B737-800 AAL KSFO-KLAX: Just another day in the life of a bus driver

After upgrading my UTX-US to Version 2, I decided that SoCal Approach needed one more itinerant bus driver to herd all over the sky in 17 wrong directions, so I loaded up some plucky passengers and a doughty crew of 7 and set off from San Francisco International on the short flight down the state of California to the City of Angels- La Ciudad de Los Angeles.

 

Tellingly, the airport in L.A. is named after a popular LAXative used by one of the legendary Men in Black.

 

We didn't need full fuel for this flight, so our American Pie Bus accelerated quickly out of KSFO, with the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance

http://i1070.photobucket.com/albums/u484/Hoggy_Dog/2015-6-22_14-49-43-889.png

 

Climbing out over San Mateo County, birthplace of yours truly

http://i1070.photobucket.com/albums/u484/Hoggy_Dog/2015-6-22_14-54-0-866.png

 

As we neared Los Angeles, we picked up a few puffy, white onlookers

http://i1070.photobucket.com/albums/u484/Hoggy_Dog/2015-6-22_23-12-9-453.png

 

I like big butts and I cannot lie...

http://i1070.photobucket.com/albums/u484/Hoggy_Dog/2015-6-22_23-16-5-884.png

 

Cloud Dancing on the descent- "Peek-A-Boo, I see you, Angels..."

http://i1070.photobucket.com/albums/u484/Hoggy_Dog/2015-6-22_23-56-58-512.png

 

The view from my office as I set up the Runway 6L ILS approach into KLAX

http://i1070.photobucket.com/albums/u484/Hoggy_Dog/2015-6-22_23-58-43-826.png

 

Giving the Fares an eyeful as we descend westward over the hills. Meanwhile, I'm trying to sneak out a bit of flap without anyone noticing

http://i1070.photobucket.com/albums/u484/Hoggy_Dog/2015-6-22_23-29-55-288.png

 

I just can't think of a better way to earn a living than this...

http://i1070.photobucket.com/albums/u484/Hoggy_Dog/2015-6-22_23-30-51-556.png

 

Intercepting the Localizer, time to dangle my dongles

http://i1070.photobucket.com/albums/u484/Hoggy_Dog/2015-6-23_0-7-28-74.png

 

Seagull's-Eye view of our final moments in the air

http://i1070.photobucket.com/albums/u484/Hoggy_Dog/2015-6-23_0-8-9-32.png

 

Will he make it, or forget the spoilers and reverse thrust and run off the end with screaming, fiery brakes into the nearest Starbucks?

 

Stay tuned in the reply for the thrilling end!

I made many business trips flying from KSFO to KLAX (Round Trip) over the years but this was the smoothest flight yet. Hopefully, the plane makes it to the gate without incident. Nice set of pictures. Jim

B737-800 KSFO-KLAX Part Deux: The Arrival

 

If this looks to you like we're on rails, thank you very much. :cool:

http://i1070.photobucket.com/albums/u484/Hoggy_Dog/2015-6-23_0-9-35-246.png

 

I notice they gave me the shortest runway again... I must've been married to this controller once... Oh, well, I've definitely got the best seat in the house for this show!

http://i1070.photobucket.com/albums/u484/Hoggy_Dog/2015-6-23_0-10-4-586.png

 

Feel for the runway... don't let it touch... hold it off as long as you can... this arrival is as good as it gets. :pilot:

http://i1070.photobucket.com/albums/u484/Hoggy_Dog/2015-6-23_0-11-18-428.png

 

Nosewheel down! Spoilers up! Buckets out! Pull those funky handles and blow the dust off the pavement in front of us! *swoons*

http://i1070.photobucket.com/albums/u484/Hoggy_Dog/2015-6-23_0-11-26-702.png

 

The Tower of Power looms over us all.

http://i1070.photobucket.com/albums/u484/Hoggy_Dog/2015-6-23_0-14-33-843.png

 

Taxi, mister? Why yes... I believe I will!

http://i1070.photobucket.com/albums/u484/Hoggy_Dog/2015-6-23_0-16-49-755.png

 

HOLY YELLOW PAINTBRUSH, BATMAN! I'll bet the approach controllers painted all these taxi stripes leading in 87 directions at once!

http://i1070.photobucket.com/albums/u484/Hoggy_Dog/2015-6-23_0-20-1-301.png

 

Thank you for flying A-MURRican Airlines. Be sure to return your husbands to their fully upright positions and have a GREAT DAY IN ELL AAAAY, y'all!

http://i1070.photobucket.com/albums/u484/Hoggy_Dog/2015-6-23_0-21-22-885.png

 

FSX:SE

Default B737-800

GEX/UTX

AA Repaint from freeware B737-800_151LiveriesPack.zip

I scrolled your screenies with pleasure Dough, thanks for sharing! :cool::cool::eek:

Wow! Awesome possum set! Loved the narrative too. Most entertaining!

Climbing out over San Mateo County, birthplace of yours truly

Hah! Me too! Been in and out of that hospital more than one for broken bones, pneumonia, 1/2 a finger torn off...lotsa fun growing up!

 

That exact flight, plane, and route, execpt for being UAL not AA, was one my father flew frequently. It was a regular route of his for a while. UAL Shuttle from SFO->LAX->SFO->PDX->SEA->PDX->SFO. Made for some long days, but never longer than about 2000. He was always home of an evening. I actually got to go with him a couple times. REALLY intersting landing at PDX once...

 

Thanks for some great pics, loved every one of them, and if that one was a Seagull's eye view, it was his last view too! Let's face it, jet engines really suck... :D :D

Pat☺

Very, very nice.....! Well done....

 

Thorsten

Excellent flight with great scenery!!!! I enjoyed your post.

Let me add to all that responded by saying the screenies are great enjoyed them all, but the captions are funny reading. Good job Jim, Kenny

Fine work with that flight and excellent captures of it Doug. Cool narrative too. :cool: :cool: :D I've never seen KLAX so empty. Do you have your AI set to zero?

Fine work with that flight and excellent captures of it Doug. Cool narrative too. :cool: :cool: :D I've never seen KLAX so empty. Do you have your AI set to zero?

 

Larry, that's too funny! Immediately before I came here just now, I posted this thread about my WOAI not working. My AI is set to medium high, as it has been for months.

Thank you for the kudos, Jan, Pat, Thorsten, John, Kenny & Larry!

 

I have way too much fun doing tongue-in-cheek stuff like this... plus, I love flying and I'm still amazed at what is possible in FSX without spending much money.

 

Doug

Great shots, Doug! Oh, BTW, that's A-Merkin Airlines! Gee, where'd all your WOAI get off to?? :D

 

Just in case.......https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkin

Hah! Me too! Been in and out of [san Mateo] hospital more than one for broken bones, pneumonia, 1/2 a finger torn off...lotsa fun growing up!

 

Actually, I claim dual-citizenship: we lived in San Mateo, but for reasons unbeknownst to me, my mother downloaded me at St. Luke's in The City. I do remember being in San Mateo Hospital for a tonsillectomy when I was about 9 (all that ice cream after the surgery was great!), and I am a proud San Mateo High School Bearcat.

 

That exact flight, plane, and route, execpt for being UAL not AA, was one my father flew frequently.

Interesting- my dad flew DC-3s for Southwest Airways, to places like Medford, Eureka, Yreka when I was but a wee lad.

 

REALLY intersting landing at PDX once...

 

Why are the hairy ones always the ones we remember best? Back when I lived in Jax, I set an OBS reciprocal 10 degrees off (doing the TO/FROM math in my head) on a hard-IMC VOR approach into Williamsburg, VA and came within a wingspan of slicing and dicing myself on some TV tower guy wires :eek: . Just blind luck that I broke out of the soup about 200 yards from the towers and realized what I had done in time to -barely- make the life-saving deviation... not to mention correcting my OBS setting and nailing the rest of the approach. We won't discuss the condition of my underwear as I tied down and walked into the FBO.

 

Thanks for some great pics, loved every one of them, and if that one was a Seagull's eye view, it was his last view too! Let's face it, jet engines really suck... :D :D

Pat☺

 

I do SO love it when somebody else gets my subtle jokes! :D I'm pretty sure that the Navy acronym "FOD" actually stands for "Flying Ornithological Dumbass."

To make it more accurate you could have downloaded a livery of the new ask 738...not sure about where though...pics were. Nice https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/fslib.php?do=copyright&fid=171158

To make it more accurate you could have downloaded a livery of the new ask 738...not sure about where though...pics were. Nice https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/fslib.php?do=copyright&fid=171158

 

WOOOOOO thanks, Darren! Downloading it as I type this!

 

Doug

 

PS: say Hi to Tabitha and Samantha for me.

Great shots, Doug! Oh, BTW, that's A-Merkin Airlines! Gee, where'd all your WOAI get off to?? :D

 

Just in case.......https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkin

 

ROFLMAO! I love that hot-pink Merkin!

 

Oh, and thanks for the compliment, and I already posted that exact same "Where, oh where, has my WOAI gone?" question over in the FSX forums. So my answer at this point is: BTSOOM.:p

Very nicely done Doug, great post! :)

Very nicely done Doug, great post! :)

 

High praise indeed, coming from you, Adam! Thanks!

Great shots, Doug! Oh, BTW, that's A-Merkin Airlines! Gee, where'd all your WOAI get off to?? :D

 

Just in case.......https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkin

 

I just wish they'd not ship all that fish all the time! Makes the planes smell....Odd!

:D :D :D

Pat☺

Couldn't ask for a better set of pics with story line. Outstanding job, Doug! The real life adventure you referred to in the above post reminds me of the couple of times I set the OBS incorrectly during a couple of IFR flights, but not on approach :) I'm quite sure the pucker factor went immediately to infinite power upon seeing the guy wires....geez!

Why are the hairy ones always the ones we remember best?

Adrenaline implanting?? Sounds scientific as heck anyway :D

 

I went along for a particular shuttle flight with my father, the SFO->etc ones I mentioned. We were coming in to KPDX, it was the end of the day, full pax load, little heavy on fuel, etc. My father, being former Navy, set the bird down firmly, as the saying goes, hit the reversers and spoilers and brakes, hard. He wanted to make a particular taxiway to avoid driving around the airport all evening. Anyway, us in the cabin were leaning forward in our seats a bit (ok a lot), and when he hit the taxiway he was still fast, but turned anyway. I thought some Pax were going to fall out of their seats sideways! I could see the ailerons way deflected trying to keep the wings close to level, it was that fast. But we made it, got slowed down on the taxiway finally, and taxied serenely to the terminal. Most of the passengers told my father that that was an "interesting" landing as they deplaned, but always with a smile for him. Those were the days the pilots would stand in the cockpit door, shake hands, whatever, as passengers got on and off.

And there's my "sea story" as we called them :) Yours was a definately, ummm, interesting landing too! I can understand the need for surgical removal of the seat cushion, as we used to say. Very high pucker-factor on that one! Better thee than me!

 

Ancient Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times!"

Great day, and dull, boring flights to all!!

Pat☺

To make it more accurate you could have downloaded a livery of the new ask 738 [...] https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/fslib.php?do=copyright&fid=171158

 

I misunderstood your post, my bad... I thought you had pointed me to a Hi-Def version of the same AAL livery I'm using ("to make it more accurate..."), but once I installed the livery you linked to, I found that it is one of the few AA liveries I don't personally care for, and to make it worse, all of the supposedly dull-grey painted sections, which is most of the fuselage, show up as kind of a sickly yellowish-brown in this paint. So I apologize if I'm missing something here, but I'm not seeing how this is "more accurate" at all- just newer, and sadly, off color.

Couldn't ask for a better set of pics with story line. Outstanding job, Doug! The real life adventure you referred to in the above post reminds me of the couple of times I set the OBS incorrectly during a couple of IFR flights, but not on approach :) I'm quite sure the pucker factor went immediately to infinite power upon seeing the guy wires....geez!

 

Thanks for the kind words! I actually saw the towers and "intuited" where the wires had to be, finally spotting the actual wire as it swooshed past my belly as I was hard-banking away. Fortunately, I was tracking a radial leading to the IAF, not to the runway, which gave me some wiggle room.

 

I think that newer pilots today have it SO much easier, navigation-wise. You really need to have dealt with "To" and "From" in VOR setting and gotten it wrong several times to fully appreciate how nice it is today to have GPS.

 

For my Commercial checkride, I not only had to do some rather intricate radial tracking, both "to" and "from," but fly a DME arc to an intersection defined only by VOR1 and VOR2 radials (thus the name "intersection"), then execute an NDB approach from that intersection to an airport I had never seen before.

 

My Dad's checkride involved "Flying the Range" using A-N Morse Code ranges, and you had to hand-rotate your loop antenna to determine a relative bearing to an NDB... if you weren't good at it, you could peak the signal on the BACK lobe of the antenna and point AWAY FROM the NDB instead of to it, and never realize your mistake until possibly too late... I can't imagine how tedious that must have been. Thankfully, the advent of the ADF solved the problem of reverse-sensing.

 

Today, all of that mental math is eliminated... you just tell your GPS where you want to go and/or what approach/STAR you want to shoot and press a button.

 

Damn, scuse me a sec. YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN! OK. Where were we? :D

Great shots, Doug! Oh, BTW, that's A-Merkin Airlines!

 

I just wish they'd not ship all that fish all the time! Makes the planes smell....Odd!

:D :D :D

Pat☺

 

Sknnnffffffff. Hhhhhhhhhhahahahahahhhhhhhhh. *snort* ROFLWTIME. :D

Very nice shots, love the scenery too.