Interesting flight to EZE (Buenos Aires) with the KLM dreamliner

✈️ Route Overview

Our route took us over Paris (can you see the Eiffel tower?), the west of Africa, across the Atlantic and Brazil to Buenos Aires.

🌫️ Weather & Visibility

During the briefing we saw visibility was quite bad in EZE, this is often the case in their winter. Experience tells visibility is often lower there than forecasted, which indeed ended up to be the case.

The visbility makes a difference for the kind of landings we are going to perform: hand flown CAT I (good visbility) or automatic CAT II or CAT III (bad visbility). The exact difference is a story for another day ;)

🛬 Low Visibility Scenario

On route to EZE at the most negative point visbility was reported to be 200 meters. In this case we would have to perform a CAT III autoland, which allows us to land with the autopilot without decision height (do not see the runway before, but on touch down) and virtually no visibility (company requires 75 meters).

You only disengage the autopilot after landing, when suitable visual reference has been made, it is always quite exciting.

🧭 Final Approach & Landing

In the end we had 500 meters reported by tower and made a CAT II autoland. This is also an automatic landing in bad visibility however it has a decision height (at this point visual reference has to be established, otherwise you go around).

In this instance decision height was 102 feet on the radio altimeter. This is all standard procedure.

I hope you enjoyed.

‍