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

[av8tor98]

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 ATP 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

 

Even some "old timers" can't seem to apply the TO/FROM correctly when navigating by VOR. Not long ago I flew with a older friend (and I'm no spring chicken) in a 152 that still had a working VOR. I wanted her to fly TO a particular VOR just north of our position. Sadly she rotated the OBS to indicate FROM the VOR :) I let her chase the needle around for a while before I pointed at the FROM indication. We were already several miles off course by that time...haha. She looked at me as if I had no idea what I was referring to! At any rate, I nudged her in the right direction. She hasn't asked me to fly with her again....so far. :oP

[Rupert]

Where's the Air California in all these reveries? I used to love flying as a passenger on Air Cal. The closest thing to a Greyhound bus as I've ever flown in. Like a milk stop airport? Just hop off and look around the next bus, er plane, will be along in a few hours. Don't want the long on the ground bus trip from LAX to Orange County? (Now called John Wayne.) Take the Air Cal. bus, that's their next stop anyway.

 

I even got to fly a P-3 Orion, based on the same birds as Air Cal. flew, from San Diego to Norfolk once. That was a fun ferry hop! Six of us aboard & none of us had ever flown a P-3 before, and almost certainly since! But we needed to get to Philly/ to pick up some choppers and the P-3 needed to be at Norfolk. Just fly it! You'll have lots of time to figure things out! Luckily there was enough fuel to make the trip non-stop, so only one landing at Norfolk. We requested a straight in with crash crew on alert. Our squadron C.O. was on the ferry trip & decided he'd be PIC for the landing. He set it down like he flew them all the time.

[Kdierken]

Hoggydog once again great shots & angles. Enjoy all of them. Kenny :):)

[HoggyDog]

Very nice shots, love the scenery too.

 

Hoggydog once again great shots & angles. Enjoy all of them. Kenny :):)

 

Thanks, Steve & Kenny!