Just had an absolutely insane flight in the PMDG 737-800. My hands are sweating and I feel like I just drank 4 cups of black coffee.
Flight started with a bad omen when I realized I put in the wrong skin for my plane (wanted Alaska, but picked up something else by mistake). Oh well, not restarting, leaving Stockholm (ESSA) for Innsbruck Airport (LOWI).
Made another mistake in that I didn’t do much research on the airport or weather beforehand. After a clean, albeit long, cold start period I got her up in the air and easy to cruise altitude.
“Hmmm…let me check out this airport LOWI, never heard of it or been there…”
Started looking at the maps and I noticed it looked like some airport a serial killer designed, nestled between 8000 foot mountains that switch back, requiring you to fly through a canyon with very little room for error.
Then it gets better. Bad weather and low visibility. Ugggh..
And oh yea, no ILS so gonna have to RNAV to runway, though doubtful that works (hint - it didn’t).
About to head into what I think is the valley of death:
Get down to about 8 thousand feet and scrape by a peak. Can’t seem to address a plan disconuity, in the FMC’s flight plan, so I kinda wing it and hope for the best. I get the RNAV slope and incredibly the auto pilot weaves me through the valley and looking good as I slow down and flaps going down. I may pull this off despite how scary this is:
I get to about 2500 feet and can barely see the runway, and the auto-pilot goes astray - it over corrects on the last switchback. Doesn’t even rip itself out of auto pilot, just swaying back and forth towards the runway.
“No way will this plane pull it off” I think to myself.
I disconnect auto-pilot and fly manually. But I’m now trying to deal with the swaying plan, and now I’m coming in hot as my 5 seconds of indecision left me too high. I hit the runway, and bounce and obscene amount on a somewhat short runway (Volanta tracking thought I landed there twice lol) . I decide to just hit the throttle and go for the alternate runway a few miles down the valley.
Disappointed, I thought to myself, “this airport won’t beat me” so I pulled the tightest and most scariest u-turn in a narrow valley to land at LOWI anyways. Came oh so close to hitting the side of the mountains when I made the U-turn but cleared by 100 yards…maybe.
Made the landing and actually one of my better manual landings. Felt great.