To close out the year I decided to do something that I’ve been building up towards all year – flying airliners but this one is with a bit of a twist. This was my very first flight in the recently released iniBuilds A300-600 for Microsoft Flight Simulator and I decided I wanted to do it with the freighter version. It ended up being a very fun and unique experience! Lets go haul some freight.

Hauling freight from CYYZ to KPHL

Today’s flight couldn’t be a long one so I did a short hop from the FedEx cargo area at Toronto Pearson airport (CYYZ) down to Philadelphia International Airport (KPHL). Both have FedEx terminals and a look at the aprons of both airports show off some obviously FedEx liveried airplanes on the parking spaces – good enough for inspiration for a cargo flight!

I’ll have a lot more to say about the A300 in the coming weeks but suffice to say its the newest and hottest airliner option on the block and thanks to a good price its become quite popular in the online space. I picked it up because I wanted to find out for readers if this offered anything unique over the A310 and because one of the unique features I wanted to dig into was cargo operations in airliner sized jets. The A300-600RF, included with the package, is all about the freighter flying and so there’s where we start.

The scenery I have for CYYZ includes the FedEx terminal which I’ve never even stopped to have a look at before and that’s point one for freighter operations because it means flying to and then checking out parts of airports that I haven’t explored much.

Starting out with the cargo area empty, I would later load it up with aviation parts before takeoff.

Takeoff would take me over to CYYZ’s runway 05 with a departure that briefly took me north and west before sending me south over both Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. Anyone living in the general vicinity will know that we’ve been under thick cloud, fog, rain and generally dreary conditions for over a week now and so it was both a bit funny and also slightly reassuring when after takeoff the A300 punched a hole in the clouds and there was sun! (Virtual as it may be)

Climbing up to 33,000 feet took a little while with the heavy load but nothing unduly wild. The A300-600R features avionics first developed for the A310 so its very much a similar airplane to fly to the A310 and that made my first flight much easier to pull off. Again, I’ll have more to say about the airplane when I get to a review but in practical terms you can go back to back in both of these with very little procedural difference.

After a brief cruise at FL330 it was time to get back down to land at KPHL. I plugged in the ILS for Runway 27L and then intentionally overshot the turn in for the airport – why? Because the ATC was once again very slow at bringing me down to altitude and so I decided to extend my outbound segment in order to get down to 3,000 feet and established for landing. This turned out to be a good call.

On the descent the airplane once again went through a thick cloud layer before getting in underneath where broken clouds allowed for more sunlight into the area.

The aircraft picked up the ILS and autopilot put it on the glideslope nicely. This brought the airplane in to a nice landing approach at Philadelphia minus a little error that I made with not reducing the speed enough. The last moments saw me desperately trying to make sure I was not carrying too much speed and that meant more time in the ground effect hanging onto more speed and air than I should have. Notes for the the next flight! Finally we were down after a bit of ugliness and making the last turn off for the runway.

Over to the parking area I made sure to head to the building that Google maps indicates is the FedEx building at this airport. Though its not marked in the scenery, the freighter area is certainly populated with all of the populated buildings. I pulled up to one of the open areas and shut down the airplane.

Freight feels different

This is all pixels on a screen but when it comes to the simulation and replication of reality that we go through here, I have to say that flying freight felt different. The airplane itself flies much the same way but the mission goal is different and that means flying different routes, worrying less about real world schedules, and finding yourself at more industrial looking parts of airports – especially with custom scenery.

This was a fun adventure and one that I intend to do between several other airports soon!

I hope my Flight Journal series has been entertaining reads throughout the year. At the very least I hope they inspire you to have your own flights and go and experience new and familiar things in flight simming. There will be more and as much variety as I can muster in 2024 so stay tuned!