Schirmer to Senior Captain

It gives me great pleasure to announce the promotion of Paul Schirmer to the Rank of Senior Captain. Paul just rejoined SPA after an absence of about a year and is off to a great start.

Paul, now that you are at Cat VI, I strongly recommend that you scrape together your pennies and buy the Level D 767-300ER. It's a fantastic aircraft, very detailed, with all sorts of great manuals and instructional materials avaiable, so you can learn to fly it like a pro. Paul Deans was even kind enough to do a SPA livery for it, so you can have the whole enchilada.

Mike Daugherty
SPA48
MSP Hub Manager

Good questions Paul. There are several ways to approach programming the FMC in the Boeing (or Airbus) aircraft. I'll describe two I have used. (1) You can enter the flight plan ,including origin, destination and enroute waypoints first, then get your IFR clearance and taxi instructions before programming the takeoff runway into the FMC. When you get close to your destination and ATC assigns you a runway, you can then enter the arrival into the FMC. The FMC allows this because, even if you choose your arrival runway before departure, ATC can always change it. In fact the FMC is set up to easily allow you to change waypoints enroute in response to ATC instructions, weather, change in destination, etc. I think that's how it works in the "real world". (2) You can use a weather program to determine the current weather at your departure airport and the current and forecast weather at your destination. This allows you to select appropriate takeoff and landing runways (as well as SIDs and STARs, if you are familiar with those). Then, if you use an ATC service (Radar Contact, or VATSIM, I suppose) that allows you to specify or request runways, then you can program those into the FMC before requesting your clearance. I do this using Radar Contact for ATC, because it lets me plan the entire flight and practice flying a real, published, approach procedure. Lots of fun.

Mike