Brand New A330 from the Biggest City in Europe to one of the World's Most Isolated Cities in the Mongol Desert

So the long awaited A330 rework finally arrived, not my favourite aircraft whatsoever but you can find some very nice, enjoyable flights to do in it, especially in the Turkish Airlines colours which is one of my favourite airlines to fly in IF.

Therefore I’ve decided to take it for a spin to Ulaanbaatar, I have flew to it once before from Seoul with @Charlie_B and I really enjoyed flying to it so I wanted to fly there again as the airport itself doesn’t really serve many airlines in the first place.


Route Info:

Flight Number: TK4908
Departure Airport: Istanbul Airport 🇹🇷
Arrival Airport: Ulaanbaatar Buyant-Ukhaa International Airport 🇲🇳
Aircraft: Turkish Airlines A330-300
Flight Time: 6 hours & 49 minutes


The Photos

Pushback completed while @Ecoops123 is taking off from runway 35L heading for Liège.


2 hours into the flight the sun already rose and currently cruising over the Caucasus mountains in southern Russia.


One of my favourite places in the world to fly over - the beautiful Kazakh Caspian Sea coastline 🥵

Another shot :)


Currently cruising in the small Altai Republic located right in between Kazakhstan and Mongolia providing some decent looking mountains.


A picture of the scenery without the plen


While flying over Mongolia I have encountered @anon24319801 who was flying on the same airway just 1,000 feet below me in the Hainan Airlines A330 heading for Belgrade!


Descending into Ulaanbaatar and surprisingly the sun is already starting to set only at 2.45pm local time.


On final


Pulling up to my gate with the big hills in the background just behind runway 32 which makes taking off from this airport slightly challenging as you have to perform a steep climb to avoid the terrain. I really recommend trying it, it’s very fun!


So that’s all for today.

Mongolia is a very obscure country that is barely visited both in IF and in real life so I’ve decided to showcase it here in this topic because it really provides beautiful landscape and scenery; hopefully convincing some fellow IFC members to fly this route rather than the basic Istanbul - Heathrow, Amsterdam, Zurich etc. that I’ve seen many others fly.

Thank you for viewing my photos and I hope you enjoyed!

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Brilliant pictures as always Igor, love the second last one!

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That is one shiny A330
Also in my opinion Asia is just left out sometimes and more people should fly here because the scenery isn’t bad

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This is really good! I dig the wing views a lot.

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Lavelyyy pics as always Igor. There definitely is some gorgeous scenery in Central Asia and Southern Parts of Russia

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Thank you for your comments guys

Definitely agree with those statements, Asia in general is just more beautiful than Europe and extremely diverse

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Stunning shots, mate! Absolutely gorgeous Asian scenery you came across! I definitely have to give that route a shot soon

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Beautiful shots Igor! I need to up my Asia game myself with the new A330 liveries!

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Nice shots man! 🙂

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Thank you all appreciate it!

I should consider flying this route one day!
Looks like an amazing route!

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It definitely is! There’s also some other really good routes to central Asia in the A330 as well such as Istanbul - Almaty, Tashkent and Kabul!

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Been wanting to do this flight, or maybe Moscow - Ulaanbaatar. Great photos!

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Haha yeah I was looking at that route too, I remember seeing Aeroflot use the A330 for that route around last year but I noticed that now they’ve changed it to the 737-800. Still possible to fly that route in the A330 realistically tho 👀

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Hi there! I’m actually a Mongol myself so you flying to our airport was insanely cool! I have flown this route (as you can imagine) many times in real life and in IF, next time I recommend flying from Istanbul to Chinggis Khaan International Airport (Buyant Ukhaa Airport is now no longer operating the Istanbul service), the new airport opened a few weeks ago! Thank you for shedding some light onto what is one of the most beautiful countries in the world in my opinion.

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