Jackdaw
What performance calculations did you do in your former life as an airline pilot? Or did someone else do it for you and you just read the bit of paper with an emergency turn procedure and banged it all into the FMS? When is the last time you sat there with the AFM and actually plotted obstacles and worked out the gradients OEI. I have an excel file that I sometimes use to plot obstacles in order that I can wind adjust a required climb performance gradient - something that airlines never do and nor to APG or Guru or anyone else I know - because I want to understand how the 1000' tailwind I'm about to fly into is going to affect my climb gradient? You don't have to be reliant on these programs to magically tell you if you can make it - I've been working on what we can do out of Cuzco and I wouldn't actually take as much fuel as Guru says I can because I am concerned that in the event of an engine failure at V1 my climb gradient would be significantly degraded by the 30kt katabatic that you are likely to encounter and that the associated turbulence that I would expect may degrade my own ability to fly the profile should a failure occur. So instead of just using Guru and putting as much fuel in as it say I can I have factored these things in and set an appropriate limit. Equally, on a nice day, if I've got a 4200 foot LDA runway, and my LDR is 4100, and I'm fully servicable, and its where the owner wants to go, why wouldn't I land there? Isn't that what being a corporate pilot is all about? That and the drinking and the girls?