This is the lake on the waterfall visual approach. The runway is hiding around the bend on the left.
Here is a video of the waterfall visual approach to runway 30 at Vagar.
June 11 — Keflavik, Iceland to Vagar, Faroe Islands
The most beautiful approach to an airport
After repositioning to Reykjavik Domestic Airport to buy avgas, which isn’t available at Keflavik, I plotted where I was going to go next. I was thinking Norway, so that I wouldn’t have a very long flight the day before my next race, in Finland. I quickly learned I should have planned earlier. Norwegian airports to which I wanted to fly required slot reservations. And it looked like they closed early, too. (This turned out to be a misreading.)
I finally chose the Faroe Islands, which was my original plan back when I didn’t expect to have spent a night in Iceland. The weather at Vagar was good enough, and the Faroe Islands were someplace I’d never been and very much wanted to go.
It worked out great.
The winds and turbulence at Vagar are notorious, so bad that pilots are required to certify that they have taken an online course that explains the airport’s special system for reporting turbulence and at times closing the airport because of it. But winds were calm on the day I arrived. As I approached the Faroe Islands, the clear skies I’d been flying in turned into marginal conditions for visual flight, with the cloud base dropping to 2,000 feet or lower in places. But I was flying over water (no buildings or mountains).
There is a visual approach to Vagar in which you fly along the shoreline, with cliffs to your left high enough to block your view of anything inland, and then there’s a gap and a waterfall dropping into the ocean, with a lake bent like a boomerang stretching out behind the waterfall. You fly over the waterfall and over the lake, turning left to follow it and avoid hitting the mountains rising on both sides. As you make your way up the lake, the mountain on your left ends, and a runway appears, and you keep turning left and land.
If only I could open my video of this, I would show it to you. I’ll keep trying.
I’ve attached some still pictures that don’t do justice to the beauty I saw in my day in the Faroe Islands.
