Here's a Challenge

John,

No, when I say "pure" I mean without aid of GPS, ATC or a view from outside the airplane (although I have often had to cheat on that last part). I routinely use all the radio nav aids available. The point of my post was that those nav aids are sometimes not that useful, depending on their location. So far I'd say I'm batting about 300 on the effort to complete "VFR" flights without cheating - good for baseball, not so good for flying.

Mike

So for the last postal flight PAEN-PAKT (about 700 miles) I opted for my dc-9 rather than my turbo-prop MU-2. While I can get an extra 125 Kts. from the dc-9, I had overcast skies at 2400, and it isn't exactly practical to weave in and out of mountain passes at 2000 ft in a dc-9.

As you can see by my posted flight plan (in my photo album), I pretty much followed the shoreline to Annette Is., which would have been fine in pretty much any aircraft, but finding my way to land at PAKT would have required the 2000 ft dodge and weave - especially since wind direction required a landing on RWY 11.

So, I set a reasonable altitude 23000 and settled in for the long flight, following VORS from PAEN (MDO YAK BKA and finally ANN). From BAK I descended to 7000 and then 5800 within 25mi of ANN.

Approaching ANN from BKA I descended into the clouds and wouldn't see land again until about 2000 ft on final approach.

I now turned to the approach plate - which I'm not entirely sure how to read everything on (second pic in my album) - ILS LOC/DME Y RWY 11. Based on my limited knowledge, I followed a 313 heading as I crossed ANN and descended to 4100. I followed 313 until I was 29.9 - or basically 30mi from ANN at which point I banked sharply to a 115 heading, switching to ILS Freq. I picked up the localizer and followed it down to land safely at PAKT. Again - nice to see the runway appear out of the clouds and rain.

One interesting note..The radials I followed according to the charts seemed to put me a greater distance from the mountains than I was actually flying. I'm not sure about the discrepancy there - or why there appeared to be such deviation from leaving the radial on one VOR and picking up the one on the other when it appeared as a straight course on my chart.

John

<br /><br /><!-- editby --><br /><br /><em>edited by: jer029, Feb 05, 2016 - 08:10 AM</em><!-- end editby -->