Sixteenth entry for the Christmas Challenge.
Click to reveal AAR
It’s a lovely morning in Easter Island
Loading up the plane
Firing up the APU, plugging in my performance data
Finally ready to go!
Taxiing
“Air France 219, on remonte la piste 10” (Backtracking to Runway 10)
Throttling up
Accelerating to V1
Rotate!
Holy vortices batman!
Gear up!
Bye, Easter Island!
Touring the island
Swinging around the airport
Going through the cloud layer
Out of the soup
Climbing to 36000 ft
Cloudy morning indeed
I actually stumbled upon this feature by mistake, but you can actually go almost everywhere in the aircraft!
You just need to unlock the door with the switch on the overhead panel, then click on the door knob.
Some gorgeous contrails
Approaching the Top of Climb
36,000 ft… or is it? In fact, I lied… the aircraft couldn’t reach this altitude with the cargo and passengers we had. I changed my cruising altitude in the FMC to 32,000 ft, something more reasonable. Time to stretch our legs and wait for the longest flight yet.
Another gorgeous shot of the 767
Cruising over the Pacific is… kinda boring…?
Sky is getting darker ahead
The sun is setting
It sort of feels weird now… I left in the early morning at Easter Island and now it’s almost night.
160 nm before SADIT
Getting darker still
While we’re cruising, I thoguht I’d show you guys how nice the Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) made by Flight Factor is. It has three sets of checklists:
Normal Checklists
Amplified Checklists
Abnormal Checklists
It even has a PA doing the announcements for you if you want. It’s really, really cool. A lot of attention has been brought to aspects “outside” of the sim, which is very nice. An even better EFB has been developed by Flight Factor (same company) for their A320.
The moon
Wing lights
I really can’t imagine doing trans-Pacific flights like that… at night… with old slant alpha navigation. @Sine_Nomine looks like he could tell us some interesting stories about that… or even celestial navigation? I think I recall someone on the forums mentioning he did a tutorial of some sorts about navigating with stars or something like that…
Over VETEA
Approaching the Top of Descent. We’ve got roughly half an hour of flight left.
Beginning descent a bit early
ATIS received… setting barometric pressure.
We can almost see the island during the descent.
It’s now pitch dark below the cloud cover.
Flying over the island. We will swing around AROBA to line up with runway 04, which is equipped with a VOR beacon
Setting 153 approach speed for a flaps 30 landing, last turn before final
Altitude is good, speed is good.
Runway ahead
On final
Bonjour Tahiti!
Almost there! Disconnecting both autopilot and autothrottle
Floating a bit on the runway, but the landing is butter smooth. I think I’m getting much better at landing manually now.
Engaging reversers
Slowing down
Full stop. Turning around
Looks like fuel-wise we were OK
Taxiing to parking area
Disembarking passengers. We landed at 5:25 local time. Another leg complete!
We have a nice view on Moorea Island, where the Moorea Temae (NTTM) airport is located.
