(Visit the VATSIM Atlanta ARTCC's "Passport Challenge" website at: https://www.ztlartcc.org/pilot_passport )
For our first stream of the new year we put a new twist on "A Day in the Life of a Corporate Charter Pilot"! Normally, we fly that as a Base-A-B-Base triangular three-hop trip -- our fictional charter company's base to the pretend group's pickup point, from there to wherever they're being dropped off, then back to base to close the day. However, tonight we flew a straight three-hopper, visiting four airports all-told, to begin working on VATSIM Atlanta ARTCC's "Passport Challenge"!
The "Passport Challenge" is a system where a VATSIM pilot can register for one, two, or three sets of airports (as chosen by the program designers) and the web-based system will automatically record your online "visits" to those airports as you perform them on the network! The purposes, I have to presume, are to encourage (a) more traffic within the ZTL airspace, (b) more General Aviation traffic, and (c) traffic to other places within ZTL besides Atlanta Hartsfield. Our night's plan, then, was to fly from Tuscaloosa (KTCL) to DeKalb-Peachtree (KPDK) to Concord (KJQF) to Covington (KCVC)!
While it's more and more challenging to create non-RNAV routes in an increasingly non-RNAV-unfriendly environment, our VATSIM controllers were able to work with us with our filed routings all evening. I'm never sure how picky they'll be about routes which may run contrary to their normal departure and arrival flows, or routes which utilize Victor airways at altitudes at or above 18,000 feet. And to some extent, dealing with reroutes (either on the ground or in the air) is part of the challenge of flying "Slant Whiskey". The only slight oddity we encountered was leaving Peachtree in the very complex Atlanta TRACON airspace -- controllers there are fond of routing us through one of their RNAV departure gates (East One, in our case, written as "EAONE"). However, as purely an RNAV point, I wouldn't be able to navigate to it if I lost comms. I do understand that controllers will vector me over that point regardless, but my understanding is that if I can't navigate to it on my own, it shouldn't be in my clearance. However, as a hobbyist only and with no real-world IFR training nor controlling experience, I'll leave that debate for the people who do this for real.
With gusty winds playing a role, our approach into Peachtree was horrendous, as I fought the alignment all the way down and never really got the plane established on a stable track down the centerline. True to form as sim pilots, we "yolo'd it" into the runway, but ultimately kept it on pavement and rolled it to the end. At Concord, there was still a bit of a left-to-right but we dialed the correction in nice and early. Our flare timing was still off, as it always seems to be in this aircraft (it needs a much more assertive control input than the other planes I fly), but my "panic flare" somehow worked perfectly and it seemed like everyone on the frequency and in the chat needed to dispatch trucks to clean up butter. Sadly we didn't end on as nice a note, as our approach to Covington was unmarred by wind but the flare was late and almost non-existent.
However, probably the coolest thing about the night's operation was the third arrival, which was into a non-towered field. First of all, even though I was halfway guessing at where it was visually, the radio-nav tricks I used managed to set us up on a perfect straight-in. But more fun, we had a friend (yes, I recognized your voice) doing VFR patterns there upon our arrival -- so we got a traffic call with our switch to CTAF, and then heard that aircraft report around the pattern when we switched over. We spotted him easily and were able to adjust our straight-in to allow him to turn from downwind to base to final and exit the runway well before we got there. Those are the immersive moments that make VATSIM as great as it is! And I'll shake off the embarrassment of that third landing hopefully before our next stream! -- Watch live at https://www.twitch.tv/slantalphaadventures