Hi all I just had the oppertunity to be as copilot in a C425 Conquest I on a trip from Hamburg, EDDH to Graz, LOWG. This was my first trip in an aircraft of that size and being propelled by a turboprop. Following the tradition of "my first..." real life experience reports, here is my story.
The day started like a typical end-october day in Hamburg, a temperature of 8 deg C, gusty westerly winds and moderate rain. After the preflight walkaround, the pic and I were soaked and we were happy to enter the Conquest. Shortly after drying and preparing ourself and copying the ATIS, we received our startup and enroute clearance: "Startup approved, you are cleared to Graz via AMLUH 5G departure, flight planned route, squak 7665". The smooth startup and running of a turbine powered prop is amazing, compared to the shaking and rumbling of a piston engine. Moments later we had our taxi clearance to the active departure runway 33. On our way, we performed the items on the checklist and got our "cleared for takeoff" when we reached our holding point 33 in taxiway K. The moment we did the line up, the rain increased and the far end of the illuminated runway disappeared in the mist. Never mind - we were fully ifr equipped and certified for flights into known icing. Setting takeoff power smoothly and quickly accerlerates the 3.5to Cessna to 60, 80 and than 100kts: rotate and off we were! We had the departure route punched into the GNS530 which was coupled to the autopilot. After performing the after takeoff items and contacting the departure controller we waited for the autopilot to do the first heading change of roughly 30deg to the right when passing the 3DME reading from the ALF DME, but nothing happened. We pretty soon recognized that neither the heading nor the nav mode of the autopilot was working. Meanwhile we had completely entered the shower, our Conquest was shaking and rocking, and outside visibility went down to zero. I remembered, what I once learned about "crew coordination" and we quickly devided the workload. The pic was flying and I did all the radio, navigation and paperwork. Just a few but interesting minutes later, we popped out of the clouds at roughly 15000ft and the sun greeted us with her bright smiling face. We continued up to FL230 and had a gentle flight for the rest of the trip. Clouds disappeared in southern germany, giving way for a fantastic view of the alps. Although our destination was in sight, we decided not to cancel ifr or to do a visual approach since the ATIS had some few clouds at 200ft in the report. The approach controller vectored us for a 7 miles final into runway 35 where we touched down a little more than two hours after our takeoff in Hamburg. Sorry for the long posting - if you made it so far, you might like some pics: http://www.t3r.de/flightpics/graz/ Greetings, Torsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
