Hello everyone :)
A few weeks ago, I spontaneously decided to go spotting with a friend after an intense school week. The weather wasn’t great at all, but it surprisingly turned out to be one of my favorite spotting sessions ever. Here is my story.
As we arrived at Zurich Airport after a 30 minute long train ride, we immediately headed out of the airport railway station to go to runway 28. We arrived there pretty quickly as it was a short 1.5 km walk. As expected, the runway was used for all departures. The winds were pretty calm at the time. I haven’t been there before, but it is a really nice spot. Suddenly, we saw a gigantic black cloud coming straight towards us from the west. It rapidly became really windy. To give you an idea how strong it was, this was the METAR:
LSZH 081650Z 24024G34KT 9999 TS FEW065CB FEW080 BKN150 21/14 Q1018 TEMPO 4000 TSRA
Qatar Airways Airbus A350 taking off runway 28 with heavy winds.
At this point, we already saw several aircrafts going around from runway 14 (which was used for arrivals). We were also listening to the live feed of the tower using LiveATC. We heard alot of wind checks from several pilots.
Two Helvetic Airways Fokker 100 taxiing on runway 28.
All of a sudden, we see two aircrafts lined up on the runway, which is a quite unusual sight.
We quickly understood what was going on as the first aircraft vacated the runway and we heard the ATC communications.
Here is a short extract of the ATC saying they’ll change departure runways.
If anyone wants to listen more, I have downloaded 30 minutes of the live feed from the LiveATC archives.
Inbound traffic was also placed in holds to allow the long departure line to cross runway 28 to join runway 32. Here is a FlightRadar24 screenshot of the flightpath of a few inbound aircrafts.
Here are some pictures I made in addition to the one I’ve included above. Those aren’t the best pictures I made, but I think it is still worth including some.
An Austrian Airlines Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 (in the Star Alliance livery) fighting against the winds.
A Helvetic Airways Fokker 100 lining up runway 28 after an Adria Airways Bombardier CRJ-900LR took off.
A Lufthansa Airbus A319 landing into the sunset.
Bonus: download this wallpaper!
You can download a wallpaper of a Swiss A320 and an Austrian Airlines Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 (in the Star Alliance livery) by clicking here.
That’s it for this topic. The pictures weren’t as good as usual, but I thought it was still worth sharing this spotting experience with you guys. I hope you enjoyed this topic.
Let me know what you think below! I’d also love to hear from your spotting experiences.
Cheers! :)
