Скачать или смотреть [ MSFS2024 | VATSIM ] "Let's Samba FNO" in the PMDG 737-800, SBSV-SBRF-SBFZ!

Almost every week, VATUSA organizes a "Friday Night Ops" event -- one or more airports on VATSIM staffed up to the nines and ready to handle a night of high traffic and high stress for four hours. Most of the time, those locations are somewhere within the Division -- and, honestly, they're often at the same twenty-or-so consistently busy airports within the US. So it's awesome that the Division's Events team constantly seeks partnerships with other VATSIM Divisions to staff up during the traditional "FNO" window once in a while. It gives our own controllers a week off and a chance to fly -- and, more importantly, gives our pilots some exposure to other places, other procedures, other airlines, other accents, and so forth!

Tonight was just such an opportunity, as the VATSIM Brazilian Division hosted the "Let's Samba FNO" featuring Salvador (SBSV), Recife (SBRF), and Fortaleza (SBFZ)! One catch was that Brazil's time zone is two hours ahead of US Eastern. In some places, the time exchange works out cleanly -- for example, when Australia hosts the "FNO Downunder" their controllers are actually working on a Saturday morning their time, in order to keep the slot consistent with the event's usual timeframe. But for Brazil that would have them working way into their wee hours. So instead of the typical 7pm-to-11pm or 8pm-to-midnight FNO event period, the event was shifted a couple hours earlier -- requiring a small adjustment in the work schedules both of myself and of Mrs. Slant!

We loaded into the sim at 5pm Eastern time and started briefing the flight, stumbling through Navigraph's Desktop Charts app, as I typically do when flying outside the US. To be clear -- it's a fine tool; the interface is simply different than SkyVector (which I use when within the US, i.e. most of the time) and I just fumble around trying to find basic things. Once ready to push, we ran into a brief moment of confusion, not realizing that what we were pushing onto and facing west was taxiway Kilo -- though on our chart it was marked as such only way down to our east. In the end, it was my unfamiliarity with the airport which led to the misunderstanding -- our controller was giving us a sensible instruction all along. We got that cleared up eventually and we were good to go.

Airborne, we experienced only a slight bit of vectoring for sequencing purposes. All night, it seemed to us -- as well as to the handful of Brazilian controllers who stopped into the chat -- that the traffic levels were high but not insane for this event, and we wondered out loud whether the slightly earlier timeframe as well as the non-US locale kept a few usual participants away. We were given the STAR and the Approach we were expecting and had pre-briefed, so, we were able to stay well ahead of the airplane in that regard despite the unfamiliar locations and sometimes challenging accents.

The arrival in to Recife wasn't terrible -- we did a slight bit of chasing the glideslope when transitioning from approach to landing speed and configuration, and bled off a little too much speed over the threshold resulting in an audible warning just before the gear squeaked onto the pavement. But the first leg ended with a very mild touchdown and only slightly long on the touchdown zone. We briefly thought about performing a "quick turn" -- leaving power and air conditioning on the APU rather than completely connecting to and configuring for ground services -- then changed our mind and decided to do the full procedure anyway. But still, we were up and running again within a pretty reasonable time, and experienced a modest but reasonable traffic delay getting airborne from the single-runway stopover point.

ATC services began consolidating during our second arrival, but we kept some semblance of service all the way to the ground at Fortaleza, and once again had no issues staying ahead of the FMC as we were assigned exactly what we were expecting based on our pre-brief. Once again, what bit us was when we transitioned from that Flaps-15, 170-knot approach to the Flaps-30, V-approach-slowing-to-V-ref moment. And, same as the first landing, we let too much speed bleed off seeking the touchdown. What made matters slightly worse here was a modest crosswind that we had to put in a somewhat drastic last-minute correction for. Real-world stable approach criteria would not have been met -- but sim-world "YOLO approach" criteria were. Then, to further complicate matters I vacated the wrong way off at the end. So all in all, our execution of tonight's two legs wasn't perfect by any stretch, but fortunately the embarrassing moments were minor. Overall we had a good time on our virtual Brazilian dance floor! -- Watch live at   / slantalphaadventures