By Kyprianos Biris
biriskyp@otenet.gr

In this document I will identify the reasons why Greece has become a country worth visiting within the virtual aviation world, with – why not – an extent to real life. 

The "…the mother of our western civilization…" in the southeastern part of Europe as Bert Zengerink states in his report on our scenery in FlightSim.Com's review section, beyond the Mediterranean weather, relaxed way of life and scenic tourist resorts, has something more to offer worth considering for the regular flight simulator user. That is the group of things described below, that all together combined, offer a realistic and challenging simulated flight environment both to new and experienced users for free. 

The Scenery

Ted Katranas, the designer of Greece’s freeware scenery explains in his site http://users.hol.gr/~kted/ the details into which he went in order to produce this excellent piece of work (within the scenery design technical constraints). The outcome, after almost 20 versions, has become a scenery depicting (simulating) lots of the aviation peculiarities that this part of the world produces. 

High mountains emerging out of the sea, which surrounds the greatest part of this country’s area, mainly form Greece.

That leaves little room for land planes that could accommodate regular ILS equipped airports that pilots would approach flying over calm valleys.

In the mainland, Peloponissos peninsula to the South and Makedonia to the North of Greece has lots of airports surrounded by steep mountains (still single peak solids in FS) that require careful attention by the pilot during navigation, approach and departure procedures. Good examples are Athens Elefsis, Ioannina, Kastoria, Kalamata, Kozani, Tripolis, and Sparti. Usually you get adjacent lakes since these are the only land planes in the area. 

In the Sea environment things get worse. The Ionian sea to the West and Eagean sea to the East contain dozens of islands which have every reason to accommodate an airport connecting them to the mainland. Some of them are classified as "remote" although you should be able to find nearby diversion fields. A quick look to runway lengths and airport lighting (and hours of operation in real life) will prove that with certain aircraft types and during Night lots of options are out of consideration. 

Since the mountains usually rise very close from the water to high elevations, tiny pieces of land are usually left for airports (and their approach paths). This problem creates one of the most challenging environments for pilots flying with anything from big jets to small props within the Mediterranean region.

You talk about hard approaches like Hong Kong Kai Tak or Innsbruck, Sion and Lugano in Europe? Why don’t you try to land in runway 09 of Samos, 36 of Skyros, 16 of Mykonos and 18 of Elefsis? 

In Kerkyra (Corfu) you get a runway built on landfilled area over water looking at a mountain 7 Nm the North and approach this runway by VORDME offset course due to another mountain to the West, while on short finals you have a hill just East of Rwy 35 threshold. 

At Athens Hellenikon International when South winds prevail you come either visually following positioning by radar vectors with a turn from right base to short finals for runway 15L or with an offset VORDME approach to avoid the city center and Acropolis overflight. During the most frequent North winds a standard 33R ILS approach is available with turbulence from the Mountain to the North. 

In Greece you will rarely find low clouds, requiring demanding ILS approaches. The large masses of water create strong North winds, though, during both summer and winter especially effective in the coastal airports. When some runways are not lined up N to S (previous para.) this creates great crosswind problems. 

Here we meet the demand for skilled pilot hands down to the bare "stick and rudder" level, without the use of any helping navaids, lighting, autopilot, FMS, GPS or ATC radar. Perfect examples are Samos, Iraklion, Souda, Preveza and Rodos. 

On the other hand when rarely winds drop to calm you may get fog situations at coastal airports such as Thessaloniki, and Kerkyra.

(The subject of aviation weather and ATC is not so important in the FS unless flying online – see further down)

The East part of the Aegean Sea has lots of Islands neighboring to the Turkish FIR. Relations between Turkey and Greece have not been that good for some few hundred years. This FIR, simply, MUST NOT get infringed in real life. 

Try to approach or depart East of Samos, Chios, Kastelorizo, Mitilini Islands and Alexandroupolis in the mainland with a chart showing the FIR boundaries and you’ll see the problem. 

Within on-line FS flying, though, you will find some very friendly controllers to work with. A very nice Turkish scenery is the one by Ahmet Bedir.

(Do not forget to set Greece at higher layer to avoid visual problems)

To our North we have Yugoslavia and FYRoM (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) with an excellent scenery by Zarko Gojkovic:

Albania by Paul K. Hansen:

Bulgaria by Thomas Gierse:

The Italian FIR boundary is 100 nm NW of Kerkyra airport.

The Dynamic Scenery

Panos Georgotas after 3 versions has managed to produce an excellent freeware Dynamic and Static scenery covering all of the airports in Greece.

What is important here is that Panos has not just filled airports with planes flying around. He has depicted in a very realistic way: aircraft types, companies, flight schedules and flying and parking procedures observed at each of these airports in real life. 

At 15 miles N of KOS, at the Greek Imia islets, you can even observe (in a funny way) some sad moments between recent relationships with our neighbors.

On line pilots are taken into account and batch files are provided to temporarily disable scenery that messes up with real time ATC procedures.

Online Flying

(Here we come to my part!)

As most of you may know this type of flying is achieved with the excellent freeware programs of SquawkBox for pilots and ProController for controllers. Visit SATCO Europe and you’ll find all you need there http://www.broders.net/satco/index.shtml

In two words you get real time weather updates for the area you’re flying and live ATC to control you together with other pilots flying in the area visible as they would all be in real life.

An official sector of SATCO Europe now, where you will find a group of experienced controllers (some of them real pilots) that are online almost every night (1900~2300 summer and 2000~2400 GMT Winter) and know the Greek FIR well. Beyond ATC you will get lots requests replied concerning Greece. Visit our page.

Voice ATC is most of the times available (Greek and English) with the according program, Battlefield Communicator (BFC), which works in conjunction with the above software and is the only thing mentioned in this document that is not for free. It is quite cheap though and can be found at http://www.shadowfactor.com/

The truth is, though; that TEXT ATC compared to VOICE has a huge realism difference. Of course you can always try its free trial version which can be found at http://www.shadowfactor.com/beta.html and is also the one most on line pilots use. 

In Greece we have managed to have a voice (BFC) server running 24H so that if no ATC is online, it works as a UNICOM facility for pilots visiting Greece, facilitating voice communication between them. 

You can check visually in real time what’s happening with online flying in the world and Greece (LGGG_V_CTR for the Greek FIR control) using the excellent "WhazzUp" freeware utility by Enrico Schirrati.

Charts and Navigation

VFR Navigation through Greece is very easy due to the difference between the landmasses and the sea described above.

GPS Navigation with popular such add-on utilities for FS98 is available with extra data files available at most FS sites on the Internet. Just search with the right keywords and you’ll find them. 

Greek IFR Enroute, SID, STAR and Approach charts are available for free but not publicly. Just contact us….

You’ll never find distances from border to border within Greece greater than ~500 nm. That makes the perfect environment for your visit by landing (or departing) an international airport before (or after) flying local to explore the scenery described above. 

Airport Details

Accompanying this document is a 6-page table (Greek_Airports.doc) which gives information on all 72 airports you can visit in Greece. The difference you will find here from other data tables, is the last column, where I describe specific characteristics (gossip!) of most of the airports, which is basically, what someone visiting for the first time would like to know. Apart from that you can find things like runway lengths and lighting, factors which may sometimes leave you without diversion fields available within range above the unforgiving Aegean Sea or a Macedonian mountain at night during an emergency!

FS Greece on the Web

Apart from the links provided above you can find also useful information at

http://www.avsim.com/greece/

Including fine tuned flight models of FS98 aircraft, Virtual CoPilot’s home, The Hellenic ARTCC page and FS98 tips.

http://fly.to/greekfs

The best – everything you need for the FS in this country BUT its in Greek - sorry!

You will find lots of current flying Greek aircraft designed by Spyros Diamantis at FlightSim.Com:

Future Developments

In the real Greek aviation infrastructure (and hence simulated) some developments are taking place and will be reproduced as they take place in the future: 

The new Athens Venizelos International airport is currently being built due to be delivered on March 2001. Visit its excellent web site

http://www.athensairport-2001.gr/

Sitia airport in Crete has a new longer runway under development.

Thessaloniki Macedonia airport will soon start the extension of runway 10/28 West into the sea on a landfilled area over water. The CAT I ILS currently in use for Rwy 16 will be upgraded to CAT II in order to allow less flight cancellations or diversions due to fog emerging during certain (quite a lot) windless mornings. 

Karpathos airport is under development to change from a remote civil airport in to a full time Hellenic Air Force (HAF) Base combining joint civil and military operations. 

Ted Katranas is already preparing version 2.71 of his scenery, which beyond other upgrades will include custom designed buildings at Athens Hellenikon International.

He is also currently investigating new scenery design software enabling 3D mesh textures, something compulsory for this terrain full of mountains. 

Conclusion 

Thanks to the work of different individuals working on a common base and the form of the Greek aviation environment, carefully simulated, you can visit "Hellas" at the SE of Europe and get a different kind of scenery exploration. 

About Me 

I am an Architect in profession specialized in airport planning but hold also a UK PPL with IFR (IMC) and have been flying real on light twins and singles for the last 10 years and for the same time virtually on MSFS. 

Check out my other uploads at FlightSim.Com.

If you want to check my personal pictures from real flying in Greece go:

http://www.airliners.net/search/photo.search?photographersearch=biriskyp@otenet.gr 

All comments are welcomed.

© Kyprianos Biris 1999

biriskyp@otenet.gr