Bossspecops

Difficult to tell, they're AI models so you can't see the intakes all that clearly.

Are those USN F-18s still on QRA at Masirah Melo? They never seem to do anything, but they're ALWAYS ready apparently. 20k ft in 7 mins, I WISH!

A somewhat delayed PIREP on the first leg of my flight home with 'Austral Rose'. It was delayed for some days because of non-working Orbx scenery, and their Tech Support came up with a solution to sort it before I set off, but......... Sitting in the little marina south of Rose Bay with 100% fuel for the 1112 nm flight to Alice Springs.# The wind was from the south so I had to water-taxi right across the Bay to the north side as I hadn't much idea how long the take-off run would be with that fuel load, and FSX said I was 177 lbs over max. weight. That's not one human being's worth really, so I just got ton with it. The take-off did take a while and I had to get her up to almost 80 kts before she lifted off, and the climb rate was rather limited, to say the least! The FST generated SID for the Rose Bay runway wasn't what I'd call 'safe' as it took me THROUGH the skyscrapers of downtown Sydney! But soon I was headed north west, and it was goodbye Sydney. I enjoyed my time in an around the city, and it'd be good to get back there before too long. My fears about the Orbx scenery proved only too true, as after a while climbing out over the lush trees and vegetation of eastern New South Wales it all went to pot and the western desert areas looked like this! Anything less 'desert like' would be difficult to imagine, so I paused and saved the flight and de and re-installed Orbx Aus2 from scratch, which took a while but proved OK. As it turned out I'd paused the flight directly at the 'Three State Point' where Queensland, New South Wales and the Northern Territories meet. But when I went back to normal flying and viewing it looked a LOT better. After 6 hrs or so of pretty boring flying I started the descent into Alice to the east of the airport and turned over the south edge of the town itself, and almost over the famous Heavitree Gap, which is the southern entrance to the town, and which was clearly visible as I turned onto the approach. Luckily the wind was almost directly along the main 12 runway, so I had no real difficulty in lining up. Before long I was down, not on the numbers, and right of the centre line too, but after that long a flight I wasn't too fussed really. Taxi-ing in and parking near the Tower before reporting to Flight Control was a matter of moments, and then I was ready for a meal and a LONG sleep! Next stop Darwin, and then away off to the Orient etc.

38 kts?

Meigs Field, eh? Fond memories, and M$ took it away with FSX too, just to match the real world. I used to have an FSX copy as an add-on, I'll have to see if it's still in my archive.

Yeah Melo, the PR9's brakes REALLY do need looking at. I'll get on the case.

Oh yes, an RB-57F, or WB-57F sometimes. A SERIOUS Canberra, almost as serious as a PR9.

Mike was BA's Concorde fleet Manager, and wrote THE book on the aircraft's time at BA and Air France. A well recommended read. Oddly enough, it's called 'Concorde' They did fly the Concorde into and out of Kai Tak, but not in scheduled service, only on trials and charter flights.

They definitely couldn't have made that strip even an inch longer! Talk about minimalist! A pity the inhabitants weren't a bit more friendly though.

I've 'flown' the RW Concorde simulator at Brooklands if that qualifies me? The 'instructor', Capt. Mike Bannister no less, asked me which airport I'd like to fly from and I said 'Kai Tak?' He looked sideways at me, but I explained I'd tried it 5-6 times the previous evening on my laptop with FSX and he was OK with that. I got it down nicely too, although that turn before you get to 'Chequerboard Hill' is a real bum-clencher!

Made it to Alice Springs, 1112 nms in 6 hrs 20 mins. With a few pauses to re-install some crazy Orbx scenery that didn't want to behave. PIREP tomorrow, while I'm en route to Darwin I expect.

Too right! That's over 1000 nms more than I can manage, that Sara sure has some tankage! That was an excellent treatise on getting the best fuel mileage from your aeroplane, not sure I've got enough instrumentation aboard 'Austral Rose' to do that, and with my ancient, 1950s tech engines, I'm not 100% sure it'd work the same way too. I'm about 1.5 hrs out of Alice just now, and the scenery is VERY boring indeed, mile after mile of red desert.

My long trek home has started. I've just taken off from Rose Bay aboard 'Austral Rose' and I'm headed for Alice Springs as a first stop, 1100 miles and 6.5 hrs away. I doubt there'll be much scenery to see as I'm IFR already and I'm not at climb altitude yet.

This flight didn't quite turn out as expected as my friends from 209 Sqdn. decided to show me what XK440 could do! Taxying out from the small creek just east of Cairns Airport probably caused a few noise complaints as the Conway isn't the world's quietest turbo-fan. The leg was 1127 nms to Rose Bay and FST reckoned it would take just under 2.5 hrs, which sounded OK to me, but the 209 guys thought otherwise! Getting off was a little dicey as the into-wind direction was pointed straight toward the shore, but those noisy Conways soon had us up on the step and away. As we were using an official CASA flight plan (Civilian Safety Aviation Authority) for this leg, we used a SID from Cairns Airport that required a sharp turn to port almost as soon as we were airborne to clear that hefty range of hills to the south. So it was 'Tarra Cairns, thanks for all the tinnies!' That's the creek we started from with the red arrow pointing to it. Our cruise altitude was to be 29000 ft and the Monterey was soon climbing like a homesick angel to get there, but the weather to the south didn't look very promising at all. Once we reached altitude the Captain decided that while he'd stick to the flight plan as regards directions and altitude he was going to exert 'Military Authority' and demonstrate just how fast the Monterey could go! The panel 3D on this FS model isn't all that good as it's just a B&W pic and a very blurred one too, but the 2D panel is cribbed from the stock FSX 737-800 so I could at least understand it. Just in case you missed it in that pic, note the Mach reading in the PFD.............. Yes, it does say M 1.04!!!!! Something tells me the .cfg file for the P6M may need a little 'adjustment' as we exceeded Mach 1 for almost the entire flight, with the throttle at around 80%. So sorry all you citizens of Queensland and New South Wales, it was us Brits who were making those bangs! Certainly the Monterey handled the speed and altitude very well and looked quite at home up there, well away from her usual operational heights of 500 - 1000 ft. Yeah, that's the RAF up there. This shot taken from Brisbane Tower as we blasted o'head. Heading further south, tracking from isec to isec down the Australian coastline went fine, but it was almost total cloud cover below us so there was very little scenery to see. Eventually it started to clear a little and the New South Wales greenery reappeared, but it didn't slow us down anyhow, oh no! At around the SANAD isec we started a STAR into Kingsford-Smith Int. Airport at Sydney, but we only used it to penetrate the area safely as we'd be turning off to the East to land at Rose Bay. At the lower altitudes we were below one cloud layer and some good old Oz rivers re-appeared. Not quite ox bow lakes, but close..... At the MEPIL isec we turned off the STAR and went IFR for the remainder of the flight, turning east and almost immediately into some heavy cloud. Luckily it didn't go down too far and we cleared through the cloud base at around 2500 ft and turned onto the approach for Rose Bay, with down-town Sydney just visible to our right. It's a bit tight for a 'boat as large as the Monterey getting into Rose Bay, and we needed to be on the water pretty much as soon as we'd cleared that headland in the pic above, but our Captain knew what he was doing and put her down very nicely with room to spare. Doing a fast taxi across the bay in case that big carrier decided to come out again seemed a good move, and when I checked the times we were just over HALF AN HOUR early on the estimated time! A good thing it wasn't a timed Rally! You can just see the Bridge over to our right there. And soon we were moored up by the marina so I could hop off and see how 'Austral Rose' was getting on. She was sitting there on the beach to welcome us too. That was that, a very nice (and FAST....) flight down from Queensland, and I waved tarra to XK440 and her crew and started to get ready for the long, LONG flight back to UK tomorrow.

After all the shennanigins of the post-gaggle BBQ at Cairns I need to get back to Sydney to collect 'Austral Rose' and head off home. But of course I don't have an aeroplane here to do that so I need a helping hand............. In a fictional RAF a few years ago their Airships saw much sense in replacing the Short Sunderland with a similar maritime reconnaissance aircraft but moved into the jet age, and selected the Martin P6M-3 Seamaster flying boat, but up-engined with Rolls Royce Conways and with two extra crew members in the rear cabin. These aircraft, entitled the Martin Monterey MR1 in RAF service, were flown by nos. 209 and 210 Squadrons for many years. I liked this idea so much I built a model of the Monterey MR1, seen on its well OTT beaching trolley below. As it happens one of 209's Monterey's just happens to be passing this way and I've grabbed a lift down to Rose Bay in Sydney with them. My Flight Report later today, but I expect it will be quick..................

I am going all the way round, yes. I'll have to go via Japan and the Aleutians as there's no way the Sealand can manage the Hawaii-California leg. If I tanked her up enough to manage that she won't take-off, and I tried it to see if it was possible.

Thanks for all the congrats, it's very nice being able to fly again. I still can't get the Oz scenery to work as yet, but I only need it to get down to Sydney from Cairns, and I guess I could fly WAY off-shore. I'll be doing that later today, and should head off homewards tomorrow. It's a LONG way.................

SUCCESS! I'm back in the FS game, thanks to an brill idea from Melo, who suggested I copy the contents of the install DVDs to a spare HDD partition and work from them, I've now got FSX and Acceleration re-installed and it all works. I'm copying over my archived scenery and aircraft etc now, and i should be OK to fly tomorrow. Got to get back to Sydney, collect 'Austral Rose' and start off on the long trek back to UK.

I remember that one fondly too, and installed it on many of my aircraft. Not sure if it works in FSX though, but maybe there's an equivalent if not.

1829 nms? That's a LONG way! My Sealand couldn't manage that even with the double overload tanks!

Looks like I've got FSX back, sort of..................... Someone suggested I deleted FSX.cfg from a totally obscure place on my laptop (WHY is it in such a silly place M$?) and try a restart, so I did and it worked! But while it says 'Acceleration' along the top of the FSX home screen it doesn't seem to actually have Acceleration installed as neither the F-18 nor P-51, nor any of the Accel missions are present. And while they're actually in the 'Airplanes' folder a lot of my add-on aircraft don't appear in the aircraft list on the Free Flight menu, very weird. I've tried to re-install Accel from my 2nd disc, but as soon as I hit 'Yes' from the 'Are you sure you want this to make changes to your hard disc?' question I get a small window flash into vision on the scree, which then vanishes. It's there for less than 0.5 second and no way can I read it! Not sure what to do next, but I've got SOME sort of progress anyway.

I fly FSX + Acceleration these days (or I would if it worked, some new discs for a re-install are on the way even now.................) I did fly FS9 in my busiest FS period, and was much more at home with it than I am with FSX I must admit. I can do repaints in both sims, and enjoy that immensely, which may be a bit obvious,. sorry. As for the ferry flights, that too goes back to my C'serve Rally days. back then I was travelling the world quite a bit and would fly to the rally destination from wherever I was in reality. In a few cases that resulted in some CRAZY flights, like the one Melo will surely remember to Catalina Island just off the coast near LA. I was in Holland at the start of that, but wanted to do an air-drop of goodies over the Catalina strip in an RAF Andover freighter, but no way did it have the range to get there. So I hitched a lift with a USAF C-5 from Mildenhall in the UK to Travis AFB and then flew the Andover from there. Total madness. Since then, while I was a serious FS pilot with the Albion Group, I always flew our operational aircraft from where they were to where they needed to be, and that required some discipline to keep track of the fleet, but it was all good fun.

My thoughts on 'The Gaggle' are probably predictable, a bit anyway. What I liked? The whole affair reminded me of the Compuserve Flight Rallies we flew way back when, and where Melo and I first got together, although it was some years before we actually met. The 'fellowship of the sky' made it what it was then and it still does today, I'm very pleased to say. The timing idea was brilliant, and made a sensible target for all of us without exerting either ourselves or our virtual airframes/engines etc. And thirdly Elias' daily news broadcast, that was an exceptional idea carried out exceptionally well. What I didn't like? That's difficult, but maybe the sheer length of the Rally, but that's because Oz is a BIG place I guess. I found it quite difficult to make time to do each Leg on the day I set out to do it, and then got shot down by my joystick giving up the ghost, and then my entire SYSTEM going walkabout! What would I like to see? More of the same actually, and I like the idea of 3-4 events spaced along the year with hefty gaps in the middle to restore one's mind to normalcy.

Hmm, that guy on the left, in the baseball cap and shades, look remarkably like Melo. Maybe being aboard that carrier's where he got the familiarity with flying the F-18?

Elias' last write-up for the Rally is a total masterpiece! A thumbnail of the entire event, to say the least, and most enjoyable to read and re-live the whole thing. And I'm humbled and embarrassed to accept the Spirit of the Race Award, many MANY thanks.