Entering the right turn I feed in a bit of rudder and hope I’ve judged the wind right. Fortunately the winds are very light and blowing nearly straight down the runway. With a bunch of wind out of the west (from the right) judging this final turn can be a tricky affair in real life.
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With a nice little thump we have arrived in Washington (actually Virginia if we want to be technically accurate!). The speed brakes extend and I deploy the thrust reverses, barely having to touch the brakes to turn off at the intersection of runway 19 and 22.
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Pulling up to the gate I look at the FMS summary of the flight and see we’ve spent 1 hour, 36 minutes aloft and burned 4343 lbs. of fuel with an average true airspeed of 351 knots and an average ground speed of 298 knots. A more proficient pilot could have improved those numbers by staying high longer and flying closer to the airspeed margins (in cruise I was a good 15 to 20 knots slower than I could have been). After starting the APU I shut down the engines, tidy up the cockpit according to the checklist and the passengers are offloaded.
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The feelThere PIC ERJ-145LR was a joy to fly. The modern avionics and electronic gadgetry belie an aircraft with good old fashioned flying characteristics. The aircraft responds nicely to the control inputs, taxies comfortably and responds to the autopilot commands with precision. The panels and sounds effects are top notch (I love the APU shutdown sound!) although you do have to believe you are flying an aircraft straight out of the factory since not a scratch exists on the surfaces. In real life these aircraft are workhorses, completing many, many cycles each day in their role of feeding passengers into the hub structure. The avionics modes and FMS are really done well and the rather “light” treatment that the manual gives them doesn’t really do them justice. If you are looking for a modern and fast way to move up to 50 passengers around your route structure, the feelThere ERJ-145 is a great choice.
Reviewer’s System Specs
- Alienware Pentium 4, 3.4GHz
- 2 GB DDR2 SDRAM
- NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT PCI Express 256MB
- CH Flight Yoke and Pro Pedals
Note: For illustrative purposes some of the images in this 3-part series were cropped or in order to highlight certain aspects of the software. All images were captured at 1280 x 1024 with no FSAA and were reduced in size and quality for bandwidth purposes.
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