PIREP Straw-3 Anchorage - Great Falls, MT - Anchorage

Hi Sandy.

I finally made it happen to fly this Straw-3 assignment.

We left Anchorage with a complete empty B744F and climbed to FL410 via
step climbs assigned by ATC. Blocks off was at 16:58 UTC and it was a
nice flight beginning during sunrise. We arrived Great Falls and made
an ILS 03 approach. It was an uncommon approach, because we were too
high on the approach, but we were empty and so we decided to fly a
steep approach and see, whether we could get back onto the glide
slope, which happened during short final and we flared a little and
set in on the runway and engaged the reversers and also with breaks
applied we were able to leave the runway via taxiway E. We were
ordered to taxi to the ramp between taxiways B-A and then we saw all
this straw standing by on these palettes ready to ship into this big
bird. Blocks on at 20:12 UTC.
Soon the ground handling crew start loading the straw onto the main
cargo deck via the left rear cargo door.

Photo: Tower view of the 747 being loaded at Great Falls. Note the F-16 doing a touch and go.

We weren’t the only ones busy at Great Falls, because some F-16's were
coning and going, this gave us some time for plane spotting during
loading the aircraft. The flight plan for the return flight was
already done and the cockpit was set for the flight back to ANC.

At 21:58 we were pushed back and begun starting the engines 1-4-2-3
and soon we were ready to taxi to RWY 21 for departure. We were lucky
about this circumstance so we had very little taxi time. We
immediately received take off clearance so we lined up and set take
off power and off we went. This time we only flew at FL380 on the
flight back and as we were close to Anchorage ATC assigned us a lower
FL and short time followed by the announcement we should expect an ILS
14 landing vectors to final, which we denied and selected the ANC 283
radial 18 DME Arc (IVANN IAF) and so we were cleared directly to ANC
VOR ;-)

As we passed Anchorage still at above 10000 feet we were handed over
to Anchorage tower, but we stayed on the approach frequency to monitor
this frequency to avoid surprises with other traffic. As we were about
to turn inbound to the ILS we switched to Tower and made contact. We
were cleared inbound and we set flaps, lowered the gear, set auto
breaks to 3. After landing we had a really short taxi to our ramp and
all other cargo ramps were also empty - the total opposite as we left
;-)

Photo: Final approach to Anchorage runway 14.

So, the 900 bales of straw are at Anchorage and shortly they should be
in our storage area and ready for shipping to the checkpoints...

Christian