them was amazing, really. How they handled incoming, landing and expeditions of aircraft on the runway in prep for the next landing.

One runway but it was a seamless sequence of events.

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I agree, the ATC service yesterday was great! Really glad I didn’t have to go-around when landing yesterday as the departure/arrival differential was only about 15-20 seconds during that time. Kudos to the controllers.

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