Moien to Luxembourg's pilots and aeronautics enthusiastics.

I usually see airplanes about to land in LUX (with a northeast heading) to turn on an imaginary "corner" that align the plane with the runway. See picture for description.
I heard of pilots using well-known landmarks for these Manoeuvre (a lake, a building, a Hill, etc.)
I would love to know what landmark is used in this case when visibility allows it. Maybe the karting track in Mondercange?

by ElectionExcellent252

6 comments

  1. I might be wrong but these are probably all navigational waypoints and the planes fly programmed routes until they intercept the relevant approach systems

  2. For jets (such as the 747 shown here) arriving at ELLX—or any airport, really—the approach typically begins with a STAR (Standard Terminal Arrival Route). This procedure guides the aircraft toward the vicinity of the airport via a series of GPS waypoints. From there, they transition to the approach phase, where they align with the runway using the ILS (Instrument Landing System). The ILS uses ground-based antennas to provide the aircraft with precise position information: laterally relative to the runway (localizer) and vertically (glide slope). ATC can override the STAR and provide radar vectors instead, which is often the case at ELLX when traffic is light.

  3. OP what you are describing is VFR flying where pilots use dead reckoning so landmarks to navigate.
    Usually commercial aircraft fly IFR so under instrument flight rules where they aren’t as weather dependent. What they can do is a visual approach where they will fly the approach visually / based on landmarks

  6. Visual maneuvers are not the most common, but are possible in LUX. In these cases pilots aim for a point around 6 miles from the runway ( around Leudelange eg. ) Most of the times planes get radar vectors from Approach or a direct clearance to a gps point . You can find these on the approach charts [https://ops.skeyes.be/html/belgocontrol_static/eaip/eAIP_Main/html/index-en-GB.html](https://ops.skeyes.be/html/belgocontrol_static/eaip/eAIP_Main/html/index-en-GB.html) .As you can see the CLX probably overflew LX063 and then followed the approach

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