P ATPL, you are now clogging the thread with a bit of a sob story and it is probably a good time to stop. Many many others have been in your boots but had the dignity to lick their wounds privately - preferably with a 12 year old single malt.
Well hopefully it will be of use to others who are thinking "I have thousands of hours, a good training record and have spent the last three weeks flying raw data approaches. That should do it". It might not and therefore spending that extra money on a 747 sim might be wise. Lesson learned as far as I'm concerned.
And just to keep Chief Brody happy, here's a couple of things I learned in the process:
- "speedbird123, what is highest fligh level you can accept for this sector?" caught me off guard during the departure. It's not something you often think about during normal line flying. Might be worth thinking about it based on trip miles while you're in the briefing room
- practicing mostly raw data approaches on Flight Simulator was probably not the best use of my time. You can do that during your day job and let's face it's not so hard. What we never do on the line: raw data complex departure. I definitely found it hard work during the sim check. It's not something that's easy to practice on your own in Flight Sim though, which is were he full 747 sim might be a huge advantage (even for PNF). My departure involved four VORs and an NDB.
- the sim notes you get ahead of the event give you a nice calm speed/pitch/power profile based on intercepting the localiser well below glide slope with Flaps 10. Both myself and my sim partner were vectored to intercept the localiser exactly on glideslope and still descending from downwind leg. Even though we realised it on the intercept vector, it was hard work if you've never flown a 747 before. Watch out for that.
Everything else has been mentioned here before.