Shooting videos for the Flightradar24 YouTube channel took me to 36 airports in 24 countries this year. That yielded 71 videos published as of today (with a few more to come that aren’t edited yet). Here are my top five videos of the year.
5. Spotting and flying the 747-400 from Mallorca!
This was special because it’s the 747, of course – but it was also extra fun to do because it meant going to Palma de Mallorca, waiting for the Lufthansa 744 to arrive and catching some video of it (plus meeting up with a bunch of viewers and Flightradar24 users) before rushing to the terminal to catch the queen of the skies back to Frankfurt. Oh and it meant sitting in the upper deck which is always a unique and memorable experience. The A380 upper deck just isn’t the same somehow.
4. Arlanda Airport: Behind the Scenes Airside Tour
It was nice to do a video on the ground for a change and the folks at Arlanda Airport gave me a very special grand tour of this airport that I use constantly but don’t usually get to go behind the scenes at. From seeing the private terminal to being next to the tug as they pushed back an aircraft to checking out the mystery MD-80 tucked away in a patch of forest, this was a very fun day despite some pretty bad Swedish weather.
3. Chasing Africa’s last 737-200
With this trip I think I proved the point that you don’t necessarily have to accomplish your goals to have a fulfilling and interesting trip. In this case, I arrived in Zimbabwe with a booking on the 737-200 which was cancelled because Zimbabwe’s President took the jet to Malawi at the last minute. Despite this, I had a lot of interesting conversations while trying to hunt down the plane and ascertain whether I’d have any chance to fly on it or not, and I made contact with a couple of very helpful Zimbabweans working in aviation who I remain in contact with to this day. And I still got to fly Air Zimbabwe, albeit on the ERJ-145, and visit Victoria Falls – two bucket list items for me.
2. Dreamliner Cockpit! Flying Etihad to Japan
Getting into the 787 flight deck has been a big goal of mine for the past couple of years after almost exclusively doing videos in cockpits with sidesticks during that time. It proved quite difficult until Etihad Airways was kind enough to agree with my proposal to do one about the 787-9 on its way to Osaka Kansai (KIX), a new route for them. That was an incredible experience – long haul in the flight deck is always something special to document, and it became the longest video I’d published to date. But it was really the crew on this one that made it so memorable. They were so hospitable, and eager to be a part of the project. Not to mention that they were just really fun to hang out with.
1. Flight Deck to Madeira on Condor’s A321!
It was great to cap off the year’s travels with this very special trip, joining up with a Condor A321 flight from Frankfurt to Madeira and back – getting to witness a day in the life of a cockpit crew and with a front row seat to the landing at the iconic FNC. And this was not just any set of pilots. The First Officer: Pascal Schmidt, who has a thriving YouTube channel (AeroNewsGermany, all in German) and happened to be flying his last A320 flight before moving up to the A330NEO. He’s also just about as friendly as they come (as was Captain Mark Furtado, who greased the landing at Funchal despite some rain storms in the area and tricky wind gusts on final. Madeira is always amazing to film – and Condor has quickly become one of my favorite airlines to work with because of how friendly and open to ideas everyone at the company is. Oh and of course the Condor stripes (which did not feature in this video, sadly). It’s this sort of trip that makes my job so incredible.
A look back at all our videos from 2023
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