Viva Las Vega$!

aloft

aloft

New Member
I'm flying to Vegas on Monday for Civil Air Patrol's annual national conference and welcome any advice from the peanut gallery. Am going into North Las Vegas (VGT) to avoid the heinous ramp fees at McCarran.

Planned route from San Diego is JLI - V514 - GFS - CRESO then vectors for VGT. Planning on 9500' cruise alt to take advantage of favorable winds on the way there, and 8500 (or 6500 if I can get away with it, to minimize headwinds) for the return.

Should be a fun trip. Comments?
 
Advice on what?


Strippers?
BlackJack?
Bars?

Not of course that I would have any experience with the above mentioned items.
 
Make sure you ride the "Big Shot" on top of the Statosphere Hotel..that thing will scare the sh*t out of you..its a fun ride, but the fact that it sits on top of a skyscraper makes it much much cooler....
 
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I'm flying to Vegas on Monday for Civil Air Patrol's annual national conference and welcome any advice from the peanut gallery.

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Be careful with the "running of the gauntlet"...

Oops, wrong Vegas flying convention...
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[ QUOTE ]
Should be a fun trip. Comments?

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They waive the ramp fee at LAS if you purchase fuel.

Overall very nice flight; kind of bumpy with up and down drafts when I did it. We went to 10500' on the way back for 20 min or so because of the turbulence.... it was HOT, DA was up around 13500'
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. Started feeling light headed so we went back down to 8500
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Have fun!
 
VGT was the destination of the last X-Country I did a week or so ago. Only advice I could give would be to take a good look at TAC for that airspace if you haven't been in before. Also, the self serve fuel at the island was 20 cents cheaper. Have fun!
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Advice on what?

Strippers?
BlackJack?
Bars?

[/ QUOTE ]
Nah, I'm good-to-go on all those.
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I will settle, however, for a discussion on leaning strategies. I'd rather not repeat last summer's embarrassing plug-fouling episode at Lake Tahoe and given an expected density altitude of around 5000' at VGT tomorrow (in the midst of forecast isolated thunderstorms, which I'm not particularly amused by), I'm interested in best practices for the arrival phase to a moderately high DA. If I'm leaned for 9500' in cruise, I'll need to enrich the mixture to some extent for my arrival, but certainly not full rich. Any tips from you high-flyers?
 
do you have a good EGT gage? or doing it by sound?

if you are doing it by sound pull that baby out till you feel i mean REALLLLLYYYY fell the engine start to choke then push it in about 1/4 inch or so, then keep it there, on the way down, slide it is very slowly you shoudl not even notice the chance as you head down. and ALWAYS taxi with it pulled out almost to engine shut down level
 
Did VGT 4 times last year. Heard phone numbers given by tower on two of the occasions. Take a good hard look at the charts.

The departure procedure out of VGT is quite interesting. They'd give us a modified version of the plate. You turn 250, and then intercept 310 outbound, but they let you turn inbound before 15dme if you meet certain altituded by the time you're inbound to the vor.

Be "very" ready to copy.
 
I'll be using flight following and hoping for vectors over McCarran through the class bravo, but I have the Rocks 1 VFR arrival plugged into my GPS just in case. Has Vegas Approach ever told you to get bent and made you circumnavigate the class bravo to get to VGT or are they pretty cool about transiting the airspace?

Thanks for the tips, Eagle; unfortunately, this particular aircraft does not have an EGT gauge so your advice will definitely help. I also found some good advice in Sparky Imeson's Mountain Flying Bible (awesome book, I highly recommend it); for arrivals at high DA airports, he suggests to re-lean for best power once you get down to pattern altitude and then leave it there for landing.

Regarding Ed and his brushes with hypoxia, I picked up one of those FlightStat pulse oximeters to see what sort of oxygen saturation levels I'm getting at altitude, mostly to see if I need to invest in a supplemental oxygen setup for higher-than-usual flights like this. I let everyone know my findings.
 
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Has Vegas Approach ever told you to get bent and made you circumnavigate the class bravo to get to VGT or are they pretty cool about transiting the airspace?


[/ QUOTE ] I've never flown VFR into VGT (always on an IFR flight plan). However, instead of absolute headings, they like to (if VMC prevails) have you overfly parts of Las Vegas. Get the airport diagram for McCarren, because they'll probably have you overfly the numbers on the east end of one of the runways. Also, I think there are a couple of casinos they like to use for waypoints.
 
Everytime I've flown to Vegas, they've had everyone fly direct to the Stratosphere. The first time I flew there, I had no clue where it was, but I was 30 miles out so I headed toward the bright lights of the strip figuring it had to be somewhere near the strip. When I was about 15 miles out, they said turn 15 degrees right and there was the Stratosphere in the middle of my windscreen. The stratosphere is a few miles north of the main strip.
 
Go IFR
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Or heck, if you want VFR, at least request vectors for a practice approach when you get near, so you won't get lost, and some good IFR practice as well.

Without EGT leaning can be fun, but you'll have lotsa time to play with it. That's easy enough to do in the pattern. But if you leave it there, and do a lot of taxi around at low power settings, it will start to foul up a bit. Also, don't forget to lean when you start to leave. Don't go to full rich on either landing or takeoff, just because your used to it!

Take a corp. 182 up there and find another member to help share the minor operating cost. There has to be a bunch of them down there, there has been one flying around WVI for the last few days constantly. If you see anyone I know, tell 'em I said howdy.

Josh

(don't forget to get a lot of $1 bills
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)
 
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