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I've had the iFly 737 for a few months now (couldn't bring myself to pay the high price for the PMDG), but only have a few flights in it. I've been looking for some flights to do in order to get more comfortable with it, and when I came across a video on Youtube of the Alaska Airlines milk run, I knew it would be a perfect opportunity. I believe the milk run is a pretty well known route in the aviation industry, but if you're not familiar with it the route starts in Seattle, stops at the small Alaskan towns of Ketchikan, Wrangell and Petersburg before making final stops in Juneau and Anchorage. There is also a route that goes in reverse order as well. No better way to get comfortable with a complicated airplane than flying difficult approaches through high terrain!

Here is leg one of our trip as we go from Seattle-Tacoma to Ketchikan, Alaska. At nearly two hours long this is the longest leg of the milk run.

Taxiing out at Seattle as an American 737 departs in the background heading to JFK

Climbing off of 16L. It wasn't as cloudy as I expected, so we had a nice view of Seattle on our climb out

Catching one last view of the nice scenery before going above the cloud layer that would be with us during the rest of the flight

A rare break in the clouds as we near our cruise altitude

The flight deck of the 737

Clouds are still holding strong as we descend into Ketchikan

Getting a nice view of the Alaskan scenery as we near the airport

Established on the ILS for runway 11, heading for a surprisingly smooth touchdown considering how much I've flown this

Welcome to Ketchikan

Some company joining us on the ramp. I had my Ultimate Traffic Live going and heard the AI version of Alaska 65 taxiing in Seattle, so that may be our counterpart on the ramp

The next three legs are all pretty short, and a few involve difficult approaches, so that will certainly test my ability with the 737. Thanks for viewing!

Michael, I'm sure those cabbies had to deal with a lot of unpaid fares before developing that process, lol!

The program I'm using has up to date schedules, and a quick look at Flight Aware shows it's still an active route with Allegiant. I know ULCC's often try to fly to the cheaper airports to keep costs down, but I am very surprised to see just how many secondary and regional airports Allegiant flies to compared to some of the others like Spirit and Frontier. I have a schedule of 12 flights so far, and the only main airport on the schedule is Las Vegas. Otherwise it's all smaller regional airports.

One of the things that really interested me with Simbitworld's 'A Pilot's Life' was that it would generate a schedule for you so you didn't have to worry about deciding where you wanted to fly next, and and so you could explore airports that you normally wouldn't fly to. Such is the case today as we fly from Las Vegas to Rockford, which is about 90 miles west of Chicago. Since I was "hired" by Allegiant, I'll be doing a lot of flying out of Las Vegas, so I thought FSDreamTeam's KLAS scenery would be a good investment, and I wasn't wrong.

Loading up at Gate A12 and getting ready for our 2:55pm departure

Pushing back a few minutes early which is never a bad thing

Climbing off of 8L leaving all of the bad decisions everyone made in Vegas behind

FO's view of the Colorado River as we continue the climb

Cruising at FL350 as we pass over Colorado

Passing Omaha, Nebraska

Descending over a cloudy Illinois

Cloudy and bumpy arrival tonight

On final for runway 25. The dusk arrival didn't disappoint

After a bumpy approach and an even bumpier landing, I have a feeling these folks will be flying Southwest or United on their next trip to the Chicago area

Thanks for viewing!

Great post and shots! Welcome back!! ;)

 

BTW: The slow FPS you mentioned is the main reason I'm primarily flying P3D Ver 4.5 right now. I have a ton of ORBX scenery and it just tore up my frame speed so badly it was hard to even "fly!" :eek::eek: And I do have what I consider an above average computer set-up.

 

I never understood what DirectX 10 did other than the "preview" that came with FSX. When I tried that it made many or most of my buildings turn black. When I asked about it online, several others commented they had the same issue with DirectX 10 preview and suggested I turn it off. Which I did and the color came back in my scenery but the FPS speed was still way slow. I never tried the actual for sale version of DirectX 10. In fact, I don't recall ever noticing it being advertised. I'm glad it works so well for you!!

 

Like everyone else I'm hugely interested in how 2020 turns out!!!;) But I'll not change much until I see a bunch of positive reviews on 2020 from actual simmers, not just those who are being paid to say nice things.

 

Michael

I had to do a little digging, but once I did I was able to find a lot of info on DirectX 10 that made my decision easier. I'm doing the same as you with FS2020, I think I have my wife on board with me upgrading to be able to run it, but I'm going to wait a bit to see how it performs first,so I'll be in FSX for the forseeable future.

Looks like my GPU (Nvidia GTX1050 mobile) is low-range then: I have the Fixer. If I use DX10, I get blurries everywhere, while I get none with DX9.

I have a GTX 980 now, but I previously had a GTX 1050 which I thought did pretty well with FSX. If you haven't already, I would do a Google search for the DirectX 10 how-to guide that will walk you through the setup process including necessary tweaks to your FSX config file, as well as nVidia Inspector settings. It only took an hour or so to set up, and a few hours of tweaking settings to get it right, but it was worth the time.

Thanks, Adam and David!

The shots look great. Never really understood the whole DirectX10 thing.

David, essentially what DirectX 10 does, aside from providing better visuals, is it takes some of the strain off of the CPU and puts it on the GPU which in turn means the CPU-heavy FSX can become more stable if you have a mid-range or better graphics card. From what I've read FSX was rushed into production, but DirectX 10 was not completely finished being produced at rollout of the game, so they put in a preview mode that had a lot of bugs and planned to fix it later which of course we know didn't happen. A guy named Steve made a fixer that resolved almost all of the problems with DirectX 10 allowing it to be used in FSX. The fixer and the cloud shadows cost less than $20, and was also very easy to install. I followed a how-to guide and had no issues.

Little back story here, and I won't be offended if you just scroll past and look at the pictures. I spent all of my younger years simming in FS9, however in 2012 my computer crashed and I didn't have the funds to replace it with anything decent. I bought a pretty cheap desktop just to pay bills and I forgot about flight sim for a while. Fast forward to 2018 and the itch was back, but I was still stuck with that store bought computer that could barely run FS9, however I did it anyway slowly upgrading my PC as much as it would allow along the way.

Finally in 2019, after a GPU, CPU and memory upgrade I decided to make the jump to FSX 13 years after everyone else did. Since then I've been battling the performance issues that have plagued us all, one day thinking I solved my issues and the next day taking off out of a busy airport with single-digit FPS. After lots of frustration with the performance I decided once again to "upgrade", this time by changing to DirectX 10 and installing the DirectX 10 fixer with cloud shadows. It took a few days, but it's finally stable and I'm really impressed with the results! Everything is much more crisp, the shadows in the cockpit and on the ground are awesome, and most importantly my FPS and overall stability has improved significantly.

Also of note I purchased Simbitworld's A Pilot's Life over the weekend while it was on sale at Simmarket. I never heard of it before, but I have to say it's really awesome so far. That will explain why I'm flying the Allegiant a320. Sorry for the long post, but here are some shots after the upgrade.

Glad I’m not the only one who feared the FMC! Having said that, if anyone is still hesitant I would give it a try. Do some research on reading charts, watch a few tutorials and you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to program. The first FMC flight I did was from Philly to Charlotte with the 757, and I remember after touching down thinking to myself “that’s what I was worried about?” It’s still nice to fly using FSX default navigation with my GA aircraft, a lot less prep needed, but when flying airliners I can’t do it without the FMC.

Now my next mental hurdle I need to clear is flying on VATSIM.

Thanks, guys!

Nicely done! I to have been putting off really learning the FMC. I even have the basic instructions printed. One of these days I will get serious about it.

I know there are some freeware FMC options, but at $15 I would highly recommend this add-on as a good place to start with the FMC. It has enough so you get a good grasp of how to program an FMC, but it's not so advanced that you are preflighting the aircraft for 30 minutes. Plus, if you decide the FMC isn't for you, you can upload FSX flightplans right to the FMC and fly using default navigation and ATC.

I've spent much of my flight sim time over the years flying aircraft that did not have an FMC as I thought the process of learning it was too much. About nine months ago I decided to give the QualityWings 757 a try since it had an FMC, but was also able to fly using FSX flight plans. I'm glad I gave it a try because it's an awesome add-on, and the simplified FMC was perfect to learn on in order to move on to the more advanced aircraft I've since purchased.

Now onto the flight. I remember as a kid flying on an America West 757, I'm pretty sure it was to Las Vegas, and I immediately took a liking to the livery. I'm not sure what it is, but it's my favorite livery of any airline and I was sad to see it go when they merged with US Air. The beauty of flight sim though is that you can fly anything you want, so today we are flying the America West 757 on a morning flight from Denver to Las Vegas.

Ground crew loading up the plane as I fumble around in the cockpit trying to remember all of the preflight items

Climbing out of Denver we cleared a high cloud layer in time to enjoy a view of the Rockies

Flight deck of the 757 with the "retro" panel as QW calls it

The view was very similar to this for much of the flight

We had to enter a hold over Lake Meade in order to lose some altitude

Turning over the final waypoint on the SITEE4 arrival with a great view of Las Vegas and McCarran Intl

Visual approach to 19L

Seconds away from a pretty smooth touchdown

Welcome to Las Vegas!

I think I mentioned this before, but I took a break from flying recently and just within the last few weeks started getting back into it. Up until now my flights were all GA flights, so it's been a bit since I've flown an airliner. I decided to shake off the rust today and fly from Fort Lauderdale to Raleigh-Durham as Spirit Wings 495. Looking at the real world radar prior to departure, and seeing that the real world counterpart for this flight took off with no issues not long before I did, I figured weather wouldn't be much of a factor with the hurricane being off the coast. But Florida did what Florida does, and provided us with a bumpy, stormy departure. Also, my rust caught up to me on landing, so there are no landing shots.

Holding short of runway 28R waiting for a Delta a320 from JFK to land

Passenger view as we turn on course over Fort Lauderdale shortly after takeoff

There's those storms we weren't really expecting...

Fighting our way through as we climb up to FL360

We finally broke through around FL300, but as you can see from this picture taken at our cruising altitude of FL360, we still had to deal with tops several thousand feet higher than we were

The flight deck of the a320

Descending into Raleigh on the MALNR 4 arrival

Getting a good view of RDU as we continue on the arrival. We're landing from the other side tonight

Preparing to join the ILS approach to 23R

Welcome to Raleigh

Thanks for viewing!

After a short stay in St. Petersburg it was time to get the Baron back in the air and heading north before Hurricane Isaias arrived. We departed Albert Whitted Airport before dawn and made the 1.5 hour trip to Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. After dodging some storms on departure the weather was fairly calm for the remainder of the flight before arriving in a cloudy Hilton Head.

Enjoy the pictures!

Chris - Very nice pics and storyline to go with them! I, too, enjoy the Baron!

 

14 posts in 9 years, don't be shy around here! :rolleyes:

 

Rick :cool:

Thanks, Rick! For over eight of those years I didn't post anything so all 14 posts have come since March, lol!

Fantastic flight across Florida and those summer storms. Is that Orbx scenery?

Thanks, David! I use both Ground Environment X and Ultimate Terrain X.

I enjoy flying different aircraft in the sim, both GA and airliners, but at the end of the day my favorite plane to fly is the Baron 58. This evening I took the Baron from Melbourne Beach across the state of Florida to Albert Whitted Airport in St. Pete. There was a line of storms moving across the middle of the state, but on both the real world radar, as well as the Active Sky radar, it looked like it was starting to lose strength. You know what they say though, looks can be deceiving.

Climbing off of runway 9R into a calm evening sky in Melbourne Beach

Turning on course over the beach

Getting a good look at the storm. We could deviate about 20 or so miles to the south and go around it, but what's the fun in that?

Approaching the leading edge of the storm, still calm air, no rain and only a few flashes of lightening. I think we made a good call going through the storm

It was right about here that I realized we made a terrible call. We got bounced around pretty good for about 15 minutes

That's not a texture loss issue, I happened to catch some lightening lighting up the side of the plane

We finally broke through just as we're approaching the west coast of Florida and the St. Petersburg area

Sure we almost died getting here, but check out the view!

Coming in a bit low on final. Those don't look like palm trees to me...

One last view of the thunderstorm we conquered

Well that was fun. Thanks for viewing!

I've been wanting to check out Jackson Hole, Wyoming for a while now so I figured it would be a good chance to get some more time in the SR22. We took off from Bozeman, Montana and took a bit of an indirect route to Jackson Hole that probably added 20 extra minutes to the flight, but I rarely fly in this area so it was nice to see different scenery. Weather was clear and calm in both places so the flight was pretty straight forward.

Thanks for viewing!

Looking good! What weather engine do you use?

Thanks, David! I use Active Sky 16 with textures from REX-4. Thanks for the comments everyone!