Michael Vone's MV Challenge Series
By Shawn Anderson (3 November 2000)
Have you ever wanted to fly from New York to London, or how about tour around Mt. Everest, or even a whole bunch of pre-selected flights with flight plans and navigation already built in? Well, now you can with Michael Vone's MV Challenges. Michael has gone to great lengths to come up with different, fun and exciting adventures. I took my time in looking at quite a few of his challenges and came up with two of my favorites!
Each set of flights has its own flight plan, which is already loaded for you. If you know how to use the GPS, then you are in luck. Look at the images I took while on these flights and you will see how nice it is to have the GPS do most of the work for you, thus giving you more time to look at the scenery, which is stunning for most of the challenges. The flight plans used by the GPS are colored in dark green, so they are easy to see. As you are flying, your course is marked in yellow; you will be able to see if you are on course or not.
My first flight consisted of flying from New York to London
using the Concorde. With the plane sitting on the runway, I was cleared for
takeoff! As I punched the throttle forward, I hit the afterburners which you
have to use or you will never get off the ground. I slowly started gaining
altitude as I switched the GPS on, which acted like my copilot for the entire
flight. I did the flight a couple of times.
Once
in normal mode (simulation
rate) and once in 4X mode. Once out over the water, I really started to gain
speed, pushing towards Mach 1. At around 41,000 feet I set the speed at Mach
1.56, and stayed there for the rest of the flight into London.
When you download these challenges, you will find included all of the weather, flight plans, and different routes you can fly. These are really nice because there are different levels of difficulty to each selected flight. The first flights are generally easy, with others gradually increasing in difficulty which includes different types of weather conditions, turbulence, system failures and much, much more.
My second challenge I reviewed was the Nepal Highlands. This was probably one of the best challenges I have flown so far. Flying the King Air for this trip was a real challenge itself! Once you takeoff, you had better start gaining some serious altitude. Those mountains are high and majestic, and full of surprises!
Here is one thing you should know while flying in the mountains... make sure you know where your airport is and what it looks like. When you get ready to turn home and land, you need to spot a grass or dirt landing strip which is not easy! If you are used to landing on a asphalt or concrete runway, you will definately get quite a bounce when landing here.
All of the challenges use standard scenery and aircraft from FS2000. You do not need to download any additional add-on's, unless otherwise specified in the Readme file.
The installation process is straight forward and easily readable through the included information files, which are in both Word, and Notepad format. Michael has gone to great lengths to provide excellent documentation for all of his projects. These are a must download for any flight simmer who wants a fun flight, or a real challenge. Best of all, there are currently over 30 MV Challenges to choose from so you have no shortage of interesting flights to try!
RATING:
Out of a total of 100 points, I rate this high quality freeware download a 97. Good job Michael Vone! Keep 'em coming!
Shawn Andersonshawn@flightsim.com
To download the MV Challenge series, click Here.