After many years of stubbornly holding off and sticking with FS9, I have recently made the switch to FSX for the first time. This timing fit nicely with my move from the ERJ fleet to the MD80 Maddogs. After spending my first couple of trips out of DFW on shorter routes, learning the intricacies of flying these slightly, erm, lets say slightly less advanced birds, I decided that I would spend my day off today flying AA2071, a 2-segment trip from St Louis,MO all the way over to Palm Springs,CA via our hub at Chicago O'Hare. This would be a good chance to really stretch the legs of my MD80 for the first time.
I thought I would take some screen shots along the way and compile them here in a trip report style, to bring you guys along with me! Any thoughts and comments would be gratefully received!
The first leg STL-ORD was fairly uneventuful, apart from a fairly low visibility ILS approach to ORD. I was having some problems with screenshots saving during this flight, so you join the flightdeck during the turnaround on stand K3 at KORD.
Once we have finished up with the paperwork for the inbound flight, we take a look at the flightplan for our next leg of the trip.
As this is the only direct AA flight today, and it is Friday, we are expecting an almost full load, just 2 free seats left for a total of 138 passengers. Many of them might be businessmen returning home after a week in the city, and I guess many others are going to Palm Springs for a long weekend. They have all certainly brought a lot of baggage with them, and I think our ground handling guys are playing a game of "How many sets of golf clubs can you get in an MD80 hold"! All of this combined gives us an expected Zero Fuel Weight of just under 114,000 lbs.
Our scheduled block time for this trip is 4 hours 20 minutes, and we can see that our estimated flying time is only 3 hours 41 minutes, so a good margin in there. Actually, our estimated average wind component today is an overall headwind of just 6 knots, which seems quite low for a westbound flight, so we look a bit further into the planned routing and the weather en-route.
It looks like operations have planned a slightly more northerly routing for us today, because of the winds, out west over Iowa and Nebraska before heading southwest overhead Denver, rather than the more usual direct routing over Kansas etc.
Taking a look at the SigWX chart, we can see that indeed we are going to fly across the jetstream for the first half of the flight, rather than directly into the wind, so the average wind estimate on the flightplan looks reasonable. We are planned for FL320 initially with a step climb later to FL340. There is a no major weather forecast along our route, although we might pick up some bumps as we cross over the jetstream before we get to the Rockies.
We have 3 potential alternates provided in the plan, KLAX, KONT and KSAN, but our destination of PSP is forecasting lovely clear weather as you would expect, so hopefully we won't need to think about those any more. With the snow falling here in ORD and de-icing needed I ask the fueller to round us up to a total load of 34,000 lbs just to cover for the possibility of a slightly longer taxi out than usual.
The ATIS tells the winds are out of the northwest at 13 gusting 22 knots, the visibility is 1 and a quarter miles, the temperature is zero degrees celsius and a look out of the window tells us the snow fall is getting heavier. With all the planning completed, it's time to get this show out of the winter gloom and on the road to Californian sunshine.
Delivery good morning, AAL2071 with information Foxtrot, IFR clearance please to Palm Springs
AAL2071 good morning, Cleared to Palm Springs via O'Hare 5 departure, radar vectors Polo, maintain 5000, expect FL320 10 miutes after departure, squawk 6672
We read this back and are told to expect Rwy 32L at T10 for departure. This is what we were anticipating, and have prepared our departure data based on this already.
With snow on the runway, we will not be able to de-rate the departure thrust, so it will be a full TO thrust departure, at Flaps 15, giving us a V1 speed of 130kts, Vr of 145kts and V2 of 152kts. We set our bugs and call the ground crew to say we are ready to go.
After a short wait for a company B738 inbound from LGA to park up next to us, ramp control gives us the OK and we release the parking brakes 2 minutes behind schedule, and begin the pushback.
As we are in the corner of the cul-de-sac it is a few minutes before we can start the engines as we have to be turned around and pulled forward. Eventually we have both JT8Ds fired up successfully, the tug is disconnected and we get a wave from the ground crew to say we are good to go.
We start our taxi and head out to the de-ice pad.
Thankfully there is no delay and before long we have been de-iced, re-configured the aircraft for departure and are finally on our way towards the runway.
We signal to the cabin that we are number 1 for departure and ask the cabin crew to take their seats.
AAL2071 via T10 Runway 32L, line up and wait
One last check of the engines, flaps, trim, speed bugs and lights, we are raring to get going.
AAL2071, winds 340 degrees and 14 knots, fly runway heading, 32L cleared for take off
We read this back, stand the throttles up to allow them to stabilise at around 1.4 EPR, then engage the autothrottle and monitor as both engines spool up to full take off power. Despite our quite heavy weight today, the airspeed builds quickly and it doesn't seem like long before the First Officer calls "Rotate" and we are airborne! It has taken 20 minutes to get from brakes release at the gate to being airbone, so we have 3 hours 58 remaining to get to our destination on time.
Positive rate...gear up
Finally we burst out into the sunshine, leaving the murky grey snowy cloud behind.
As we past 10,000ft the PMS pitches us down and starts accelerating towards our optimum climb speed of 296kts
We take a look at the PMS to check that FL320 is still our optimum level, which it is, and it also suggests a step climb to FL340 in just over an hour, which agrees with the flightplan.
We call Chicago Centre and make our request for FL320, which we are given. With a bit of a headwind in this early stage of the flight, our climb performace is good and it takes just 17 minutes from the gear going up to levelling off at our initial cruise level. The aircraft accelerates from our climb speed of M0.72 to its calculated optimum cruise speed of M0.75. It's a smooth ride so far, so we switch the seatbelt signs off, and settle into the cruise.
Leaving the snow behind as we pass Fort Dodge, Iowa
As we pass over Nebraska, the turbulence we expected starts up and we get continuous light chop for a while. As the forecast was for the strongest winds to be around FL280/FL300, we take this opportunity to make our step climb to FL340 to see if it is better higher up. It is slightly, and we ride it out for 20 minutes or so.
We conduct fuel and time checks at various waypoints along the way, and by the time we pass overhead Denver airport just over half way through the flight, we are about 6 minutes behind the flightplan time, and about 700lbs better off for fuel, so we decide to increase the cost index in the performance management system, which brings our cruise speed up to around M0.78.
There is no forecast mountain wave today, but we still pick up one or two bumps as we cross over the snowy peaks of the Rockies.
We check in with LA Center and start to make preparations for our arrival. We check the latest weather report for Palm Springs, which as expected is good. The winds in the valley are very light and variable, there is no cloud reported and the temperature is 24 degreees celsius. Perfect conditions.
Normally in these conditions landing would be from the south up the valley to Rwy 31L, but as there is a no other traffic in the area, and because we are fairly new to the aircraft, we decided to request the more interesting and challenging RNAV approach to Rwy 13R, for crew training purposes. We make this request to ATC and are cleared at our discretion to descend to FL180.
We tell the PMS how many miles we have to run to SBONO and that we want to cross that point at 9,000ft, so it can work out the optimum descent point. We arm FL180 in the MCP and engage descent mode in the PMS, which tells us we have 28nm to go until top of descent.
At the appropriate point we commence our descent, and are instructed to descend further to 12,000ft, before contacting SoCal approach, on 124.5.
SoCal approach good morning, AAL2071 with you descending through 16.5 for 12 thousand, inbound to UBABE
AAL2071 good morning, descend to cross SBONO at 9 thousand, cleared RNAV Y approach Rwy 13R, Palm Springs altimeter 30.10
In order to make sure we have a nice stablised approach and can make the necessary descent during the procedure we slow the aircraft nice and early to 210kts and extend the leading edge slats.
Turning into the valley and starting the RNAV approach.
Runway in sight
Gear down, three greens, Flaps 28, Vref 141 set
Autopilot and Autothrottle disconnected, Go Around altitude set
We touch down smoothly right at the displaced threshold, set idle-reverse only, monitor that the spoliers have deployed and let the autobrakes slow us steadily.
80 knots, forward idle
AAL2071 welcome to Palm Springs, vacate right when able, taxi to parking
60 knots, manual braking
It is a very short taxi to the stand here at Palm Springs, so we quickly get the APU started and clean up the aircraft. Landing lights off, flaps up, spoilers down.
We were airborne for 3 hours and 52 minutes, so arrived on stand almost exactly on time (3 minutes early to be precise), have burnt 25,500 lbs of fuel, (leaving us 800lbs over our planned remaining fuel), and have delivered 138 passengers safely to their destination.
The aircraft is handed over to a new crew to take back to Chicago, while we are overnighting here before continuing back to our base at Dallas tomorrow.
It has been a thoroughly enjoyable flight for me, and I hope you have enjoyed "coming along for the ride" as it were
