Bossspecops

I've been tweaking the .cfg file of the 'Aries' Lancaster to get the fuel tankage and payload about right, and that's not going too bad, but I'm still waiting for my 'inside source' to come up with the proper insignia on the RW aircraft. I'll post the various fields I'll visit ahead of time, and I'll try and up grade the default scenery for each one. I tried that for the FSX Shawbury scenery and the 'update' was TERRIBLE, so it's gone, the default place is simpler but looks better. Thanks for letting me use the Club titling for the flight too.

I've already got all those bits thanks, what I can't do is FIND the darn file yet. Boeing test flew a CH-47 with those large rotor off-loading wings quite a while ago. It didn't have the add-on pushers though.

After doing the circumnavigation in 'Austral Rose', I got a bit of a taste for such silly things and looked up a few historic flights around the, world. Amazingly I came across one that was quite close to home, as it were. My youngest daughter, Anita, is a Warrant Officer in the RAF and she's at RAF Shawbury in Staffordshire, about 85 miles north from me, and she's heading up a programme to produce a new training syllabus for all the RAF Air Traffic and Fighter Controllers. Back in 1944 a rather special tweaked Lancaster called 'Aries' flew around the world westbound starting from Shawbury, and the main cafe/restaurant on the station is called 'The Aries Cafe'. They also have an 'Aries Event' there every year, where they present awards and have a darn good dinner too. A few years ago Anita invited me to go along to the event and it was rather splendid to say the least. As a result of this I've decided to re-fly the 'Aries' flight in FSX, as I know all the airfields she used, and there's quite a few reasonable FSX Lancasters available, even though I can't find one exactly like 'Aries'. I've done a boiler-plate repaint of a civilian Lancastrian, which looks a lot more like 'Aries' than the usual WWII Lancaster bombers, and Anita's finding some more info on the aeroplane from the station historian up there. What it is to have friends in high places, eh? I'll probably start a new thread for the flight itself, and I'd like to post it under the 'Club Chachapoya' label if I may? This is the 'Aries' repaint as far as I've got so far.

That's a GREAT link, thanks so much. I watched the whole series and learnt a lot more of the USN's airship programme than I knew before. I SO wish I'd been born early enough to see one of the big airships, the British R100 being my fave of the period, mainly because Barnes Wallis was involved in its design. I've seen a couple of the Goodyear blimps over here, and I once saw the tiny, all British airship 'Bournemouth', cruising right over my parent's house at RAF Abingdon when I was about 10 or 11.

At first it was a relief at not having to arrange yet ANOTHER flightplan around predicted weather and restriction zones, and then a big ego boost because I'd DONE it! Something I never thought I would do, or even need to. But having taken the decision to fly out to Oz in the first place, it would have been silly to come back the same way. But thanks to Melo and my/our contacts in the USN I made it. 'Austral Rose' is surely due a D Check now though, maybe an E, F, G, H, I, J & K check too!

It'd be coffee in my case, I drank my last cup of tea on Sept 3rd 1965, at b'fast at my parent's house the day I got married (the first time.......) Whatever I fly I want it to be something larger, with more engines, more space, a higher moment of inertia, and a GOOD autopilot. I'm tempted by the Aerosoft Boeing 314, which I have filed away somewhere on my archive drive. A very complex model, but very satisfying when you master its complexities.

And I FINALLY made it home! And no apologies for this leg being pic heavy........... Starting off the MilOps side if the Gib runway required taxying all the way back down to the west end before turning for take-off. Naturally there was one suicidal car driver who dashed across the road right ahead of me! Sitting there at the 09 threshold makes you realise just how BIG that lump of rock is! But I was soon up and away, and it was bye-bye Gib. Because of the Spanish air space restrictions I had to fly up the coast quite a way before I could turn in on a more direct path home. But as soon as I made that turn off the coast the true nature of mid-Spain became apparent. It's a very rough and bleak looking country, and hardly farmed at all, at least not that I could see any farming from up there. Toward the centre of the country, and passing west of Madrid, the capital, I came across this hefty river, and it turned out it was called the Aulencia River. Heading on further north and approaching the northern Spanish coast at Santander, I came across this inviting looking lake, called Embalis del Ebro apparently, but I was eager to be home and didn't do a 'splash and go' there. And shortly afterward I reached the coast at Santander, a major ferry port for sailings from the UK and Ireland. I went there once en route to see my youngest brother who lives in the South of France, and it's a much shorter drive from Santander than it is from Le Havre or Caen! From there it was a straight north flight across the Bay of Biscay, well known for its rough weather, which I luckily missed on this occasion. And the coast of France loomed up after 2 hrs or so of Flying. That's the southern coast of West Brittany there, and very welcome it was too. It took a very short time to cross that narrow bit of France and soon it was 'Next Stop England' time as France receded into the distance. And before long I was back over my home country! That's Portland Bill down below me, and a very welcome sight it was too. Naturally, this being England I'm flying over, after a very short while it started to cloud over and soon I was out of sight of the surface yet again. And pretty soon after that I was out of sight of EVERYthing, total IMC conditions! Carefully letting down, I cleared the cloud base right over Chew Valley Lake, a reservoir built in the 50s to feed Bristol's water supply and has since become a wild life centre as well. Travelling further north west, and just to the west of Bristol itself I crossed the M5 motorway on its massive bridge across the River Avon (That's NOT Shakespeare's Avon, there's 4 of 5 of them in the UK....) before heading out into the Bristol Channel. The FSX bridge is nowhere near as impressive as the real thing sadly. By now I was down to less than 100 ft above sea level and as I turned up-river I came down even lower, to 50 ft or less, to do my usual 'Bridge Pass Flight' on suitable occasions. Here I'm just going under the New Severn Bridge, an architectural monstrosity to my mind........ An then turning a little to the north east toward the older and much better looking Old Severn Bridge. This one too was treated to an 'under fly' before I turned onto the approach for Dean Forest Regional. One plus point about doing such bridge passes in an amphibian is that it doesn't matter quite so much if I get a little TOO low. And here it is, my 'home field', and a very welcome sight it was too. My house is just about under the red arrow there. Naturally I plonked 'Austral Rose' pretty well right on the numbers, as so I should after all the practice I've had there! The Tower View shows just how much the two Bridges dominate the scenery around here. Before long I was on the Scanman Airmotive ramp and shutting down at long last. And the very first thing we had on our list of stuff to do was get that socking great over-load tank out of the cabin, and maybe we can do some proper air taxi flights again! It's been a long, weary but very rewarding series of flights, a) getting out there, b) meeting all you guys again and competing in the Oz Rally, and then c) getting back home again the long way by completing a total round-the-world flight, the first time I've ever done it in FS., or in any other way, come to that.

Onwards, ever onwards. My next leg got me back to Europe, but only just. I flew from Lajes to Gibraltar from which you can SEE Africa on the other side of the Straights. I've done it a few times in the RW too, and it's a sobering occasion knowing that you're the SOUTHERNmost person in Europe! I downloaded some much better scenery for Lajes, which included the USAF-USN buildings at the north end of the field, and with a fuel tanker like that in front of me it could only be a US base! The south end of the field was also much improved, and I wish I'd done that upgrade before flying in there. But from then on it looked like this pretty much the whole way. The Spanish are pretty bloody minded about Gib being part of Britain and do all sorts to make life difficult for us, including generating all many restricted areas to the west of the Straights leaving a very narrow gap for me to fly through. But it gets worse further to the east! But having said that it was very nice seeing both Europe and Africa loom up on my horizon, both at the same time! I said it gets worse, didn't I? The 'approved approach' to Gib's 09 runway involves flying south of the Algeciras peninsular, which is part of Spain, making a sharp turn to due north flying up through Algeciras Bay, and then making a very finely judged descending right turn onto the runway. I've done this 3-4 times before in my life, as pax rather than crew, although the first time I was sort of a crew member as I'd pinched a ride aboard an RAF Beverley back in the 50s. It took a LONG time to get there and the sight of that massive rock was very welcome! That's the rock arrowed in the pic below, taken as I passed through the Straights and just before the sharp left hand turn. And the runway runs across the land just north of the rock, and sticks out into the sea at both ends! The approach is somewhat similar to that involved in landing at the old Hong Kong airport at Kai Tak, but without the 'Chequerboard Mountain' ahead of you! It was quite late by the time I arrived and produced a spectacular sunset over the Spanish coast. After making the requisite turns etc I was rewarded with this view, and very welcome it was too. One even more bizarre thing about Gibraltar is that the main road to the town runs directly ACROSS the runway, and in the RW there's some traffic lights on either side to stop road traffic when there are flight ops taking place. Not so in FSX, the road traffic keeps on coming! Dodging the suicidal cars and stuff I taxied off to the RAF hardstanding on the south side of the runway, which is opposite the civilian terminal on the other side. I parked up on exactly the same spot as I did aboard the Beverley way back when. And that was me back in Europe, if only just. That evening I could hear English spoken as it should be again, eat English style food, and I could have drunk English beer if I was a drinking man, but I'm not so I stuck to my usual apple juice. Tomorrow should be the last leg back to the UK, and I'll be both pleased and sad. It's been great flying all around the world, but as Frank Sinatra sang 'It's oh, so nice to go trav'ling, But it's so much nicer, Yes, it's so much nicer to come home.'

It's OK, I'd just forgotten that we had a couple of them for the Oz Rally, and didn't know how to find another one anyway.

Ah, OK Melo, thanks. I thought that was where we are here, but apparently not..........

I'm trying to gather all the hours, miles and fuel I used for flying the Oz Rally. and while I have the Rally legs themselves fully logged, and my return ferry flight home I can't find any sign of my outward ferry flight, and I KNOW I reported it here. Does anyone else know where I posted the PIREPs please?

Now that's interesting Melo. I had almost exactly the same problem flying the Sealand on a couple of legs of my homeward flight in the engines started to lose power, and no amount of throttle, prop or mixture tweaking would solve it. I must admit I used the 'tactical nuke' approach to solve it by re-loading the aircraft from the main menu, my FSX Sealand panel doesn't have the full compliment of mag switch gear that you have on PL965.

The flight to the carrier from Bermuda was more economical than I'd estimated, and with the wind continuing to come from the west I calculated I could make Lajes in the Azores without using 100% overload fuel. The Sealand was a bit of a handful taxi-ing on the deck even though the windspeed had dropped some 10 kts (Adjusted in my custom weather profile for take-off, later to revert to Active Sky......) and the Navy towed me into place near the stern with one of their nifty deck tractors. Take-off flap and full throttle produced a satisfying amount of acceleration and I had the tail up just past the island, using the WWII type 'straight deck' take-off path. And well before the deck ran out I was airborne and away. Who needs catapults, eh? As a result of a request from the Air Boss I made a 180, flew downwind on the north side of the group and then made another 180 and did a fly by over the deck for assembled gawpers on the island. Great fun. So that was goodbye and many thanks to my friends in the US Navy (and to Melo for generating the carrier group for me ) After that it was over 900 nms of pretty well nothing, just wave after wave on the surface of the Atlantic 5000 ft below me. Approaching the Azores it started to cloud up a bit and the wind was much gustier, and it was doubtful if the forecast winds for Lajes would hold good. This was my first glimpse of the island group as I started my descent, that's Ilha do Faial ahead of me there. And that's my only diversion airfield on this leg, Horta. Sure enough the wind direction changed through 180 degrees as I passed Horta, and that needed a turn to the north around Ilha Terceira to reach Lajes airfield on the north side. It's arrowed in the pic below, but it's invisible from my position. Sadly the default FSX scenery for Lajes is pretty much rubbish and the dreaded 'blue islands' re-appeared for me as well. And there's not just A tree on the runway centreline, there's a whole FOREST! The rather sparse buildings on the airfield are actually floating some 4-5 ft above the ramp and runway, but the pic below was carefully posed to avoid sight of the gap! An overnight at Lajes was a rather pleasant prospect, maybe not as much as the one (or two....) in Bermuda, but very acceptable, and tomorrow I'll be off to Gibraltar, that tiny British rock at the west end of the Mediterranean.

The oil rig scenery file isn't on my current laptop, but I have two more lying about and my desktop machine to check too. For sure it's on the desktop machine, and that died some years ago, but the drives are still there and I could probably get at them somehow.

I think I still have that wonderful package archived somewhere. I'll have a look see. We used it a lot in my Albion SpecOps days, flying oil rig support contracts on behalf of various organisations.

I'm flying FSX these days (and wishing I'd still got FS9 I must admit.............) and I can tweak the brake's effectiveness. I was too darn busy figuring out how to stop falling off the stern of the ship to check that them wheels were still rotating or not. I'll get on and sort those brakes so it doesn't happen again, after all I may come across all sorts of carriers than need landing on any day of the week.............

I'm not quite sure that 'full power' is something that equates with only a couple of Gypsy Queens to provide the 'power'. It felt decidedly dodgy sliding backwards with the brakes full on! This morning I dropped the wind speed by 10 kts for take-off and it worked a treat. PIREP in the morning.

Having had a nice overnight on Bermuda it was time to carry on homeward as the wind was from the west, definitely the best direction for me, but there was one rather more fundamental problem. The distance from Bermuda to Lajes in the Azores Islands is 1900 nms or so, and the Sealand's max range is only about 1200 nms on a good day. But luckily I have friends in high places from my time as Albion Airways SpecOps Director, and I also know a good scenery designer, Melo, right here in this Forum. So I've arranged a 'refuelling depot' in the middle of the Atlantic. Getting away from Bermuda went fine, and I opted for a runway take-off this time. The arrow shows were I was parked last night on that massively long ramp, It's a very civilised place, and it was nice to see the cars driving on the correct side of the road for a change. Of course flying for some 1000 miles over the Atlantic did not give me too many chances to look at nice scenery, mostly it looked like this. But now and then it was like this, yeuk! After then after the requisite number of hours, around five, I started my descent while being homed onto an NDB beacon seemingly out there in the middle of the ocean., and eventually I could see a slight glimpse of my target! Contacting the ATC went well, and they gave me a good talk down for my approach, but then they'd had a LOT of practice doing that, but maybe not for a small amphibian! Yes, it was a USN carrier group with a VERY large deck for me to land on in the middle, a few escort destroyers and a supply tanker too. In case I made a hash of the deck landing the plan was for me to water-land alongside the tanker and fuel up while afloat! Getting right on the flight path here, and nicely lined up but flying VERY slowly, or as slow as I could without stalling as I don't have an arrestor hook and have to stop in the deck's length! By pure fluke I put her down almost directly on the correct spot, just before the wires and was quickly onto the brakes! And then it got REALLY difficult! As the carrier scenery couldn't be aligned with the RW weather I used, I'd switched off the RW weather and generated a similar setup but with a 45 kt wind directly down the deck. That's 30 kts from the carrier sailing into wind and a 15 kt wind. As I came to a halt in a remarkably short distance (but 'Austral Roses' landing speed is only 65 kts or so) and throttled back, the aircraft started to skid backwards along the deck! Even the parking brake had no effect, and I was in danger of sliding clean off the ship over the round-down and into the sea! I took the brakes off and opened the throttle again till she was moving and taxied her forward of the island to a parking space between the two deck-edge lifts there, but then had to slew her into position facing sideways as otherwise she was skidding back again. For some reason she didn't skid sideways when parked, which was good. I'll experiment with the wind speeds when it's time to fly off toward the Azores.

Hmm, I think I may give up on going home and head for Colorado! I'm hungry just LOOKING at that menu!

Yes, it surprised me too. I couldn't zoom in close enough from the Tower View to see exactly what the type was, but it had the right proportions for a K-28. It may have been 'imported' from a traffic file from a scenery add-on somewhere that I'd not noticed before.

Because my Sealand doesn't like flying in very low temps, ref. my problems in the Aleutians earlier on my homeward trek, I'm reluctant to fly Melo's route in reverse across Greenland and Iceland, so I'm going via a southern route, hence my jog down to North Carolina. From KRDU I'm heading out across the Atlantic to Bermuda first of all, that little island Overseas Territory of the UK, well known for its idyllic life style and its Triangle, but we won't think of the latter on this flight! Having restored my AI traffic by 'borrowing' Melo's traffic.bgl file for the 2nd time, I was quite pleased to see this A320 on its take-off run as I was taxying out. And I know the tower at KRDU is tall, but nowhere near as tall as the 'Tower View' makes out in FSX! Some people have no idea how to write an AFCAD file................ It was rather good seeing airliners and GA stuff back on the ramp after the barren look of the place when I arrived! Soon I was climbing away from Raleigh-Durham and turning to the north east toward the coast. Very soon the North Carolina I knew from the 90s became visible, miles and miles and MILES of trees, millions of them from horizon to horizon! As I neared the coast I had to dog leg north a bit to clear some MilOps areas, and the entry to those areas was marked by a couple of almost circular lakes, Phelps and Pungo Lakes. I couldn't help but wonder if they were ancient asteroid strikes. Turning further northward I crossed Albemarle Sound, a VAST amount of water leading out to the Atlantic from deep in NC. Eastward of the Sound is a long chain of sandbars, hundreds of miles long, that sit off the NC and Virginia coastlines, and are wide enough to have complete towns and even airfields on them! This one's Dare Co. Regional. Having realised where I was the previous night I made a special dog leg north to fly over a VERY significant spot in the aviation world, the site of the Wright Bros. inaugural powered flight in 1903, on the Kill Devil Hills. Nowadays the site even has its own airstrip right alongside the Wright's first ever airfield. The green area to the left of the paved strip is that most famous site. From here onwards, for about 2.5 - 3 hrs, there was nothing more to see apart from the sea, and the odd cloud of course. Looking from the Tower View at First Flight Field I noticed that there was an AI airship flying down the coast! I wish I'd been just a little later as I'd have loved to have taken an air-air pic of one! Eventually Bermuda hove into view, aided by a couple of NDBs and a VOR on the island and I started my descent for a water landing there. They have a water runway just south of the airport that's almost surrounded by the island itself so there's little chance of any rough water. With a westerly wind I had go east of the islands and make a 180 to the south to male my approach. As I was on my approach ATC warned me of traffic to my north and sure enough a 737-800 came whining down on its approach to the main runway. I bet the pax were surprised to see a flying boat on a parallel approach alongside them! You can see what I mean about the water runway being almost completely enclosed, I LOVE it like that. Throttling back I eased 'Austral Rose' down onto that lovely lagoon and headed for the slipway to the extended ramp to my north. That ramp was HUGE and there was lots of space for me, so I parked alongside a Dash 8 that had just taxied in. I figured there'd be NO shortage of hotels or restaurants here so I may hang around for a day or so until the wind direction is friendly for my next leg.

That's great, thanks so much, I've download it now. I agree about the search function here, it's like wading through treacle sometimes!

Which particular 'Hover Gauge' works best for helicopters? Rob Barendregt does a whole heap of such gauges, most for VSTOL fixed wing aircraft or V-22 tilt rotors and I'm not sure which would be best for a chopper. I've had lots of success with his stuff, particularly with FS9 Harrier GR5s and Sea Harriers, so I'd like to see what he can do with chopper flight.

Heading ever eastward on my way home, my Leg 15 is a lot southward as well as eastward from the Windy City as I flew to Raleigh-Durham KRDU in NC om Friday after meeting all the guys at Meigs, a momentous occasion if ever there was one. I'd thought this leg would be fairly barren from the pics of scenery point of view as it was diagonally across the centre of the US, but actually not so, all sorts of interesting places passed under my wings en route. Here I am in a familiar place, how many screenies have been taken of this ramp over the whole life of the FS world? Got to be in the BILLIONS! There was a hefty crosswind when I wanted to fly, so I used the Sealand's dual capability and opted for a water take off, so taxied to the south end of the field where there's a shallow beach down to Lake Michigan, but en route spied a MOST unlikely item parked up on the ramp! What's a sailplane and trailer doing at Meigs of all places? I can't think of a less likely place for thermal or slope lift! Slipping into the lake was an easy task down that nice gentle beach and I was soon able to chose a take-off run directly into wind, so long as I avoided the vast number of boats out there! Turning on course toward the south side of the lake I waved bye-bye to Meigs, our spiritual home, and that well remembered skyline. I'd chosen a cruise altitude of 10000 ft as I wasn't sure how high the hills were nearer to KRDU, but it meant I had no chance to observe the scenery as I was IMC pretty well right away! After a while the clouds got got boring so I asked for a descent down to 5000 ft as that was nicely below the local cloud base. The first place I clearly observed was Muncie IN, and that's Delaware Regional Airport there just astern of me as I passed o'head. My flight path dodged to the east a bit to clear one of the numerous 'Military Operations Areas' in these parts, and soon I passed Dayton OH, and that's Cox-Dayton Int. below me, a pretty impressive place, but I was expecting an even more impressive field to come into view soon. Well, it was impressive when I was there in the mid 90s, but seemingly not so in the FSX world. That's Wright Patterson AFB, the home of the USAF Museum, a place where I achieved THREE lifetime ambitions on the same day! I saw the XB-70 Valkyrie, the F-82 Twin Mustang Betty Jo and an X-15, along with a whole load of other mind bending stuff. Sadly FSX seems to think that the base has just a few sheds, not the MASSIVE hangars that are there in the RW. Further on the clouds cleared and a vast expanse of flat America came into view, a bit like the mid-West we saw during the Route 66 Rally but somewhat greener. I flew over a very large and tempting lake crossing Ohio, which turned out to be Deer Creek Lake. For some reason the whole area is apparently owned by the US Army Corps of Engineers. Very son afterwards I crossed the Ohio River, a pretty large chunk of water, and it connected with the Kanawha River at a T junction. My flight followed the Kanawha for quite long way, leading south east into West Virginia. A bit further on I came to the first large range of hills or mountains in these parts, the Blue Ridge section of the Appalachians, and pretty impressive they were too, being almost totally covered in forestry. The next major place was Roanoke, with an equally major airport too. Onwards and ever onwards took me over a couple of very large water areas, by now in North Carolina, the first being Smith Mountain Lake, that stretched for EVER across my flight line. And further on there was Falls Lake as I started my descent for KRDU. The whole US seems to be dotted with lakes everywhere, I'm used to them in Minnesota, but didn't realise there were so many elsewhere too. Raleigh-Durham Int. was soon in view over to my right and I started to turn onto the ILS for their 23L runway. For reasons best known to itself my VOR indicator didn't seem to want to read the ILS altitude although it guided me nicely in azimuth, so I reverted to the mark 1 eyeball and lined up properly. Landing on that massive length of tarmac, 7500 ft on 23L, and 23R is even longer, wasn't a problem and I turned off and headed to the FBO at the northeast end. Sadly there was NO traffic at all in sight, just like before, it seems something keeps on messing with my traffic files. And here I am at the empty FBO. I know the area quite well having stayed around here 4-5 times and there's this really good Italian restaurant I know. The next leg isn't one you'd imagine for my flight back, but it'll still be homeward bound.................

Made it to Raleigh-Durham KRDU yesterday, but the PIREP will have to wait till tomorrow as it's a BUSY day for me today.