Sunday, April 4, 2010

Las Vegas - Grand Canyon West / Beechcraft Bonanza A36 (N7226Z) / VFR

This was a short flight that I made with four virtual passengers in order to take them to that worthless tourist trap, the Grand Canyon Skywalk. Getting there by car from Las Vegas takes 3½ hours; by airplane, it's only 30 minutes. The short ride from the airport to the tourist trap is still dusty, but I just stayed at the airport.

The flight is easy and I stayed at 5500 feet most of the way, climbing briefly to 7500 to get over some mountains southwest of the airport. The sim version of the airport is a bit more challenging than the real thing, since an error in the database puts very high hills just north of the airport, whereas in real life it's mostly flat. Nevertheless, I managed to descend over those hills to a smooth landing. There's no fuel or other services at the airport, so I'll fly back out on my own shortly, leaving my virtual passengers to enjoy paying through the nose to greedy aboriginal residents to see that over-hyped skywalk (funny how a land can be sacred when someone else wants to develop it, but suddenly becomes non-sacred when the owners want to cash in on it).