How To Fly Over The Netherlands

Flying over Europe and in my case The Netherlands, is something quit different than flying over lets say the USA. It is not easy to tell you what differences there are, so I decided to guide you through a trip over Holland and show you what it is like.

The meaning of this story is to give you the feeling that a real private pilot has on his flight. I will teach you some things about flying that you never needed when you flew from A to B. In the real world there are many safety rules to deal with.

I have my private pilot license for The Netherlands. My license allows me to fly private non-commercial single engine airplanes lighter that 2000 kg over The Netherlands. I also have my Radio license for IFR flights. You need that in Holland.

Because I don't want to overwhelm you with text, I split my trip up into a few small trips. Each trip brings you to another airport and finally you will land at Schiphol airport.

You need two software packages for this trip:

    Microsoft Flight Simulator 98  (I think it can be done with earlier versions, but I am not sure)
    Europe 1 scenery add-on.

Please apply the following patches:

    fs98pat1.exe        This fixes some bugs in FS98
    ehamfs98.zip        This is a fix for Schiphol. Don't skip this one, else you will see things double

Don't forget to apply the Europe 1 scenery patch that is on your FS98 cd-rom. You can find it in the directory \scnsetup

You will need a few scenery files to complete Holland a little. Every time you will need a new file, I will tell you. I checked every file for there existence on www.flightsim.com. You don't have to search the entire Internet for them.

If you do have some problems with error messages during flight, try it with the 3d display driver turned off. Some sceneries have problems with direct3d. On my video card, a Diamond S220, I am missing a few bridges at Rotterdam so better turn 3d off.

After all this trouble, we can start with the trip. We start from Seppe, a little airport in Holland.