On a United flight from Denver to Houston two weeks ago, we made a non-standard approach into Bush Intercontinental. As a commercial airliner junky, I was wondering if the pilots out there could tell me what it was called and how common it is. I am not a pilot, but I do play Flight Simulator a lot. In this flight, I had the added advantage of listening to ATC over the in-cabin music system. I didn’t really notice anything unusual, so I assume it wasn’t anything really out of the ordinary for ATC or the pilot. We landed safely and smoothly without incident. My wife asked me “Is that normal?” (I have explained slats, flaps, spoilers, thrust reversers, etc. to her on previous flights) and I had to answer “I have no idea.”
26 and 27 are usually the approach runways. 26 is north of the airport, 27 is south of the airport. Usually, what happens is you get put into the pattern somewhere northeast of the airport and intercept a localizer and fly IFR in. We were in a 737 and approved for approach into 26. What we did was flew something like a 220 compass heading directly into the airport and made a 40 degree turn about 100 feet off the ground, right over the runway threshold. The only thing like that I had ever seen was the “interesting” approach into the old Hong Kong Kai Tak airport. In that one, you made about a 90 degree bank around 50 feet over a heavily industrialized neighborhood and then immediately landed on a peninsula facing away from the city. When I flew on that, I was sitting in the middle seat bank of a 747, and I remember Marlboro billboards whizzing by the windows while we were still in the air. This one was of course far less extreme, but it was still unnerving to see 20 degrees of bank with under 100 feet of altitude.
I seem to remember the pilot being approved to fly “right in.” I wasn’t really concentrating on the chatter, but I don’t remember a VFR approval. There was around a 3000 foot scattered cloud ceiling, with very little wind. It was right before 7 PM (so right at sunset) and visibility was good under 3000 feet. While leaving the airport, I saw planes stacked up on the 26 and 27 approaches in the standard positions in a direct line to the east of the airport, so it wasn’t something that everybody was doing that day.
Anybody have any ideas what I am talking about?