Travelogue: Day 12 - Cincinnati, Ohio (almost) to Tampa, Florida

For the next leg of our world tour, we jet back to Florida once again! This time, we find ourselves heading to Tampa. Tampa will be the third Florida city we plan to visit, with Orlando coming up soon after that. Having four of the nation's busiest airports represented in Florida is a clear testament to Florida's status as one of the nation's fastest-growing states (well, prior to the current recession anyway), its enduring popularity as a sunny vacation spot for snow-weary visitors from the north, and its favorable location as a gateway for international travel, particularly for the Caribbean and Latin America.

We start out today at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, which is actually located just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati near the town of Covington, Kentucky. This quite possibly makes Cincinnati unique as the only major city whose main airport is located within another state! Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky serves as a major midwestern hub for Delta Airlines, although Delta has been scaling back its presence here in recent years, due to the fuel shocks of 2008 and the recession. The merger with Northwest (picking up relatively close by hubs in Detroit and Memphis) will probably not help Cincinnati in the long term, but perhaps this will create opportunities for other carriers to move in.

Nonetheless, Delta planes are still a very common sight at Cincinnati. Delta recently changed its livery, and is in the process of repainting its entire fleet. Now that Delta is absorbing Northwest, many former Northwest planes are now getting the new Delta treatment, too. Here, My Traffic X faithfully recreates both old and new Delta liveries on various planes here:



And some more Delta planes here, for good measure:



This time, we are directed to the crosswind runway for a departure on Runway 09. Here we head that way:



And we're off! The Cincinnati skyline sits along the north bank of the Ohio River to our left, in Ohio:



We climb over eastern Kentucky and Tennessee enroute to Tampa:



Here is McGhee-Tyson Airport, serving Knoxville, Tennessee down below us:



The vast expanse of the Atlanta metropolitan area spreads out before us here:



Here is Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport below. We visited here not long ago, as you may recall:



Over southern Georgia, there really isn't a lot to see here:



Now we have crossed into northern Florida, and the Gulf of Mexico is visible ahead. We shall begin our descent into Tampa soon:



St. Petersburg, Florida (on the Pinellas peninsula) and Tampa Bay loom ahead as we descend:



At this point, I seem to have tripped over an interesting, yet apparently harmless bug in Flight Simulator. I was directed to an ILS approach on Runway 15R! Huh? A quick check of the charts for KTPA (Tampa International Airport) quickly reveals that there is no Runway 15R at this airport! Clearly the game got confused, and thought we must have decided to go somewhere else. Fortunately, I was able to manually request an ILS approach for 18R at Tampa, and we begin to line up for final:



Ah, happiness is being cleared for an approach to land in the same direction you were traveling, is it not?



On final for 18R here:



We land without incident! Here are a few scenes of the terminal buildings and skyline at Tampa:







Next stop: Dallas/Fort Worth