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(Continued from HERE)

It will take you approximately 2 hour 15-25 minutes before you reach Istanbul, Ataturk International (LTBA) from Moscow, Sheremetyevo (UUEE) on Tu-154. Of course, it depends on factors that are well known from navigation by air, such as true airspeed, wind, time on the approach, etc.

Here’s am excerpt from Great Circle Mapper showing a great circle flight path between the two.

I put the ground speed value of 420 Kt, which reflects kinda typical ‘averaged’ ground speed for this plane, whereas cruise goes at Mach numbers in the area of M .80-84.

Unlike in Moscow, weather was nice in Istanbul.

Perhaps, this fellow could even tell that it was ‘rather warm’ outside on that day as he threw bags and boxes with ‘all kind of stuff’ into the plane’s pits

As for the ‘turn time’, it may be said (by the ‘low cost operator’s standard’, though) : ‘no sweat’, - you won’t probably see turns faster than 1 hour 20 minutes, and it was not unusual to have turns on international flights even longer - up to two hours. Because of that, we often had opportunities to explore ‘duty free shops’ at different airports. That one at İstanbul Atatürk Airport was not too bad

Of course I also had some time to play with my new camera. Here’s a few images taken during this session of ‘ramp spotting’. This is a 737-800 of the Turkish charter operator Inter Airlines.

I took a few shots of departing planes, tried serial shooting on the Cargolux’ 747: ‘nose gear retraction in progress’

I noticed a military helicopter on the Southern ramp, it was hardly seen on the dark backgrounds

Also, an optical zoom x3 in Canon PowerShot A80 wasn’t enough for this kind of shooting.

And finally, it was time to go home.

(to be continued..)