The AEA 332 was holding for about 2 hours at FL100 on a pattern south of Portuguese Algarve Coast, Faro East-West-East (and so on), between Faro VOR (VFA) and Sagres Cape (Sagres VOR). Its indeed strange for me about 2 itens:
1)If the crew departed on the same RWY as previous AMX seven minutes earlier, did the AMX advise ATC about it? If so, did the ATC advise AEA...its pretty strange indeed how to allow such TO without a previous RWY inspection, me thinks.
2)Why only after overflying Lisbon, about 1 hour after dep and climbing and maintaining FL310, the plane started to descent and heading towards Algarve Coast?
Could it be the fact that crew was only advised about probable issue with the gear after reaching the Atlantic? He Reached Lisbon at FL310 and then started to descent rapidly towards Sagres until stopped at FL100.
I've seen it with my own eyes low along the coast and then passing over FAO low enough as a normal FAO traffic, as lot of people saw it too. As can be seen too on FR24 "playback" mode. FL100 its not pretty common for an A332 overflight here. Besides the Fuel Dump or Burn Procedure ( i dont know wich one in this case), what really intrigues me here its the "all normal" previous pattern until reaching the ocean over LIS.
Last edited by JanetFlight; 17th Apr 2013 at 03:06.