Zurich arrival/departures routes

[RUDAS]

i flew swiss last week from zrh to africa,and we departed rwy 34,then seemed to do a spiral climb over the Uetliberg to about fl150,then continued south.is this normal? last time we departed via BODAN.

[Irish Steve]

A friend of mine who works in ZRH, and is well up on local issues, told me a while back that there are all sorts of issues going on at the moment in ZRH in relation to flight routes that require use of air that is outside Swiss airspace, which includes some of the arrival and departure routes.

The Germans, actively encouraged by some Swiss citizens that don't appreciate airports, are apparently causing all sorts of problems for ZRH, some of which I am led to believe may have flight safety implications, as flights are having to fly non standard routes and procedures.

[AN2 Driver]

RUDAS,

well, sounds like you had a departure going direction ALBIX rather than Bodan. If you take off direction 34 and then have a left turn towards ALBIX rather than the right turn towards BODAN and then over that way, it does not sound totally abnormal to me.

If you hand me the correct date and flight nr, I can have a ask round, but what you describe sounds to me like a pretty normal departure heading south rather than east.

Best regards

AN2 Driver

[square leg]

It was either a GERSA 4Q or a GERSA 2L departure. At GERSA one should have at least 14000' which is 40 DME TRA.

Maybe it went over BODAN non-the-less, which would correspond to the "spiral". This would be the BODAN 6L which brings one over KLO again, after the left turn thus the impression of flying over Uetliberg.