David Megginson wrote in
:
When an aircraft is flying under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR), air
traffic control will assign different altitudes, headings, and
airspeeds. Depending on the other traffic, your plane might have been
told to descend to a different altitude, at which point it would level
out again until cleared to a lower altitude. Ditto for headings. It
could be that the pilot was also a little gung-ho on the controls, or
that the controller was falling a little behind the traffic and had to
vector you around a little too much, but there's nothing unusual about
what you described.

Thanks for the follow up.

But at 3:30am at Irkutsk Siberia, there isnt a lot of traffic.

I did not notice any other planes before us (no other pax, nor luggage) and
no jets landed after us. We were an hour late though.

And being Siberia - theres plenty of room between airports as well.

Gung ho Im used to - many Russian pilots are ex military (as are in other
parts, but even more here I think) but the very long approach seemed very
unusual. I did some checking and found that one of the approaches to IKT
does in fact include 4 turns.

Isnt 4 turns a 360 though? There arent any mountains of consequence in the
near vicinity or other obstacles I can think of?

The only other major airport that is near is Irkut Aviation which does
handle some military as well as test flights.


--
Chad Z. Hower (a.k.a. Kudzu) - http://www.hower.org/Kudzu/
"Programming is an art form that fights back"


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