My room
July 05
I flew on the 5th even though we were on the tail end of the big sandstorm. The weather was really bad on preflight, but it eventually got better the longer we waited. We took off about 3 hours later than anticipated, but the weather was supposed to be a lot better than it had been the previous month. As we flew we heard that the normal runway that we take off and land on was out due to some sort of electrical problems. This runway was the only runway that had an instrument approach, so if the weather was bad when we came back we were going to be in trouble. Every hour we checked the weather and the ceiling was supposed to be 2000' and visibility 3200', right as we broke track to come home Balad put out a new weather brief and the ceiling was less than 800' and visibility was a mile. We knew we were in trouble, but we really didn't have enough fuel to land anywhere else but Balad, so we went in knowing we were going to have to land. We had to do a PAR approach which is something I hadn't done since flight school 5 years ago. I flew the approach and it went really well, but it turns out the weather wasn't nearly as bad as expected and we saw the runway about two miles out. I made an appropriate landing, but it wasn't anything special. It was my first night landing in over a year and it showed. Any time you can walk away from a landing people say it was a good landing, and it really wasn't anything too bad.
I flew on the 5th even though we were on the tail end of the big sandstorm. The weather was really bad on preflight, but it eventually got better the longer we waited. We took off about 3 hours later than anticipated, but the weather was supposed to be a lot better than it had been the previous month. As we flew we heard that the normal runway that we take off and land on was out due to some sort of electrical problems. This runway was the only runway that had an instrument approach, so if the weather was bad when we came back we were going to be in trouble. Every hour we checked the weather and the ceiling was supposed to be 2000' and visibility 3200', right as we broke track to come home Balad put out a new weather brief and the ceiling was less than 800' and visibility was a mile. We knew we were in trouble, but we really didn't have enough fuel to land anywhere else but Balad, so we went in knowing we were going to have to land. We had to do a PAR approach which is something I hadn't done since flight school 5 years ago. I flew the approach and it went really well, but it turns out the weather wasn't nearly as bad as expected and we saw the runway about two miles out. I made an appropriate landing, but it wasn't anything special. It was my first night landing in over a year and it showed. Any time you can walk away from a landing people say it was a good landing, and it really wasn't anything too bad.
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