American Airlines Virtual

As promised, here's the rundown of my flight into Innsbruck. The equipment is the Captain Sim Boeing 707-320B ADV departing from Rome's Fiumicino International Airport. We're flying this offline so as not to embarrass ourselves in public if things go wrong and also because I don't recall ever having landed in Innsbruck at night... but mostly not to embarrass ourselves in public. No practice runs, just plan the route, figure out the fuel and let's go. The departure is set at dusk in order to facilitate the nighttime arrival but ensuring that people are still up to summon emergency services to the field just in case. For this adventure I am accompanied by Otto, Mr. Dahlquist's trusted partner in crime. I was given a warm and smelly welcome into the cockpit where I could immediately recognize the bag of my favorite burritos lying on the center console now devoid of its contents...

After running through the checklists and poking the squirrels to turn the engines I get on the PA to welcome some friends aboard and brief the rest of the crew on our weather and time of flight. Midway through "welcome aboard" Otto starts to belt out a Rodney Carrington song that I can't repeat in this family-friendly forum...

As you can see I was feeling a bit nostalgic, hence the Pan Am colors. Otto now bears a sizeable knot on his forehead. I never realized that such a small clipboard could leave that big of a mark, but oh well, onward and upward we must go...

Otto has now developed some form of PTSD as every time I go to flip a page on my clipboard he wants to jump out the window. We somehow make it through the takeoff checks and head on out...

There's not a lot of activity going on right now, which was great as we were numero uno for departure...

I've done a few flights in this airplane, but not too many and not too often. I had forgotten the amount of pollution this thing leaves in its wake but it looks friggen cool and sounds even better

I have to admit, it took me about a half hour of studying those Italian departure charts, but I finally figured out a suitable DP... that made me fly a counterclockwise loop around the airport enroute to my first enroute fix.

As you can see it's not taking very long for darkness to arrive and we have some afternoon thunderstorms and lightning activity below us as well...

Once we reach cruise altitude I had an opportunity to calm down and I apologized to Otto for the welt on his forehead. He accepted the apology and later murmured something under his breath...

I gather all my arrival charts and get one last look at the weather in Innsbruck, we have some cloud cover down to about 3000 feet but at least it's not raining and the winds are only about 8 knots. I will admit that my big snafu on this flight was overshooting the transition for the STAR as I was trying to calculate our descent. I didn't want to chance it in the valleys in case we couldn't pick up a beacon so a couple of successive 180's put us back on track after burning through about 15 extra minutes of our reserves. I'm not sure if it was the airplane or that he actual nav beacons are just that bad, but I was having some issues trying to get the RDI's to show me which way to turn. THIS did not help my situation much...

North and then east over the airport, then a 180 back to the west and terrain is starting to creep up FAST!

Little pesky patches of clouds are interrupting our lizard count...

By this time Otto is curled up into the fetal position on the right hand side sucking his thumb. I keep shaking my head and saying out loud "I KNOW there's an airport out here somewhere!".

By now the needles are telling us that we're close. We're going down the checklist and by now she's all set up for landing. By the way there were 896 and a half lizards plainly visible from the left side of the aircraft... and now I see drops on the windshield

Otto has calmed down now. He has promised to buy the first round if we don't die...