The Misty Fjords Phenomenon

A Kind Of Review By Andrew Herd (21 February 2006)

on hands you the book and you sign for the gas. You can see him looking at you out of the corner of his eye. Long time since you bin to Rupert, he remarks, almost under his breath.

Guess there isn't much to bring me down this way now, I guess. You look at him steadily and he turns away.

Maybe you're right, Jim. Yeah, I guess you're right. But... well, you know, huh?

Yeah, you think, you know. You surely do know after all these years, but things change. S' long, Don. Have a good one.

He follows you out of the building, points up at the sky. You gonna fly in this?

Does it look like I ain't intending to, Don? No fly, no money, it's been that way ever since I can recall. Anyway, the plane can smell its own way where we are going, hardly needs me to take it there. And you think, don't be too hard on him, this man pumps gas for a living, he means well. You get to smell the stars.

You gonna bring Janey down here sometime? Donna asked after her. He looks at you with his head on one side. Almost apologetic.

Well, she can keep asking. We got divorced three years ago after a spat over the time I was spending fixing up the plane.

Gee Jim. He shrugs.

Man, it has been a long time. Last time you were down here at this airport that Frank Betts built (PRNCRUPT.ZIP) was six long years ago and a lot has happened since then. That time you had Fred Banting's plane and Misty Moorings didn't even exist. And now...

You complete the preflight of Aerosoft's Beaver and climb in. Yeah, and now. And now what?

Now we are going to fly parts of some machine you never heard of to a mill that only exists as an 'X' on your battered old sectional with a metar has the cloudbase down to 200 feet, but you are going to fly anyway, because if you don't go, you won't get paid and if you don't arrive, no-one will miss you, because all you have left is this plane and your pride.

Maybe they might miss the parts, but they can get some more tomorrow because there will be another fool with a plane who is prepared to fly them out no matter what. On the other hand, they chose you, because you always deliver, no matter what.

You pull the belt tight and crank the engine.

Everyone knows the plane. It has to be wearing one of the most eye-catching schemes out there and it has pulled in a lot of business for the Misty Moorings people, you know that. It has the rare distinction of being a repaint of a repaint of a repaint, the original done by Aerosoft, the repaint by Joe Watson, and the "re-coloration" is by Dan and Doug Linn. You like flying it.

You reach a thousand feet, ease off on the power, back off the revs some and take a look out the right hand window. After you had to sell your first plane to pay off Janey, you were lucky to be able to keep on flying, but there are compensations. Just look at the view out there, huh? You hadn't even heard of the Misty Fjords until a contract took you up there, looking at a product by some company called Microsoft and you just chanced to load up a Caravan at Ketchikan and flew it around some and were amazed to find that such a place existed, despite the fact you had fished steelhead on the Kispiox and the Skeena, which are hardly a million miles away.

Remember fishing Labor Day at the mouth of the Skeena for coho? You were getting one every other cast and half of them cartwheeled across the water and came off in less time than it takes to tell. All of them identical, size, weight, color, as if you were catching the same fish over and over again. Now that was a good day. The weather had promise, not like it does now.

Today is one of those days where you can understand why people move to Florida. You contemplate a wall of cloud looming up ahead. At least it isn't so dense it isn't possible to fly around it. You bank away from the shore and reflect on the fact that some people actually enjoy simulating flights in this kind of weather. You can't help a grin breaking out on your face. I mean, what kind of nut would relax doing that! Gotta be totally brain dead. Women do it too, or so you are told.

You shake your head. Man, there are some strange people out there. Wonder what they tell people their hobby is at dinner.

You have also heard that there is this product called Misty Fjords that a lot of people are going crazy about in Flight Simulation circles and saying how realistic it is and all. They say it covers some vast area from just north of Prince Rupert very nearly to Wrangell at the northwest corner and a good deal beyond Hyder/Stewart at the northeast corner. That Brian Smith guy seemed to like it, but the guys who like to simulate bush flying oughta trying hauling their asses around in thirty year old airplanes when the cloudbase is at sea level half the time and there is magnetic deviation like you can't believe and you can't even rely on the GPS and half the time you are too low to pick up the navaids, so getting lost is a serious possibility. And yet they are queuing up to do what you are doing, only they are doing it for fun and you are doing it for what?

One time you did seriously consider it. Getting lost that is. Just turning west and keeping on going until you were far from land and then rolling that old airplane right onto its back and pulling the stick into your stomach and bye-bye all those difficult moments with the bank and Janey's lawyer and then you thought, shoot, what a waste of gas and you turned back on course. But you got near to doing it.

You spot a ship far below and waggle your wings at it. Some kind of freighter - who knows where it is going or what kind of guys are crewing it. You did that once, when you ran out of money in Saigon and the only way you could think of getting home was serving as a deckhand on a ship headed for Boston. Lucky that they needed crew, you were told the guy you replaced had one argument too many in a bar over a girl and it didn't sound like they reckoned they were going to see him again. The captain certainly wasn't gonna wait and it made you realise how lucky you were being a pilot with the kind of experience you had, because you could always sell your skill somewhere, even if it was doing something you wouldn't necessarily have been proud to tell your mother about.

Misty Fjords, eh? They said that the product was made such a difference to Flight Simulator that you could use it to practice flying VFR around the place. They said that all the shorelines had been corrected by hand and all the lakes large enough to piss in were in their correct positions and all the islands bigger than 20 feet across were in the scenery and all the rivers had been corrected so that none of them did anything crazy like climb the sides of mountains, which was just as well, because it had a phenomenally accurate 38m mesh, so all the mountains looked real too.

You would think that people doing this for fun would fly somewhere flat where the visibility was habitually good enough to see your hand in front of your face, but no, apparently this is what they liked. At least it was better than sitting here on your lonesome with your right elbow freezing against cold glass and your feet sweating in a pair of hiking boots you had worn so long they had learned to love you.

You've been daydreaming again. Bad habit. One time you flew a reciprocal out of Ketchikan and spent a whole hour trying to convince yourself you what you were seeing was what you expected to be seeing, before you came back with your tail between your legs to pick up some more gas and light out the other way. The guy in the tower must have known, but he never said a darned word. Maybe he had seen it too many times before, tired old pilots trying to make it pay.

Anyway, they say this scenery is so well done that where the small streams have more than a certain amount of slope, they have white water and there is a complete road network and they use a thing called landclass to put all the towns and settlements in exactly the right place and even the forestry operations can be seen. There are seaplane pontoons and all kinds of stuff.

Must be really something. Man, look at those clouds. They may be in the way, but they sure are beautiful.

No simulation could ever look like that. No, not even if you used Flight Environment, which isn't supposed to work so well with Misty Fjords, but looks pretty darned good when you install update two and will look even better with update three - but it could never produce a scene as wonderful as the one we are looking at now, because even when the world is being bad, it can be so beautiful. Just a shame it can also be so tough on you if you make a mistake, like that time you went to sleep and woke up looking at a mountain. One more reason to love the Beaver - you still have the twigs that you pulled out of the starboard nav light fixing, or at least, from where the fixing had once been before it chopped a larch in half as you rolled level. You heard that a company called Aerosoft sell a simulation of a Beaver that looks just like the one you are flying now, except it has ski, wheeled, float and tundra-tired versions as well and no less than forty two paint schemes. Some guy told you at dinner that he had found this group who called themselves Misty Moorings and they flew planes that looked just like yours and they had their own website and people were adding all kinds of freeware scenery to it, based on stuff you could find, or might find, in Misty Fjords.

You had heard that the original scenery in Flight Simulator of the area was thought to be pretty good, but this guy said that that was until the Misty Fjords scenery came along, it was a little expensive, but worth every penny and he should know, because he had been dreaming about someone doing something as good in the area for nearly half a decade and you said I'll be damned.

He told you that lakes and rivers could be made to freeze in winter and you just laughed out loud. In a simulator? you said. In a flight simulator, you can freeze the lakes? Well, there's a thing, huh?

Next thing you'll be telling me that the streams look real in winter and the trees too.

No kidding ? Bet they got ships that sail around as well, cruise liners and fishing boats?

They have those too? Well, unless you had told me I wouldn't have believed such a thing was possible. There I go hauling fishermen and hunters into places no aircraft should be put all day long and you are telling me that there are virtual bush pilots who come home and do the same thing to wind down after work? Man, you have to be putting me on.

A virtual crash hurts less. You still sweat when you think how close that mountain was when you hauled the stick onto your left hip and felt the plane shudder its way along the brink of a stall with every rivet complaining. Every now and again when you get the feeling you know something about flying you go back and look at that place and imagine how it would look with a big scar up there on the mountainside where some fool crashed a plane in nearly broad daylight.

You throw one of those old photos another pilot once took of your plane near Ketchikan and you tell him, okay, I bet it doesn't look like that.

And he looks at you straight and he drains his whisky and he says, yes sir, I can promise you that it does look just like that. Furthermore, when you fly out of the airport, you can see speedboats and cruiseships moving on the water and the buoys have lights on them - it even has all the glaciers and the snow persists at higher elevations right through most of the year just like it does in real life.

Which seems incredible. You reply, you are telling me that I can get a simulation of my plane for a lousy $24.00 and a scenery for $48.00 that looks as good as that and people aren't rushing out to buy the combination?

To which he says well, it seems to be doing okay, considering there aren't that many Flight Simulator addons that have their own fan club.

They gotta be a real bunch of long hairs and layabouts, right?

No, no, he says, there are some extremely credible people involved, the likes of Bill Womack, Mark Smith, Bill Dick, Bob Lagendorfer, Mitsuya Hamaguchi, Leon Louis and Don Moser, so it looks to be on a total roll. One of Womack's sceneries is actually included in the installation, a place called Antelope Trail Ranch and there are seventeen US Forest Service cabins too. You get all the radio masts and other antennae, five airfields and twenty one seaplane bases to visit.

Sounds kind of neat. It er... must demand a reasonably powerful computer to run it then?

Yeah, he says, you really need at least a 1.8 Ghz system with a good graphics card and if you run with the kind of cloud you can see in the shots, you may need an even faster system as it can challenge a 3 Gig machine.

Must be all that sophisticated mesh. Is that a yacht I can see down there? you ask.

He puts his glass down. I think it must be, he says, slowly, I didn't realise that there were any of those in there. I do know that it has hunters cabins and custom seasonal textures (thanks to the cooperation of Ruud Faber at FScene) and most of the harbors and lighthouses and that the cruise ships have animations like moving radar and night lighting and if you follow them for long enough they actually sail the Inside Passage. On top of that the Misty Moorings people have put together a huge amount of additional free scenery that you can download and install so that you could just about spend your entire life flying around there and never see the same place twice. And they have provided AI traffic and FS Navigator flight plans and briefings for flights you could make and there's even a forum where you can talk about stuff you have seen and done and -

You hold up a hand. Enough, already.

One more thing, he says.

You look out the side window and there is the mill. You pull the throttle and push her back into fine pitch. Nice lady lives down there, lost her husband a few years back. Bet there is good fishing below those falls, too. It might be worth staying a little longer, this time.

The guy is still trying to get your attention. Okay, okay, you say, but tell me quick, Remember I have to land this thing.

Just one thing, he says, small, but it is quite extraordinary.

Which is?

They are cooperating.

What? you snort. Now c'mon. You can stomach just about anything, even the idea that someone sitting at a computer on the other side of the world could pretend to be you, but the idea of flight simmers actually co-operating? Now that is just totally unreal, you tell him, as you drop some flap.

He says they are doing this because the whole Misty Fjords thing is such an outstanding idea, it has crystallised the ideas of a lot of people in the FS community behind it. Misty Moorings appears to be something special, a loose association of freeware authors who have drawn their inspiration from a payware scenery and as far as he can recall, nothing like this has ever happened before. Normally these things die before they have lived, but this one looks as if it is going to grow and grow, which it richly deserves to, because the team behind it have set it up so well. There should be more projects like it. Best yet is with a little effort, you can use it with Naji Chehabeddine's bush scenery packages and there are instructions about how to do that given in one of the Misty Fjords folders.

Really? you say, easing back on the stick as the Beaver drops towards the water surface. Do you reckon Holger Sandmann's Misty Fjords and Misty Moorings might be in line for some kind of awards, then?

Guess so.

Andrew Herd
andy@flightsim.com

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