Recently I tried my hand at making two short YouTube videos to visualize two of the flights from In a Moon’s Course, my flightsim ebook about the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA). So I thought I would share links to them here.

 

The first video ‘

’ is one of my favorite scenic routings – a flight in a PBY ‘Catalina’ flying boat north from Greenock, a key centre for Catalina ferry deliveries, to Sullom Voe in The Shetlands.

 

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The picturesque route of this delivery is along the Great Glen; Lochs Linnhe, Lochy, Oich and Loch Ness and then up the east coast to the Shetlands.

 

Over 500 PBYs were ferried during WWII across the Atlantic, many arriving at the Greenock seaplane base west of Glasgow for armament and operational equipment fitting, after which they were distributed to military operating units. While flying boat deliveries were only a small percentage of the 300,000 aircraft movements made by the ATA, Lettice Curtiss wrote about them in her book ‘The Forgotten Pilots’. She noted how pleasant these ‘boat’ delivery flights could be in good weather – unhurried, as the aircraft are not fast, with coastal routings and gorgeous views. I hope I have done justice to this in my video. I used the Abacus PBY Catalina with Garry Smith’s RAF livery.

 

The second video, ‘

’, is (for me) the quite fascinating VFR flight from Chattis Hill to Colerne made by Ann Welch on 3 February 1942 in bad visibility and low cloud ceiling.

 

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The story is given in Giles Whitell’s book ‘Spitfire Women’. It was mentioned in one of the earlier ‘Fly & Deliver’ articles on http://www.flightsim.com (see flydeliver2.zip in the library) but more complete details are given in my ebook. I used the A2A Simulations Spitfire Mark I.

 

As a ‘video novice’ I used simple freeware tools for these videos; FS Recorder to capture the flights for replay, EzVid for the video capture and Audacity Sound Editor and Microsoft Movie Maker for the sound and video editing. They are not ‘fancy’ videos. I can now see the value of more versatile video support software for FSX and editing tools and will have to look at these if I make any more, so any advice would be appreciated. I am still a little amazed that I can follow tutorials on YouTube and pull a video together!

 

I hope you enjoy them.

 

Allan Jones

allanj12@gmail.com

http://moonscourse.blogspot.ca

 

Allan Jones is the author of In a Moon’s Course, an ebook of World War II flight stories/plans of the Air Transport Auxiliary, available at Amazon, Kobo, W.H. Smith and other ebook online suppliers.