I’ve had a few questions about the Toulouse Fly By so let me give you a bit more information. Essentially a ‘fly by’ is and splash and dash, an aborted landing and takeoff all-in-one — something you just don’t experience everyday and if you are the lucky flyer, you never experience except during something that FlyerTalk does.

We approached landing in Tolouse just as any landing, but once at about 50 feet off the runway, we continue flying the full length of the runway at that same altitude and once at the very end, the pilot gives it a nice punch of thrust and we head upwards kissing the sky and then vector back around to land as we normally would. Now do you see why we were all left with sore hands from clapping so much? It was awesome.

Now for some color commentary: 1) can you picture the grin on the co-pilot’s face as we did this while landing at the Airbus factory in a Boeing? 2) We had the chief pilot for Condor as our pilot and immediately upon landing he pulled his business card out and thrust it into the hands of one of our hosts, Tommy777, and said if we ever do anything like this again to please call him, he loves the way FlyerTalk flys! 3) We were told you need 3.3 tons of fuel to land as the bare minimum and after the fly by we only had 3.4 tons left so there was no chance for an ‘encore.’

You had to be there.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 4:34 am and is filed under First Annual Star Alliance MegaDO, Toulouse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.