Flying the NightEye
Catching the late flight off this island to Brasil. Insel operate a two flights a week to the city of Manaus that sits along the Rio Amazonas (Amazon river?). The only direct flights are onMonday and Friday at 20:50 getting into Manaus just before midnight. Took off about 10minutes behind schedule into pitch blackness. Finding my way to the end of runway11 at Willemstad for take off was challenging when the aircrafts landing lights failed. This (MD80) mad dog has been a real pain to fly and I will be more than happy to abandon her at the first gate I find at SBEG, The engineers can spend all the time they want trying to find lighting fault. So as not to delay any further I opted for pushback and clearance, there shouldn't be any need to tell the passengers? The take off became even more challenging when I battled with the auto pilot to get the nose up out of the climb. The first time I had an oppertunity to look out of the window I was crossing the Orinoco river and briefly skirting along the Venezuelan and Colombian borders. Airtraffic was very quiet at this time of night, not much traffic about. However I was joined by N22600 a B747 flying parallel that was a Global freight from Denver to Rio De Janeiro (I thought I had disabled all FSX AI traffic??).
Reliesed needed more speed to catch up as I'm now scheduled to arrive after midnight
