Leg 1, Segment 3: BIKF - BGBW

Sunday, 8 February 2009
Welcome aboard for the shortish hop from Keflavik in Iceland over to Narsarsuaq in Greenland. I had a bit of trouble with this segment, becuase the built in FSX flight planner that I ordinarliy use to plot my flights didn't have any airways that connected Narsarsuaq with Iceland including any VOR segments. Obviously in real life, pilots use the North Atlantic tracks to traverse the pond, however the ability to use these is not in-built into the sim (shame, as you can download real world weather; if we even see an FS11 is a different story, so I guessNATRACKS might be asking too much..... waffle waffle) . I did think about manually creating a route of my own choosing (I also checked real world routes and couldn't find anything pertinent without routing myself thousands of miles in the wrong direction to eventually get connected airways back again......) and after much to-ing and fro-ing on various sites on t'interweb, I thought sack it I will do a direct GPS route or else I will never get this segment flown! What you see below is the FS nav log of the trip....



Enough midless chin wagging, time to get aboard G-DOCU and strap in for the upcoming flight. On the tarmac at gate 6 in Keflavik, the weather is quite nice, and we are scheduled for a Runway 11 departure..... I've opted to fly with the very questionable in-game IFR rules... more about that filth later, as it caused me problems on my approach....

All PAX aboard, FMC programmed and ready, APU running, ready for pushback and start.

Engines started, about to complete the before takeoff checklist.

Ready to go at holding point Kilo 4, awaiting clearance from tower.


After take off on Runway 11, G-DOCU does a 180 in order to intercept the GPS heading as per ATC clearance to FL240.

At cruise; Mach .76, FL335.
Just awaiting the dubious FSX ATC to give me clearance to descend...... over the ice shelves of Eastern Greenland.


The next picture is the result of the uttery useless ATC and IFR facility in-game in FSX. Based on current weather reports from the airfied about 80 miles out, I prepared for a runway 7 approach over the glacier, however to my complete and utter horror, the in-game AI decided to vector me in for a runway 25 visual approach. Great, a small runway with a 25 knot tailwind. Very realistic, not to forget that it also bungled it's calcs of my descent rate...... it announced 'cleared to land runway 25' with me about 10 miles out at 8,000 feet...... yeah right. So, the pic you see below is me making a turn to allow me to descend and slow correctly for the visual runway 25 approach.....

I know the approach isn't perfect, but given the uselessnes of the in game AI, I think I did okay to recover from this and bring G-DOCU in to land!!

With only 5000 feet of runway and a tailwind of nearly 30 knots, I managed to slow down before the end of the runway and turn it around before taxiing back down the runway to the terminal.

And here it is. Ladies and Gentlemen welcome to Narsarsuaq international. It's looking very shed like, somehow I don't think they have a Starbucks franchaise in the terminal building.....

I've been rather verbose tonight, but hey - it's my blog. I've made a new rule up. From now on, I'm going to fly every segment using VFR, and using the VNAV and LNAV of the aircraft. I may not even bother with ATC, as the game seems to pay scant attention to the wind direction when choosing it's operational runways....... this is a massive gripe as far as I am concerned, and somewhat typical of a product with the name 'Microsoft' in the title. Enough, here's the stats and I shall now step down from my rant box :)

Flight summary:

Time of Departure (from 11): 12:44 UTC
Time of Arrival (at gate): 14:38 UTC
Flight time = 1 hour and 54 minutes
Distance Covered = 649NM
Accrued Distance=1848NM

I'm turning in for the night, tommorrow I intend to finish Leg 1 as we depart for Gander in Newfoundland!

Goodnight godbless pilots.

Stavroski

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