I wake up this morning and hit the gym, ready for my flight to visit relatives in New Hampshire. I work out an itinerary of things I'll be doing in the Great Outdoors during my 2 days off from work at Southwest.
The time comes, and I arrive at the airport around 1800. I've done my walk around and pre flight and my usual meet and greet with the passengers, not even half the 737s capacity today. Oh well, a nice and quiet flight from the nest.
We taxi for a good 20 minutes (even though there was ZERO air traffic, or ground traffic for that matter) and we climb out over the Southern Long Island coast, merely a few miles from John F. Kennedy International. We get the call from ATC to turn right to a heading of 45 degrees in order to itnercept our route up towards Manchester Airport and the Boston/Manchester area.
Back on track and above the clouds at FL 255. I kick my shoes off for a quick 15 minute break before we begin a descent on this short hop.
Looking out to where I watched Retief Goosen win the United States Open a few weeks earlier, I marvel at the beauty of the Hamptons-area of Long Island.
I don't usually snap photos without getting some part of my aircraft in the picture, but I just had to get this full screen shot of the beautiful cloud cover and the sun preparing to set into the Western Horizon. At the same time, the weather made me think that I'd be experiencing a bumpy landing if the cloud cover were low enough around Manchester. I was right.
I got to my approach altitude of about 2,200Ft. and desperately waited for my approach vectors. I was getting closer to the airport and when I was about 12 miles out I got my final clearance. I could not visually spot the runway, something I anticipated would happen. I was semi-prepared, having already dialed in the ILS frequencies and adjusted my instruments accordingly for the Runway 6 approach.
The instruments took over and everything looked fine. It started leveling off and everything looked right on the line until the clouds lifted themselves and showed me I wasn't even close.
I hurriedly disengaged the autopilot and threw her into a steep bank to the left. I could feel a TERRIBLE crosswind as I tried to line her backup again for what turned out to be a VERY short approach. These conditions were not what I would call very ideal.
I battled and battled and managed to handle the pressure. I calmed down when I realized it wasn't going to be such a rough landing after all, just a very tough approach.
I had to land her on the right foot first, but it provided our snoozing passengers in the back with a nice little wake-up.
She came to a pretty quick stop about 3/4 down what wound up being a pretty small runway and I got my permission to park her. As I sit on a nice rock this weekend fishing with a beer and a fresh tin of Apple Skoal I'll be thinking about what would've happened had the clouds not lifted themselves up for that short time before I made my attempt at landing the 737.
Now, it's time to relax and forget about what could've been.
...........and I don't blame you for wanting to leave 
