I’m temporarily grounded thanks to a little hardware issue. While I wait for a hardware replacement to come in, I thought I’d cover a few more recent flights. This is a flight where I flew the slightly shorter A330-200 with it’s General Electric engines engines and a beautiful Qantas livery. Like my last journal with the A330, I’m not doing a real world flight specifically but just enjoying the airliner. Let’s go!

Back in the A330

Flying the A330 is quite a bit like flying the A320. I actually did a fun A320 flight recently (maybe another one to share) just to see what it’s like back to back and it was easy to go back and forth between the two. Sharing the same iniBuilds tablet interface, the same Airbus avionics setup, and minimal differences overall its quite easy to go back and forth. Do they handle differently? Yep! The A330 is a much larger widebody and it flies like one but its still very well behaved. It’s also easier than the A300-600 I’ve also been out in recently.

For this flight I elected to fly the shorter A330-200 with GE CF6 engines on it. Slightly different than the A330-300 I flew previously, though, in practical application within the sim they are quite similar. If you fly these two back to back enough times and pay close attention to the engine details, there are differences but if you like to load up and fly you may not notice much beyond the visual. In the real world, the differences in power between these engines is also remarkably similar.

This route would take me on a hop between Adelaide, a south coast city in Australia, and then over to Sydney, Australia. The approach would take me right past the famous Sydney Harbour and give us some great sights along the way of Australia’s more rural regions. This all against the backdrop of the rising sun.

Outbound

Starting out at Impulse Simulations YPAD Adelaide International Airport, I removed the engine covers, tube coverings and wheel chocks before moving into the cockpit. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again is that I actually appreciate the walkaround mode before a flight more than I thought I would. I like getting a feel for the airplane and the scale of it before going onboard. It really helps make setting things up interesting – even if the clickspots for some of the different inspectable parts are frustrating and, dare I say, nearly broken in some instances (this is not a A330 specific complaint).

After looking around the pre-dawn airport, it was time to get going with a start-up of the A330. Flight plan was imported from SimBrief, performance numbers copied over from the EFB into the MCDU and on to pushback.

From there, I was cleared to taxi to runway 05 and takeoff into the sunrise.

It wasn’t too long before we punched our way through the clouds and up towards our cruise altitude.

Cruise

As the flight continued on, we levelled out and cruised towards our destination of Sydney Australia. Enough time for a quick look around the cabin which, in this included livery wasn’t branded on the interior, yet still managed to look pretty good. The doors from the cockpit to the cabin work and most of the details are excellent. I still can’t believe this is an included airplane.

Back to the cockpit then and as Sydney came into sight, it was time to start descending into our destination.

Landing

Before getting things sorted for landing, I did end up overshooting a bit on the landing approach coming in too high and too fast to get immediately onto the approach. A common issue I’ve had and both the result of challenges with the ATC and with my own management of the airplane for landing. I am improving every time and I’ve been studying up on how approaches are done so bit by bit this is improving. Also, my problem solving when I haven’t quite got the approach right is getting better too. Here I pretended to vector myself and headed north of Syndey into some beautiful scenery before turning around for the landing.

The landing approach on Runway 16R brings me over some of Sydney’s suburbs but also you can see the skyline of the city and its harbour in the distance. Right now I’m having some issues with 2024 not loading the distance details in the way I want them to and I had that problem here but it was still beautiful.

The scenery for Sydney airport looks good but seems similar to the 2020 version. Those with a more intimate knowledge may know if the upgrades have improved the airport but here I was mostly focused on finding a gate that I could park at. The density of traffic seems to make that nearly impossible to do with any kind of realism. Still, I found a spot that I mostly made work and I appreciated the AI-only A330neo parked nearby too – I love those curved wings and want to fly one now. It’s never enough right?

I hope you enjoyed this flight journal. I will be sharing some of my adventures with iniBuilds recently released A350 too! But I wanted to get this flight shared before I moved on with those.