LOWI Primer
Revision as of 11:08, 23 March 2012 by Claus Faber (talk | contribs)
About this Document
This document is intended as training and reference material for controlling Innsbruck Airport (LOWI). It covers the stations LOWI_DEL (rarely staffed, but theoretically), LOWI_TWR and LOWI_APP. This page is work in progress. Currently the DEL and TWR section is progress. Stay tuned for APP. If you are controller: Feel free to discuss and edit. Special thanks to Hermann Plunser, our active LOWI controller. It's his material which is used for this page.
General
Location and peculiarities
Innsbruck is one of the most thrilling airports to fly from and to, for various reasons:
- It is deeply in the Inn valley, surrounded by mountains as high as 8000ft (to the north) and >10000ft (to the south and West). This means that approach is particularly long, and flying is limited to a narrow corridor.
- The runway is somehow not in line with the valley, so approach and takeoff is not straight-in-or-out. Instead, the last part of approach and the first part of departure is visual only.
- LOWI has peculiar wind conditions - "Föhn". This is a very strong and gusty wind descending from the mountains, blowing west to east through the valley. Under these conditions, aircraft usually perform a "special Föhn" departure and arrival to avoid vomiting passengers and heart attacks.
- The runway has no complete adjacent taxiways for entering and exiting - Departing (and sometimes arriving) aircraft need to backtrack on either side, which takes time and makes Tower controlling a real thrill.
- X-Plane 9 has LOWI as (nice) standard scenery, which provokes many X-Plane newbies to try out their skills here - thrilling experience for controllers, to be polite.
Airspaces around LOWI
As Innsbruck is deeply buried in "the canyon",
- TWR airspace (Innsbruck CTR) reaches up to A9000ft (mark: actual altitude, not FL). If no higher ATC is available, then Innsbruck Tower controls up to A11000ft).
- APP airspace (Area Tirol) reaches up to FL165. The airspace above is delegated to EDMM.
Airport
(see the aerodrome chart, which is [here]