1321 km In Silent Wings

By Thomas Sevaldrud and Adrian Mesbah (11 September 2006)

On Thursday August 31, 2006 Adrian Mesbah completed the first online 1000 km flight in Silent Wings, and maybe the first simulated 1000 km soaring flight ever?

The flight was made in the Antares 20E self launcher in 10 hours 40 minutes, which resulted in an average speed of 123.9 km/h.

Task Details

The Swiss Lakes:
10:30 am deep in the heart of the German countryside, Donauesching sees the start of our European tour. A quick glide across the hills to Interlaken via Duebendorf to take in the sights of the Swiss lakes.

The Alps:
Skirting the edge of Italy we descend from Switzerland into southern France visiting seven of the most famous peaks in Europe: Aletschhorn, Dom, Monte Rosa, Matterhorn, Mont Blanc, Grand Paradis and Barre Ecrins.

French Riviera:
From the Alps our 4,000 meter descent carries us to Nice on the French Riviera. Thermaling high to maximise the tail wind we turn east covering 250 km out over the big blue Ligurian Sea to Pisa on the Italian coast for a birds eye view of the famous tower.

Italy Coast to Coast:
From Pisa we move northeast over the hills of Tuscany and on toward Ferrara and finally across the plains to beautiful Venice.

Slovenian Hills into Croatia:
Our final sea leg takes us 80 km over the Gulf of Venice skimming the north coast of Croatia as we visit the tree covered peak at Sneznik before turning south for our final glide into the Croatian city of Rijeka.

Here is Ade's own account of the flight:

"Don't ask me why I did this - I wasn't even half way around the task and I was already regreting taking it on! Trouble is when you have already invested 6 hours into something, you tend to think it must be seen right through to the end. I cannot begin to describe the level of effort it has required today to stay focused non-stop - exhausted is a total understatment!

The good news is I completed the task - all 1321.7 km of it - live online in a multiplayer session. Total time for from start to end gate - 10 hours and 40 minutes making the average speed 123.9 km/h.

You guys have produced an incredible sim here - unreal that you can fly endurance in a glider over such a distance of high quality terrain. I used TrackIR Pro 4 for the entire flight - this has been the most awesome immersive experience I've ever had on a sim...and I've been using flight sims etc. for over 20 years (started: Spitfire 40 - Sinclair Spectrum).

Anyway, if anyone beats my time I still get to hold the 'longest non stop unpowered flight' record in the sim! Razz (get Guinness world records on the phone!)

Anyone who does complete this - you'll not regret making the effort."

The task has now been added to the official servers, so you can all have a go at it if you want.

Congratulations to Ade from us at Silent Wings for this impressive flight! As a recognition of this effort we have granted a free license of Silent Wings Viewer to Ade. This has already been put to good use making the screen shots on the bottom of this page.

If you want to have a look for yourself, you can download Ade's IGC log here.