My pet hate.

Flight from LPPT (Lisbon) to LEMD (Madrid) using default sceneries.

Departure and cruise all Ok and then I had to try and decipher the Spanish approach plates for the arrival at Madrid. Not an easy read but all sorted and the arrival sucessfully loaded into the FMC, ROLDO1C for the ILSZ 33R...no problems. So confident am I that I whip out and fire up the expresso machine for a quick Java (Colombian medium roast). When I return i'm in the later stages of the STAR and in a few minutes will be turning finals for the ILS and all the time knowing that the nav radios are being auto tuned. LNAV tracking smoothly and VNAV is hacking it very well with minimal intervention required. First error. The LNAV was tracked nicely onto finals and I armed the APP mode...nothing...zippo...hmmm. Thinking it is an auto tuning issue I check nav 1 only to confirm that the correct freq and inbd course is indicating. That's odd. Check the FMA and find that there is no ILS ident displayed. What the....So I resort to the tried and true mark one eyeball technique in order to solve the riddle of where the F*## am I and look out the front only to see one runway well out to my left. One runway when there should be two. A quick FMC reshuffle followed by a sidestep on to 33L and the rest was uneventful.

I really do hate it when new runways are built !!!

My pet hate is when I forget to arm the approach mode on an otherwise perfect flight. It's amazing how quickly you over-run the GS and are unable to catch it again without a seriously unstable approach.

 

Also I don't know how you can fly into default airports. I've even got to the point where they need to be up to UK2000 extreme level for me to even bother with!

Yes that GS overun seems to be a regular gotcha! I only use default airfields when I really, really have to. I am just trying to expand my sphere of operations and unfortunately I had run out of time to track down good alternative sceneries.