Flight to BLR (Bangalore in India) with the KLM dreamliner

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✈️ Route Overview

Our route to Bangalore took us over Afghanistan, Pakistan and then India. Back we flew over the Gulf.

🛰️ Afghanistan – Uncontrolled Airspace

Afghanistan is quite interesting because it is uncontrolled airspace (class G). Special procedures are in place as to avoid other traffic, namely a TIBA: Traffic Information Broadcast by Aircraft. This is a frequency where no ATC is active where aircraft can report there whereabouts.

It was previously controlled by the Americans and left uncontrolled after they left, a captain told me.

🌍 Pakistani–Indian Border

Then you encounter the Pakistani-Indian border, 3000+ kilometres of continuously illuminated border. Because of the unstable political situation between these countries, we have to think carefully about the consequences of possible diversions to Pakistan with many people from India on board.

This sparks an interesting discussion, in some checklists we are directed to land at the nearest suitable airport. Is it suitable in this instance? The pilot-in-command may determine, based on the nature of the situation and an examination of the relevant factors, that diversion to a more distant airport would be the safest course of action.

🛫 Performance in Bangalore

Bangalore has an elevation of 3000 ft. Being close to max take-off weight and calculating with a tailwind of 2 knots, since a variable wind was reported (most conservative), we saw that we could only accept maximum 2 kts of tailwind with full thrust on a runway of 4000 (!) meters. This surprised us.

The Dreamliner is not nearly as powerful as the 777, you see in these instances. We each calculate performance separately and then compare with all available pilots, to ensure that we use the correct metrics for calculating the performance.

Hope you enjoyed

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