Night Flight - Part III - Go-Arounds and Wildfires

We continued our cruise towards Roanoke parallel to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Shenandoah national park.

The synthetic vision system beautifully rendered the peaks below giving our pilots a clear view of the path ahead.We tracked over intersection WITTO towards the Montebello (MOL) VOR and began our initial descent towards Roanoke at 8:40 PM as Horne and Weight reset the autopilot to command a descent to 15000 feet.

Roanoke was lit up beneath us as we flew the approach and lined up for our low pass over Runway 24. With our altimeter set to 30.30 in and our gear down and locked we continued our descent to 100 feet above ground level.

We crossed the threshold of Runway 24 at 8:58 PM with our landing lights illuminating the ground beneath us. Our pilots commanded “going around” applying full power, rocketing the Gulfstream back up in the sky at a 20 degree nose up attitude. With this kind of power, any unsecured drinks in the cabin would end up in someone’s lap.

We made a 90 degree left turn on our climb out from Runway 24 climbing back to 5000 feet to set up on our second approach. Our new course had us tracking parallel to Runway 33 which would be used for our second go-around.

Another feature built into the Gulfstream avionics package is a paperless environment allowing the pilots to bring up Jeppesen approach plates directly on either of the two multi-function displays (MFDs) in the middle of the flight deck. The ability to display approach plates is taken one step farther by directly interfacing with the aircraft’s position which is represented as a green airplane icon displaying the exact location relative to the chart on the screen.

The ILS Runway 33 approach was brought up on the MFD as we accelerated to 200 knots tracking downwind away from the airport. With the NAV radio tuned to 109.70 we turned 180 degrees to intercept the localizer. The Gulfstream descended to 4,200 feet and lined up on a direct course to waypoint VITNB which sits 3780 feet above the Vinton Non-Directional Beacon (NDB). N922H captured the glideslope 9.3 miles from Runway 33 and began its 3 degree descent to the runway.

Roanoke Regional Airport, also known as Woodrum Field, sits at the intersection of highways I-81 and I-581. On this particular day, just beyond I-81 off the end of Runway 33, a raging wildfire had engulfed 2,400 acres of land. From the flight deck, the line of flames in the distance were easily seen scorching the earth. It looked like an orange ribbon clearing a path for empty blackened land.

I returned to my seat in the cabin for the conclusion of the approach. As we slowed to 140 knots and descended through 3000 feet, the EVS screen at my seat told a different story of the fires below. The scorched darkness was illuminated in blinding white light, displaying the intensity of the uncontained wild fire in the distance. Fire fighters spent the week battling the fires before they were fully extinguished.

At 9:09 PM, as we approached 100 feet above runway 33, the pilots advanced the throttles forward, sending the G450 back up into the night’s sky. We banked right to set us back on a course towards Dulles.

To be concluded.