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laska--it's
twice the size of Texas, colder than hell, and one of the
most beautiful places on earth, in a big way. Mt. McKinley is just
one example of Alaska's gargantuan beauty. It's nearly 21,000 feet
high, a mere 6,000 feet shorter than Everest, and the tallest
mountain on the North American continent. All these reasons are
exactly why I felt that I needed to explore it. Before I decided to
do this review I had flown to Alaska maybe two or three times. Each
time it was in a 767 and it was from Seattle or Los Angeles. Needless
to say that I hadn't ever really taken the time to truly explore this
land of snow, ice and beauty.
So one afternoon after I had recently purchased Abacus' Private Pilot I decided to skip on up to Alaska and check it out. I situated myself on the runway at Anchorage International Airport and hopped in an AeroStar 7000 and throttled up. First I decided to take a look at some of the hills that were straight ahead so I climbed to about 14,000 feet, leveled off and looked around. I was astounded at the detail I was seeing. I mean, for someone who is used to seeing the default FS Mesh block that's about one square mile by one square mile, and blander than plain toast, the detail that I was seeing was absolutely amazing. Mr. Denney has simply out done himself this time. As I looked around I could actually see rounded mountains, not the pointy things you see in the default FS.
I was flying south for a while and when I reached water I decided to turn back around and head on a north-northwesterly course. I eventually passed back over my point of origin and kept flying. After flying about 75 nm I noticed something giant looming in the distance. I bet you can't guess what it was...well as far as I could tell it was quite simply the biggest pile of snow I'd ever seen! It was the mighty Mt. McKinley. At this point I couldn't resist doing a wide circle around it. So I climbed back up to about 20,000 feet and leveled off again (the ceiling for the aircraft I was flying was 25,000 feet). I reached this giant and turned off to the left, and turned, and turned again! This thing just didn't end. It was in amazing detail, with the colors of the snowing varying from a plain white to a light grayish tint. After I finished my circle of the mighty mountain I realized that I was running out of fuel as the air was pretty thin at this altitude and I had been climbing a lot so I decided to head back to the airport. I picked up the ILS and touched down softly about two hours after I had taken off from the same airport.
To summarize this article I'd like to say that the man responsible for this, Eddie Denney, it's a blessing to flight simulation. Never has someone taken on a project this big with little help, and this guy is doing it alone! If you take flight simulation seriously at all then you really need to get this. Even if you've got the bare minimum to run FS2000 this won't slow down your frame rates one bit, or if it does you won't notice it unless you're looking at the numbers in front of you as you fly. The only thing that makes this hard to install is that it is composed of eight different files, all of which are between 4.7 and 7.8 megabytes, but trust me it's worth the wait, you will not regret it! Just like in the commercials: it's fast, easy and fun to fly in!
Adam B. Carlson
Download
Eddie Denney's Alaska Terrain Mesh Scenery.
Visit Eddie Denney's RealScene FS Homepage.
air4ce@rightflight.com