Belem to Cayenne

Departing Belem for Cayenne – Félix Eboué Airport in Cayenne, French Guiana's main international airport. Cayenne is just a few miles south of Guiana Space Centre, the space launch site used by the European Space Agency (ESA). Here's a virtual tour of their space museum. Here are some things to do in Cayenne.

After a nominal takeoff and climb-out, I'm level at my usual 31,000 foot cruising altitude. Temperature outside is -44C, with a 26 KT left crosswind. On this short flight, I've barely gotten to altitude, and I'm already just a few minutes from the top-of-descent point.

Descending through 5,900 feet, still in the cloud layer, with the ILS approach to runway 08 setup in the panel. I'm heading directly to CYR VOR, which is the initial approach fix.

Just popped out of the bottom of the clouds, bases probably at 5,800 feet, with the airport about 15 nautical miles ahead. The moving map display shows the entire ILS-08 approach all laid out for me, complete with the outbound leg and procedure turn. 

An interesting thing happened, after I captured the last snapshot - the entire ILS approach path disappeared from the moving map on the multi-function display, and the course guidance was no longer being provided on the primary display. So I switched to Plan B: manually tune the ILS and VOR frequencies, fly to the VOR at the airport, turn west and fly the ILS reverse course outbound for 8 miles, while descending to 2,100 feet AGL, then make a procedure turn to reverse course, switch the CDI to LOC1 mode, intercept the ILS, and follow it down to the airport. So now I'm descending through 900 feet, after intercepting the ILS localizer and glideslope. In the real world, with visibility this good, I probably would've simply entered the downwind leg of the traffic pattern and landed, after arriving over the airport.

Rolling out on the runway at Cayenne. After all the excitement of the disappearing ILS approach just moments ago, this somewhat commonplace event felt very satisfying.

On the ramp at Cayenne. I love being able to zoom away from the plane, pan around and see the airport, and other airplanes coming and going, from different perspectives. You can barely see a part of the King Air that landed just after me, now that it's pulled up to the far Jetway by the terminal.

Looking back after the fact, at the snapshot I capture before landing, I realize that the flight plan changed to BGBW-CYFB, which is the route I flew last year, to get from Greenland to Canada. Somehow the simulator replaced my flight plan with that old one. I'm going to have to research this a bit further, to figure out what happened, and if it was because of something I did, to make sure it doesn't happen again.