I’m building a flight plan if anyone wants to fly it, that will take you right over everest at the edge of space. At cruising speed the flight plan is probably a little longer than an hour depending on how well you fly the departure and approaches.
I have a departure from Chengdu that takes you in a 270 degree turn with the stratospheric injection on the 180 degree leg; the reason is the mountains near Chengdu rise very fast and rise above 18,000 feet which makes the performance of reaching the stratosphere difficult and makes the chance for an alternate route if you fail to be impossible. So I’m simulating a more realistic departure. The approach to New Delhi should be straightforward on runway 27 @ heading 271 degrees.
I will likely invert over these mountains for cruising altitude and the landmarks should look like this at about 1000km into the flight which is about 15 minutes into the flight:
I will then fly to through what I am “dubbing” the Sapphire Gates which are these two large lake features I fly between:
I can go sideways to look more ahead and see this lake feature top of page:
Everest will be just to the bottom of that view so back to inverted - Everest is center right:
From here the approach to New Delhi should require a large HAC that is not drawn on my GPS course. (Actually the approach is more direct than I thought from Everest to New Dehli it’s lined up with the shorter runway so I can directly lose speed/altitude on a 271 course and can probably adjust for the longer runways if needed.
50nm out is over the largest river (Gahr) in the area before New Dehli and looks like this:
HAC Maneuver explained (Defunct but kept in this description anyway):
The way I like to do the HAC is to have the GPS course guide me into the last ~100nm of the approach that will be in-line with the 271 heading runway. At that waypoint I am coming in probably at 120,000 feet and ~Mach 4+.
To remove this speed so I don’t have 300nm of normal flying to the arrival star, I do a HAC maneuver by turning the opposite direction and conducting a large approximately 270 degree turn so if I’m heading 220 degrees or so, the entrance to the HAC should be such that I begin the turn when the runway heading is 271 degrees (because this is the heading of the runway itself).
I begin a left turn away from the airport such that I come around a full circle such that my waypoint indicator is at 271degrees which tells me I’m fully aligned with the runway and when my vector and aircraft indicators (green diamond and yellow line) are fully aligned with a 271 waypoint indicator, I know I’m properly lined up.
This is a HAC maneuver, it’ll take me from 120,000 feet at Mach 4+ to 30,000 feet at 300knots about 100nm from the airport.
I can probably tighten that approach as I get better at this.
Notes:
- I probably will make the final approach waypoint at 30nm from the airport. This way the HAC maneuver will probably get me at 30,000 feet and 300knots somewhere around 100nm to 50nm from the airport.
And frankly, getting used to flying at Mach 5+ means I want as little normal flight time as possible. If I started the turn at 100nm I’d probably end up 150nm away.
I could have a beef Wellington by the time I get to the airport then.