Red's Holkham Christmas Tale

[RedGreen]

It was a busy night at BGSF airport in Greenland. Mechanics tended to the Wright R-3350 radial engines in the bitter cold, while inside the plane cocktail waitresses were powdering their noses and adjusting their Pan-Am uniforms to look just right.

In the pilot's lounge, Red Green was taking a few minutes to relax before his long journey Holkham Bay, but his newspaper reading was interrupted by a large man in red. The man in red asked Red Green if he could transport some Christmas presents to all the good little boys and girls in Holkham Bay. Red told him he'd be delighted to do so, and offered him to come along on the flight. The man in red thanked Red, but told him that he couldn't take him up on the flight. Seems he has his own travel arrangements.

So with bundles of Christmas presents in the cargo hold (as well as a liberal amount of "Christmas Cheer" ) The Pan-American Douglas DC-7C taxied away from the gate at Kangerlussuoq, Greenland for a non-stop trip to Holkham Bay.

[LJ922]

Thanks, Red.

[salt_air]

Merry Christmas Red!

[RedGreen]

The plane and the presents are down safely in Holkham Bay.

Winds varied quite a bit, but were decent for the most part. Only two incidents came up during the flight. First, while leaving Greenland, FS went into "change the damn wind direction and speed every five seconds" mode and threw me into about 15 seconds of overspeed.

The second difficulty occurred about 250 nm from Holkham. When I did this flight last year in CalClassic's older DC-7C model, I didn't do any tank switching at all and made it with about 9% fuel left (due to 20-40 knot headwinds the whole way). This year, with much better winds, I started getting those "Fuel is Critically Low in the Selected Tank" messages...even though I had over 45% of my fuel left. I soon discovered the problem. The plane was drawing from just the main tanks and not the auxillarys. (Oh, those wasically FS airplane modelers!) I was searching frantically for a switch or lever to switch the tanks when I heard the engines start to sputter.

As a last resort, I paused the sim, went into fuel and payload menu, and moved the avgas from the Auxillary tanks to the Mains. I unpaused the sim, and the Wrights mercifully came back to life. I got a red flag from the Duenna for it, but I decided it was preferable to crashing into a mountain while trying to figure out how to get 3500 gallons of perfectly good fuel to some starving radials.

Naturally, five minutes later I finally found the stupid lever. Oh well, better to find this out now than in late Feburary!

Final tally: 8 Hours 14 Minutes 7 Seconds

Now then, no pushing or shoving. There's enough whiskey for everyone.

http://www.fsrtwrace.com/track/ShowF...l3KvtxIdjYgyQU

[salt_air]

Great flight Red!!

Not sure where I heard this,,,,but there's a valve out on the top side of the wing(s) that you can use to select which tanks will be utilized.

Tricky move, but just have one of the crew go out there next time and flip the switch for ya,,,,no worries.

You and the crew head over to the Pilots Lounge and toss back a couple,,,,my treat of course.....

Cheers,