Recently, I decided to fly a trans-Japan flight from Kansai International in Osaka to Chitose International in Sapporo. Primarily, I was testing out a Japan mesh as well as another MD-8x panel. Originally, I had not planned on posting screenshots of this flight, as I was expecting it to be fairly routine. However, it was not at all routine. Read on to share this harrowing flight with me! I selected some shots for aesthetics and some for storytelling and ended up with 18 shots out of the original 60+. Because there are so many I opted to scale them down quite a bit. But many are really much more beautiful at higher resolutions. I will post a higher resolution version of any shot by request (not that I'm expecting any).
Here I am, holding short at Kansai. As you can see it's a beautiful April day. You can see how I was expecting an leisurely flight!
While climbing we get one more look at Kansai and the lovely day we were having.
A few assorted dark clouds (cumulonimbi?) over Osaka only added to the lovely sights.
Requisite puffy cloud shot. :)
Now the mesh is beginning to exercise itself. Some lovely snow-capped mountains come into view as I fly north. I'm treated to a lot of this as the flight continues.
However, as I start my descent, a sense of foreboding creeps over me as I see that below me the weather is changing. METAR reports light snow and very low visibility.
In the cockpit, this is the last time I get to see the cheery blue skies.
I flew into some heavy rock'em-sock'em clouds and was relieved to exit the other side.
But my relief was short lived! Uh-oh!
I have entered the lighter, upper layers of the soup. It only gets worse as I decend.
On short final I can see absolutely nothing of the airport. The small dots you see are just little chunks of snow/ice collecting on my windshield and are not any sort of runway lights.
In the cockpit, I see nothing more than what you see above and was still descending at nearly 700 ft/min. But this is the real situation, little did I know!. (Note the shadow.)
This is the point where I finally caught sight of the runway. I should have already been flaring for some time now. I was fairly certain I was about to die. :)
I pulled back rather hard on the yolk, knowing better than to over-do it. You can see here, a fraction of a second later, that my nose is just beginning to flare.
And we SLAM into the ground...
...bouncing momentarily back into the air.
But all landing gear held. Fortunately, only the rear gear had to absorb all that energy and I managed to keep the nose (mostly) up until I could set it down gently. Of course, ground control sent me all over the airport to find my gate, and visibility was still quite miserable.
And, finally, here we are safe at the gate. Call in the maintenance crew!
And that's it. I've been in lower visibility than this once or twice before, most notably on takeoff from Kathmandu, but I have never experienced visibility like this on a landing. I learned that I really need to work on my no-visibility landings. A happy, albeit bruised, ending for all and one heck of a fun flight for me. :)
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