Thread: cockpit view, landing in fog, NZ.

Quite a leap of faith to trust in yourself and your instruments to go ahead and do what he did..
Kenley

FWIW: That particular flight path was the project of a Qantas B-737 Captain, and took many months of consultation and planning between Qantas, computer programmers and NZ aviation authorities, as well as practice in a simulator to get the flight path approved. I got an email which describes the detail as follows:

"You can't see it in that video, but at the point that you enter cloud, the runway is exactly straight ahead but the aircraft is too high to land from there so, while in the cloud, the aircraft makes a full 360 degree right turn while washing off height, then straightens up in the very short distance remaining from the completion point of the 360 turn, to the runway.

The 360 degree turn takes the aircraft between the Remarkable ranges which are the tallest snow capped ones to the right you see before entering cloud and another smaller mountain.

The precision required for such an instrument approach could not be achieved flying the aircraft hands-on, it had to be automated!

The problem with the world today is its hard to distinguish between reality and really good CGI, it's hard to know what to believe.

Vlad, it's real all right... it's the IFR approach to Queenstown NZ. There exist specialist professional mathematicians who consult to airlines and govt. agencies to calculate optimal flight paths and routes for particular weather conditions. They feed their data to computer programmers who then code said data into aircraft avionics suites...
The video did look a bit stilted to give the appearance of a desktop make-believe. I have seen a different version which for some reason goes longer and is far smoother. The one posted here seems to have been edited.

That's the closest airport to me. Now they have these systems working you can actually expect to make your flight connections. Prior there could be days of cancelled winter flights. Bit of a problem when you are trying to catch a 2 day conference.

Air nz was the first to have guided flights in during poor conditions. Do not bother trying to fly jetstar into our from there.

Originally Posted by Hoges

Vlad, it's real all right... it's the IFR approach to Queenstown NZ. There exist specialist professional mathematicians who consult to airlines and govt. agencies to calculate optimal flight paths and routes for particular weather conditions. They feed their data to computer programmers who then code said data into aircraft avionics suites...

.....to fly you into Mt Erebus. http://www.erebus.co.nz/

Originally Posted by p38arover

.....to fly you into Mt Erebus. Erebus Disaster|Mt Erebus Plane Crash OFFICAL Facts Website|1979 Air NZ|NZALPA

only once!

It's called RNP or required navigation performance. The queenstown approach was developed by a company called Naverus who were bought out by one of the big player, I think General Electric.

Procedure starts around 18000ft and automatically puts you onto the end of the runway after a run around the hill. all automatic and F... hard to hand fly in the sim