Thanks for the answers. It sounds like an extremely short flight such as Mueller to ABIA can be very busy for a pilot, but not otherwise exceptional. However, the business can be mitigated by setting up the arrival before departure. In this case, the departure and arrival would both have been managed by the same ATC.
Of course, the Austin flight may have included a tour around the city. I don’t remember the specifics.
I haven’t done much. A few maintenance flights but they were up to a reasonable altitude and weren’t really short at all in terms of track miles flown.
We had a spare aircraft at the base for a while that had to be flown once a month. Normally it would fly anyway due to disruptions but there was a month where it had sat idle and I was tasked with flying it. I asked ops what had to be done and they said “just fly it”, so we took it out for a circuit. It was a big circuit as we had to be fit in to the sequence but still pretty fun.
We also had to fly circuits as part of differences training when we got a new variant to the base. For that we went to an uncontrolled aerodrome and did genuine circuits. We had a third pair of eyes in the jumpseat to look for traffic and help with the radios as the workload was quite high
So what happens if you have an emergency after take off that requires an immediate return to land without getting to the required airspeed?
Same ATC is very helpful. I used to do a 90NM flight that crossed a flight information region boundary. For half the flight we are talking to Brisbane Centre and for the other half it’s Melbourne Centre. The flight is all uncontrolled but we need traffic information so we can make sure we don’t hit anyone. Melbourne can’t tell us about Brisbane traffic and vice versa so you’re missing half of the “picture” for half the flight and when you do get it you have very little time to work out how to deal with it.
The other thing you do on short flights is skip some of the cabin stuff. On the 90 mile flight above, we would leave the belt signs on, not do a PA, no coffees etc.
You’d still have computed Vapp / Vref. So even if the numbers didn’t post to our airspeed tapes, a few quick keystrokes in the FMS and you’d find it (if you hadn’t written it down, which I do). Then if you wanted to use the automation, you’d engage the autothrottle in manual speed mode and select what you want. Of course, that assumes the emergency hasn’t taken out the autothrottle.
If you were really hurried and hadn’t even the time to compute numbers I’d fly the Angle-Of-Attack indicator, which gives us a pointer at 1.3 Vso. I also have a certain generic airspeed in mind that would work in most situations. Haven’t yet had the pleasure of trying that outside the sim.
Ah yep sounds practical. We just have a card clipped to the panel that has all the speeds for the weight. Simple has its benefits. It reminds of a time recently we had briefed for a visual approach tracking via a couple of waypoints on an RNAV approach. We get to the initial approach fix and we are still IMC so can’t fly the visual. We also don’t have time to load the full RNAV approach in the box. We do have time to whip out the VOR chart, dial up the inbound course and fly that though. It’s an old fashioned approach but when pushed for time it was simple and easy to fly. Of course if I lived in a first world country there would be an ILS at both ends of the runway, but I don’t.
My mother once put me on such a flight, kind of reminiscent of a Bob Newhart quote about hopping across the country. Starting in Oklahoma City we went to Lawton, Oklahoma; Wichita Falls, Texas; Dallas; and then finally on to Lubbock. Some of the passengers wondered if we weren’t being served drinks because of OK and TX weird alcohol laws, but no, it was because we weren’t in the air long enough. There was time for one drink between Dallas and Lubbock, finally. Since takeoffs and landings bother me I really needed a drink by then.