The Week in Review – 2026-12
✈️ Last week I was traveling for work and in between had a brief chance to play in an Airbus A380 flight simulator with an original full-size cockpit.
The task itself was easy: take off from Frankfurt in beautiful weather, do one lap over the Taunus, and land again in Frankfurt.
But flying completely by hand is still more exciting than pressing the autopilot button half a minute after takeoff and twiddling your thumbs. It was good that I had a pilot non-flying next to me, who handled details like flaps, landing gear, and many other things, so I could focus on the actual flying.
I did a pretty good takeoff, the landing was a bit bumpy, but still okay. Pretty much like what Ryanair does every day.
As a small bonus, I got a few minutes at the end to fly in a Bo 105 simulator. Of course, I could barely manage that myself; coordinating the three control inputs is not something a human naturally masters instinctively. But in the left seat sat a former Bo 105 pilot, who quickly demonstrated all the tricks the machine can do (loop, aileron roll, …).
The display was a hemisphere onto which the image from six projectors was projected. The fact that the graphics did not offer the familiar level of realism from the flight simulator at home (high-resolution aerial imagery, 3D surface model including buildings, etc.) was surprisingly completely irrelevant — in the brain, the hemisphere display created more than enough immersion.
🚄 This business trip was the second trip within six weeks where the regular return journey was canceled because an airport in Berlin was not functioning: this time it was a strike (✊), last time it was the weather.
I then got an ICE ticket (with seat reservation, but also tied to a specific train) as a replacement.
Learnings:
- at least some ICE services have Lufthansa flight numbers: on Thursday, ICE 992 was also called “Lufthansa Express Rail LH3672”
- train stations have “three-letter codes,” just like IATA airport codes. Berlin Hauptbahnhof is, for example, QPP, Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe is KWQ, and Wolfsburg goes by ZQU.
Guess what was also canceled. Right, the train in question did not depart at all from Frankfurt Airport long-distance station.
Since the train had already departed Braunschweig with a delay early in the morning, it did not arrive on time at its destination in Frankfurt and was therefore turned around already at Frankfurt Südbahnhof — instead of at the airport as planned.
Luckily, there is bahn.expert — without this tool, train travel would be even more exhausting. This way, I was always well informed, could get to Südbahnhof on time, and still got my seat on the train.
🎙️ On Friday, an episode on the “Antritt” podcast (in German language 🇩🇪) was released in which Gerolf interviewed me all about Bikerouter.
I listened to it again and think it turned out quite well :-)
Links to the episode:
🗺️ In the podcast episode (and also here on the blog and on Mastodon), I mentioned Bikerouter’s new elevation profile: also since Friday, it has been available in a test version at dev.bikerouter.de and can be tried out.
Over the weekend, I improved a few small things on it and think it will also be available on the regular Bikerouter website in the next few days.
There is a post about the new elevation profile here on the blog, and I also wrote a page about it in the manual:
🎮 The Spring Sale on Steam is currently running. New in my library:
- Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 (I’m curious how well the Cirrus Vision Jet works here)
- Sniper Elite: Resistance
🌍 My OpenStreetMap account has just come of age.
When I started actively contributing to OpenStreetMap, changeset IDs were still in the low six-digit range (currently we are at 180 million changesets) and my user ID was only just five digits.
A lot has happened since then :-)
For me, alongside Wikipedia, it is the most important community-driven project on the entire internet.
🔊 Listened this week:
Questions or comments?
The easiest way to reach me is on Mastodon.