Pilots: You can land a 767 on an aircraft carrier

Sounds like a lot of fun! Whenever I have spare sim time at the end of a session and the instructor says “anything you’d like to do?”, I just shake my head and say “get me out of this thing.” Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the sim, but I’m not in the frame of mind to be playing in it.

That said:

During my initial BAe146 endorsement the instructor was fairly “old school”, putting more emphasis on pure handling skills than is fashionable these days. We did a couple of exercises for a bit of fun and handling practice.

  1. He set the weight of the aircraft low, the equivalent of being empty with a bit of fuel. Put as at the end of the runway with a 100 knot wind straight down the centreline and got us to take off, hover, and land back on the piano keys. If you kept the nose pretty well aligned with the runway you got the illusion you were flying something like a Harrier jump jet. With the right combination of power and attitude you could gently climb, descend, fly backwards, forwards, sideways etc.

  2. The second was to take-off on runway 19 at Brisbane, Australia, jink over to the river and fly under the Sir Leo Hielscher Bridges. Then pull up into a right wingover while the instructor fails three of your four engines. Next you try to make it back to the airport for a landing on 01.

I had to have two goes at this one. On the first I overcooked the bank at the top of the wingover, didn’t have enough height to recover, and put a smoking hole in the ground. Second time was a winner. The main challenge was to slow down in time to land without getting too slow too early. One engine is enough to extend the glide but nothing more.

All good fun, but most of the time I just want to get the debrief done and get back to the hotel and have a beer.