Los Angeles - Phoenix / Boeing 737-800 (SWA214) / IFR

A daytime flight (which is rare) from Los Angeles to Sky Harbor, a route I know very well.

Unfortunately I was running late with respect to the real schedule and made some stupid mistakes. Added to this was the mysterious flickering of the runways at LAX (but not at PHX, oddly enough).

In my rush I forgot to enter the departure runway in the FMC, so the aircraft tried to make HOLTZ direct after departure, which caused ATC to ask me what was going on. I discovered the problem and told ATC about it, and they just cleared me direct TRM, which was easy enough.

On the way into Phoenix, another pilot was spending so much time chatting about irrelevant stuff on frequency that I couldn't get through to ZAB to check in. As a result I had to work hard to rejoin my descent profile, as I was already thousands of feet above it by the time I was cleared to descend. The landing went well, though, especially since I hand-flew it. I'm getting better at hand-flying the big iron.