Saturday, February 21, 2009

Denver - Las Vegas / Boeing 737-800 (SWA3439) / IFR

Today I decided to fly from Denver to Las Vegas in some big iron, which is a 90-minute flight. This took me over the same area that I had flown on the way to Aspen, but it sure was a lot easier in a 737. Red Table was my transition from the departure out of Denver, and the mountains looked very nice and not at all threatening from flight level 400.

This early-morning flight was easy and uneventful. I almost dozed off after we got past the Rockies. The only difficulty was in the descent. For some reason, the FMS didn't take me low enough, fast enough, and I was obligated to make a really steep descent towards LUXOR on the arrival. I didn't really get down to the correct altitude until I was almost established on the ILS for landing (25R). However, I finally got aligned on the localizer and glide path, and I hand-flew the last few miles, landing reasonably well, albeit about 20 feet off the centerline (fortunately it's a wide runway).