Bossspecops

8 hours ago, defaid said:

That tractor driver has bigger balls than the pilot.

Even if he has got a big dent in his head! 

Noting that this flight was recommended to be flown with a higher power aircraft with good STOL characteristics I thought 'I have JUST the thing in my hangar!

Yes, the Westland Lysander that I  flew on the Route 66 rally. I've updated her a bit since the early Route 66 stages and she now carries a hefty belly tank and a ladder to persuade the pax to leave the warmth of the cabin when we reach our destination, wherever that may be.

Downloading the FSX scenery file for Milford Sound was a matter of moments, but I couldn't find an upgrade for Queenstown, but that didn't really matter as the default FSX scenery there is pretty good.

Locating the good 'ole Lysander at Queenstown went fine, and I powered up my Active Sky software for real weather, drew up an IFS flightplan as the cloudbase was quite low and I anticipated being IMC for at least some of the flight. 

BIG mistake, but see later.

Here I am on the ramp at Queenstown, no local traffic, just me, so I started up and hit the 'Shift-P' button so I could turn around and head for the threshold.

To my utter amazement one of the little push-back tractors over by the tower started up and raced over toward me to aid in the push-back! NOT a good idea with a single engined prop powered aeroplane as the tractor driver was likely to get his head cut off by the prop!

However both my Bristol Mercury engine and the tractor driver seemed to survive and I got out onto that looooooong runway and headed off to the west.

My FSTramp produced a rather strange SID for that Queenstown runway which involved a 270 degree turn to port, passing directly o'head the airport before setting course for Milford Sound, but who was I, a mere Brit, to argue such things, eh?

Having got airborne in a minute fraction of the Queenstown runway the Lysander was climbing as only a Lysander can, and I was on my way.

After a short while I passed over the field and headed off to the south for a short distance, still climbing to the safety height, noted as 8500 ft by FST.

But all the while I was being tossed about by horrendous wind gusts and the aircraft was climbing and diving almost at random, nothing that I could do with the stick seemed to have much effect, and pretty soon I was in the cloud.

And that was pretty much that. I didn't have a single glimpse of the apparently awesome scenery of the South Island and all the time I was being battered and bashed by the weather. There was a single major turn on the flightplan, and that was fairly close to Milford Sound and just before my planed start of descent, but I was till IMC at that time.

Descending over all those mountains was a mind numbing procedure and I was wondering if I should open the canopy in case I needed a quick exit after a crash landing! As it happened I popped out of the bottom of the cloud almost directly o'head Milford Sound field, but I was way too high and headed past the field by then.

I tried making some spiral descending turns but they left me well west of the field and heading AWAY from the runway, which wasn't too clever. Seeing that hefty rock ahead, I planned on passing it to the north and making a 180 deg turn around it to come around the west side of it and nicely lined up.

WRONG!

But the rock was just the pointed end of a hefty chain, and there was no gap west of it so I headed up the canyon in the pic until I found airspace wide enough to carry out a 180, which wasn't easy. Luckily the Lysander is a pretty nimble beast and made the turn ok, and I was headed back to my destination, but at a very low level.

Lining up was not easy and the gusts we re still bashing me about, even deep in the canyon here, and my first attempt was a total failure, I was WELL over to one side of the runway, so I opened up and went round again.

And I did that THREE times before I could plonk her down. And at last I landed, but waaaaaay down the runway.

Taxi-ing in was a slight problem as the Lysander wanted to weather-cock into the wind and only some hefty differential braking turned me off the runway and onto the ramp. I was VERY glad to shut down, I can tell you!

Of course the main problem was using real world weather, in the Real World I'd have never attempted a flight with the wind gusting like that and the cloud that low, so I may try it again but with some customised weather, bright sun, light breezes and either no clouds at all or a little cirrus at around 35000 ft. 

YES! That's great, thanks. 

I'll PIREP my 'flight' later today. (The word 'flight' is used here in its WIDEST possible sense............ )

If it is, I can't find it. A direct link would be very useful.

I'm afraid the way the whole site is arranged has deteriorated badly over the last few years. 

17 hours ago, PhrogPhlyer said:

OK, I posted the NZ flight in the wrong thread, how do we move this?

Where IS the thread for the NZ flights please?

I can't find it anywhere.

23 hours ago, taoftedal said:

 Hey Bosss ... how are you coming on your new RTW ... ?

 

I'm still waiting on the RAF to get me some info on the aircraft's markings at the time. They have other things on their hands at the moment of course. 

On 5/6/2024 at 2:22 AM, Melo965 said:

 

My 529 ft fast pass down the runway centerline.

 

 

 

Landed safely after my Round the World flight! 

 

Parked at Avian Flight Center where I usually park.  The guys are very impressed that I am climbing out of a Spitfire, instead of the usual Cessna that I often fly here.

 

Great stuff Melo, I bet they LOVED the fast low pass down the runway, a lot faster than I managed in 'Austral Rose'! And the Avian guys will have been SERIOUSLY impressed too ,a bit more horsepower than a Lycoming.

Well done of completing the circumnavigation, it's a great feeling when your wheels make that final touch down, isn't it?

Regards

Kit

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. 

On 5/1/2024 at 5:08 PM, Macroburst said:

Interesting concept for the CH-47;

 

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.

On 4/20/2024 at 10:40 AM, MAD1 said:

Just watched Part 1 and 2 of this very good series 'The Flying Carriers' about the airship era e.g. Acron.

 

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. 

8 hours ago, TomPenDragon said:

Re: A,B): +1!

Re: C): Congratulations, Kit!  How did it feel, shutting down for the last time after your first circumnavigation? 

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! 

11 hours ago, Macroburst said:

Kit,

When you settle down with a mug of hot tea in your favorite chair, exhale, and realize there's no yoke in front of you, what's next???  

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. 

49 minutes ago, Melo965 said:

Kit,

 

Here is the thread where they are:

 

The 2024 Australia Rally... 

 

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. 

20 hours ago, Airbasil_1 said:

Btw. does anyone still have the Oil/Gas rig Offshore Plattform Scenery for FS9 which has been shared once on FS-ODG and is gone now? 
I'd love to have this Scenery in my FS9... so if anyone still has it, please share! Thanks a ton! 

For reference; FS-ODG Oil & Gas Rig Scenery FS9

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............. 

5 hours ago, PhrogPhlyer said:

Nicely done. With a tail hook it would have been just the opposite, full power on touchdown in case of a bolter.

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.