[ MSFS2020 | VATSIM ] the JustFlight BAe146, KGEG-KBIL-KBIS, for the "Empire Builder FNO"!

Occasionally when VATUSA plans out Friday Night Ops events, a temporary placeholder goes on the Events Calendar listing which ARTCCs are hosting, but doesn't yet contain any info about which specific airports they plan to include. Those details are published when the event gets closer. That was the case tonight as Seattle, Salt Lake, and Minneapolis hosted what eventually would come to be known as the "Empire Builder FNO"! Somehow, I thought that referred to a SimCity-like video game -- but that's not the case. The name is derived from an Amtrak rail route which runs from Seattle to Minneapolis, and the FNO featured many of the cities it passes through!
Prior to the details being made public, though, we had tapped the night as an opportunity to visit some lesser-visited airfields across the northwestern US -- so we had planned to fly the JustFlight BAe146 from Spokane (KGEG) to Billings (KBIL) to Bismarck (KBIS)! As it turned out, Spokane was one of the airports staffed up for the event! At Billings and Bismarck, though, we knew we were going to face challenges getting service from a busy Center controller where there wasn't any local staffing. We packed some extra patience and headed out!
The BAe had recently been updated, and that meant resetting a number of our preferences for the aircraft. In that process we ran across one option we didn't recognize -- "SYNC FLIPCHART TO WT" -- and left it unmarked. That nearly killed us on leg one's departure! The combination of that plus the upgraded fueling and boarding process left us with takeoff V-speed bugs that were, unbeknownst to us, set WAY too low. Even the First Officer callout was tied to the bug. So when we got to the marked rotation speed, we were about 25-30 knots too slow, and couldn't maintain a climb! I did manage to get the nose down and build some airspeed and get a gentle ascent going, so we avoided disaster. However, the issue remained a mystery until we took a closer look at the flipchart and the bugs, and vowed to sort that out for our second leg.
It's almost always the case that at least one controller will miss that we're navigating /W (analog radio-based navigation only) and try to send us direct to a point that either (a) we aren't yet receiving, or (b) we have no way of identifying a path to without a VOR radial to track to it. And that's no big deal; I miss it as a controller myself, often enough. Aside from that, we had great service from controllers who were at their workload limits. One of them, clearly stressed, did scold a number of pilots for calling in overtop of one another -- however, we reminded them that depending on where we were, we were unable to hear the other calls and had no way to correct this. With that in mind the controller seemed to exercise a little more patience thereafter.
We felt like we got an early descent into Billings -- we wound up at 16,000 for quite some time -- and yet once we got close to the airport it seemed like we must not have been descending fast enough because we did get spun around a bit to get set up and sequenced for our approach. The automation seemed to have trouble grabbing the localizer accurately, but with plenty of visibility we seized the controls ourselves. Not yet confident in the Vref bug position we kept some extra speed. A significant crosswind made the landing a challenge, and we wound up a bit high and fast on short final. But, we corrected it in time such that the arrival wasn't too terribly bad, overall.
On our second leg into Bismarck, we got more of a continuous descent, and in fact we were still a bit high once we realized we were being turned onto final. In the early stages of the descent in this aircraft, one normally need to keeps at least 60% into the throttles, to generate enough electricity to run the plane. However, it's also normal to have the APU running during takeoff and landing, so the four "hairdryer" engines have full power available for takeoff or go-around. Having switched over bleed air plus electrical power to the APU, then, we were able to go to full idle plus full spoilers to "catch up" with the descent, and managed to grab the glideslope still a few miles from the airport. Winds were reported as five knots on mostly a tailwind for Runway 31, but we experienced some crazy wind shifts on final and our stats window logged a 15-knot fully-sideways crosswind upon touchdown. Even with that adversity we felt our arrival was solidly executed, and nice and gentle! It was a little extra work for us as well as for the controllers, but another successful FNO was in the logbook! -- Watch live at / slantalphaadventures