MAN - MBA (Mombassa)

[EGNH]

I recently have flown from MAN - MBA twice in the last 6mths and wondered about the what seemed to the untrained person the route we took we almost headed north east from Kenya up to east of Italy then routed North West towards Basle and onto the UK is this normal? However what is normal nowadays!

On the leg from MBA to MAN we started at FL300 then as soon as we coasted out of Africa climbed to FL360 I assume this is due to the lack of ATC over Africa?

1 final Q: on the 2 outbound flights (overnight) from Man you generally see lots of thunderstorms over central Africa and it seemed there was a line of them and produced a spectacular show of lightning and it was so smooth through these storms, question is, is it possible to fly right next to the storms and for it to be smooth or does it only get bumpy in the tops of the CB's thats how close we seemed however I appreciate it could of been an optical illusion!

Thanks in advance.

[AircraftOperations]

Not that it necessarily applies in this case, but aircraft with a high payload (fuel and pax) on long sectors will often cruise at a lower altitude for the first portion of a flight before climbing to a higher altitude for the 2nd portion of the flight when aircraft weight lost (from fuel burned) means a higher flight level brings performance improvements.
Heavy aircraft cannot always reach the highest cruise level on a flight whilst they still have a lot of fuel in the tanks.

[EGNH]

The FO did however say they where at MTOW for a Boeing 767, 185 tonnes?? And the informative FO advised we left the tarmac at 200mph! I like it when we get a bit of detail from up front instead of the usual we expect a smooth flight (Never is!) puts those nervous fliers minds at rest where as I like a little bit of rough and tumble in flight!

[K.Whyjelly]

EGNH............never operated from MBA but have flown from Egypt back to the UK and the routing off the African coast is over Crete (talking to Athens) then up the East side of Italy, just off Brindisi (and spookily talking to Brindisi). The next unit is Padua as we fly just west of Venice and then over the Alps via Hockweld talking to Swiss radar. As we clear the Alps Southwest-ish of Strasbourg we enter French airspace and route up to the French coastline to coast out at a point just to the west of Le Touquet and onwards to Blighty.

With regards to the Ts these are due to the ITCZ NWS JetStream - Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone. We try our best to avoid them and will operate many miles laterally and thousands of feet vertically away from them..............they are spectacular to view and do look closer than they actually are.