defaid

May I propose that JGF take the OGO cap as it was he who first mooted the event back in October? If that's not possible, both you and VP2 did a sterling job in the Bendix & R66. I'd suggest that any plane is fair game but that some may not be eligible for one or more sub-challenges? I thought something like this: Sightseeing: whatever will fit on the runway. Regularity: GA only and from any year. (The suggestion is broadly in keeping with the RW event). The east coast AB2, I guess should be commercial aircraft, and possibly above a certain empty weight. That's AirBasil_1's choice. If you want a plain race then probably only 1976 entrants or the closest approximation. This is what I'll be doing. If it means I come last in the regularity, that's of absolutely no consequence: I'm here to have fun. I saw an entrants list and I have a fairly well developed small single-engined Piper, owned for years & never flown. Anyone else wants simply to see how fast they can go, please come along. Per the Bendix, R66 and AB-mini, whatever weather you want - the story is the thing. Gusty crosswinds and zero visibility wins a bonus? It should at least cover the repairs. I thought regularity scoring had been settled several posts back as -1 + +1 = 0. I think I've seen several proposed start dates. I imagine that mid Jan would give us all time to get our sim in order and perhaps the end date should be after one month but again, deal with it on the fly. Do I recall the R66 being extended by a couple of weeks, meeting with no complaints? Details are OGO's decision and with a little thought, could be made when issues crop up. Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they're yours. The flying is what matters. I've searched in vain for another Illusions quote - the follow-up to Don's complaint about the type of crowd that only wants the spectacle of miracles. Sometime later one or other of our boys realised that there's nothing wrong with going to the races to watch the crashes. Perhaps I just imagined it. You know what? The revelation means that there's nothing wrong with fencing an event with rules and that too should be allowed to flourish, though that perhaps is more Pirsig than Bach and we may never get off the ground... D

I hadn't seen your suggestion that we form a club: the comment was not aimed at you or the proposal. I'm sorry if I offended you, that wasn't my intention. It was just a complaint about what I perceive as the increasingly restrictive way the group is being moulded. D

Thank you Andy. I'd been told that it was more stable but I didn't realise it was now free. I'll give it a go. D

Genius! I'd never have though of doing that. Thank you.

I haven't.

I have to get this off my chest. I've been growing increasingly frustrated over the last couple of weeks, watching bureaucracy first swamp and then subsume the original concept, very much like one man's faith can grow into a church with no connection to the god. I've written half a dozen rants about this and not posted one. The last three challenges appeared, happened and settled without any of this. Now, who immediately thought "There have only been two?" Can I ask each of you two things? First, what do you want? Second, how do you feel about joining a formal, rules based club with a named leader and a mission statement? I'm expecting at least one argument that the challenge group is now sufficiently complex to need proper organisation.

I've uninstalled FSReaWx for the duration as it (or some companion such as antimalware ) is causing FS9 frequently to lock up, necessitating a three-fingered salute. I can't understand how to get it to work offline. I did download a weather dataset and it seemed to load into FSRWX but I couldn't then get FSRWX to act upon it -- neither to show stations' weather nor to load it into FS9. If anyone sees this and uses it offline, could you please explain how you got it to work? D

If you can go back and reread my second post (2nd December), I have VOZ manually installed pretty much as I want it and have found (and discarded) the horrible sky textures. The last correction I need to make is to remove the ugly green sea but I can't remember what FS9's sea/water textures are called. Could one of you refresh my memory please? Cheers, D My 'default'. Saharan FScene landclass txx and HDEv2 water txx: Full-on VOZ. Green-grey water that I dislike. How I'd like it: VOZ but with my original water textures (before you ask, this one's a photoshop job):

It'd certainly keep the forum cleaner. I think a scrollable series of stats would probably be easier to scan but with a lot of legs × a lot of entrants you're probably right -- it would become difficult for the OGO to pick up where they left off. I guess the choice of format and delivery should be left to whoever has the unenviable task.

One thread solely for the times. Don't post anything else in there: no pirep, no discussion, no screenies. Just the times. The format is not really a matter for argument either: Comp name Leg name Plan time Actual time V That will cut right down on the amount of compulsory reading the poor OGO will have to face. Everything else goes in the story&screenie&discussion thread.

Name your comp plane before the challenge starts. Fly and report anything else you want but comp times ought to be for the named comp plane. I think we should maintain some semblance of following the original suggestion: a competiton along the south coast, with an emphasis on sightseeing and story-telling. I don't believe that racing and having fun are mutually exclusive. I'll be choosing my plane from the original list of entrants and trying to match with what I have in the Aircraft folder. I'm ready for a race: just flying around doesn't really do it for me, and the regularity, though it's infinitely fairer, requires too much planning and test flying. It becomes more like a job of work. For regularity I'd want to choose a plane with which I'm already familiar else my estimated times will be hours off the mark and that wouldn't be authentic. I'm happy to race myself but if anyone else wants an informal on the side, I'm your man. Just pick from the original list.

The final connection is at 0800 local Wednesday morning. The previous two flights were done in the RtW timeframe so weren't made on the scheduled day. I slept Sunday and chilled in Ottawa for a couple of days, spending what I'd made from the last flight. How many museums?? I dropped by the Canadian Tire Centre (a strange combination of languages) on Monday night to watch the Sens lose to the Panthers. Booked a table at Chesterfield's Diner for lunch the following day where I had the best non-British approximation of the artery-clogging fryup I've ever eaten. All done by taxi -- the humvee's difficult to park. Well actually it's very easy to park but the insurance gets expensive. *** *** Wednesday dawns with brume and a dark grey roof almost low enough to touch. BRIEFING Beautiful day? "Ottawa has winds 040@9, visibility 4 miles (compounded by gloomy dawn light) and an overcast ceiling at 300 feet. Runway 07 is in use. "We are very light. We'll rotate at 105 kt and climb out at 127. Stall speed with 20% flaps is 85 kt and we'll set 3.3° nose-up trim for the takeoff. Up to rotating we can stop on the runway. Once we're off the ground, any critical failure will involve a right turn onto right downwind runway 07. If we can't make the downwind leg then we'll try for 32. "I've elected to follow ATC instructions on the departure as there's nowhere particular I want to visit so we'll take vectors, and cruise at 12000 feet. Our first en route waypoint is Campbellford VOR on 113.50 "CYTZ has 350@11G16 and an OVC007 with RA, well below MSA. That will be an ILS approach to runway 08. VREF will be 110 kt with 20% flap. Great. No sightseeing... We'll rebrief the arrival and approach just before the terminal area crossing. "Centre should have us down to 11000 feet for the crossing near CYOO, and down to 7000 shortly thereafter where I will ask for the IAP. And runway 08 if necessary. I don't intend to fly a localiser-only approach with a tail wind. Not today. "There shouldn't be any conflict with CYYZ traffic as their weather is 010@15 with -RA and OVC015 so they'll be using Rwy05 and Rwy06L and we'll be on parallel tracks. "If CYTZ closes while we are on our way then we'll go for Pearson with its multitude of instrument approaches. If we suffer a critical instrument failure, we have around 800 nm of fuel in reserve so we'll let Centre or Approach know what has happened and we'll just ask for a suitable field with VMC. Currently, that looks like Elmira, the only field within 150 miles that doesn't have BR or RA or OVC00x in its metar." DEPARTURE We leave by runway 07 and make a long climbing turn with a snowy Ottawa glowing warm and festive through the pre-dawn murk. We burst through the silver lining into a beautiful azure world under a full moon. Farewell to Ottawa 12 minutes early. Up and out. Funny how things changed. CRUISE Again, the cruise is unremarkable; everything has gone swimmingly with RC's co-pilot driving. I watch the stars fall asleep as the day wakes up. Good morning from 12000 feet ARRIVAL AND APPROACH On crossing into the terminal area I take over again for the long, low curve round to the top of the down escalator. In nearasdammit zero vis, a flawless intercept and capture (thanks to taking the easy way out with hdg & alt hold ) and with a clearer head than I'd had a few days ago has me looking forward to an opportunity to boast about the approach when we hit the town with the whole gang. Nasty arrival. Thirty seconds later the rosy daydream is ejected by a bucket of ice-cold water: The Oh sh*t! moment. Superstitiously, I think "Naming calls" but really I'm grateful to Whoever prompted me to think it through during the briefing. Full throttle and tweak the yoke back a little. Gear up and flaps 10 as we gain a little height and speed on a steady 071°, and having made a right turn onto 177° and 2000 feet, ostensibly to intercept YYZ radial 130 even though I can't on account of losing half my electrics -- I try to let Approach know what's happened. We are in what's best called a deteriorating situation. This is something I've been thinking of for some time. I've never bothered with alternates: this being a game, they'd be planned in advance so seem pointless. I used to do the odd missed approach but eventually became impatient and enabled the nose cannon. But an instrument failure, well, there's a huge challenge in itself... How many of you did years ago, as I did, the easy thing and left all failures disabled? It's not once been mentioned here so I'll bet we all have. Consider a night flight to CYTZ, an ILS approach in overcast at 500 feet with rain and a gusty wind and with tall ships anchored on short final and that huge tower just beyond, when your attitude indicator, radio compass, CDI and ILS needles all go tango uniform. What do you do? Did you plan for it? I didn't. This is the first time in years that I've even thought of alternates or declaring a pan. It took me a while just to remember that the C-130 has a backup AI on the other supply and a magnetic compass. After some real-world thought, I know that the S-word is a bit of a trigger so my next action after aborting the approach would have been something like "XV300 going around on a runway heading. Please standby" because nobody likes admitting to an emergency. I'm in trouble so I'm expecting help and not instructions. Or complaints. That one transmission lets Approach know I'm no longer following instructions and it should be enough to prime them of the impending disaster and to keep other traffic out of my way. RC doesn't do pan calls but it does have a limited interaction for emergencies. I'll confess this was entirely premeditated, and effected simply by cutting one half of the a. c. power. Having never declared an emergency before, I'd wanted to see how RC handled it so set this up in order to make the call whereas ordinarily a missed approach and request for vectors to the alternate would suffice. I found the entire dialogue -- where RC, unprompted, also made some of my responses for me -- most interesting. When I finally had time to get a word of my own onto the radio and when RC finally shut up its barrage of criticism: "Conatct tower... I said contact tower... are you listening? I said contact tower" "You don't appear to have your gear down. You really need to keep an eye on those checklists" "Someone's going to have to submit a report to FSDO concerning your conduct" ... and gave me the option of declaring an emergency (at the bottom of the last page of the dialogue box), I chose electrical failure. The next few wavs brought me some hope for the evening to come. Toronto'd better brace itself. "Approach, XV300 would like to declare an emergency..." So far, so good. But-- "We have a passenger onboard who's had too much to drink and is getting out of hand". What did he do? Pee on the wiring? From that point, I closed RC, turned the electrics back on, flew back around to KENDI and landed with nobody's permission. RC had suppressed the native ATC dialogue and didn't reinstate things on closing so I couldn't even talk to them. Where's the rum?? Is there any strong drink brewed from maple syrup? How much can I load into the back?

I feel this should really go in Airbasil_1's new thread but the first leg is already in this one and the BTS aspect was in response to ViperPilot2's post concerning the plan and the practical approach to procedures. I might open the pdf and re-upload both into AB1's thread. A night flight "... and everything went black... " We're at Pearson at 2130 hrs and ready for the next hop over to Ottawa. Departure is scheduled for 2210 and Air Canada's A321 would arrive in Ottawa at 2311. I'm following the Flight1 2003 commercial flight timetables that make up my AI schedule. The flight from TTPP to CYYZ was recorded in the previous attachment. The shortest, quickest and least complex trip from Piarco, my current RtW location, to Billy Bishop is I cheated on the first leg, departing in the morning so I could have a look at Toronto while approaching. It was cloudy... Back to fltplan.com for CYYZ departure plates and anything for CYOW. LOAD & BALANCE I still have 10700 kg useable fuel but I'm carrying twenty new Titan Adventure 155 snowmobiles over to Ottawa. At $16000 each the next landing had better be as smooth as the last... The crates are labelled with a tare weight of 30 kg. A bit odd - I suppose they fit several models. The snowmobile spec states an empty weight of 658 lbs. Metric and bananas... 20 × ((658/2.2) + 30) = 6582 kg Trial and error over the years has established that an evenly spread load with any extra weight placed towards the tail works best so... Station weights, crew & cargo. I don't need any extra fuel, and arrival time is not critical. I'll just use the GPU to run crossfeed pumps to empty the auxilliary tanks into the mains. A short leg at low altitude and I'm expecting to burn around 9 kg per nm over a 200 nm journey. V SPEEDS The wind at CYYZ has shifted from 320@6 to 020@3 since I arrived and runways 05 & 06L are in use. I guess we'll use 05. It's a looong taxi ride. It's also a long runway and we're not exactly heavily laden so flaps 20% and 4.5° nose up trim. V-S(20) is 92 kt. We'll rotate at 114 and climb out at 139. Calculated V-speeds. DEPARTURE There are no suitable fixes/intersections in FS9 so our departure will be Toronto Four: fly runway heading to 1000 feet then a climbing left turn on to 047° to 3000 feet and maintain until vectored to the assigned route. Bits of charts from Nav Canada & Garmin. I will tell Radar Contact that I am flying a departure with 'No Altitude Restrictions'. That's not intuitive because the departure procedure does include specific altitudes. What it means is that RC should not apply restrictions, at least until 30 nm from departure. Radar Contact controller setup. I personally will want to be at cruise altitude before RC takes a hand so have added NUBAV intersection, where I will start the climb from 3000 to 13000 feet. CRUISE Our en route heading will be between 55° and 65° so odd flight levels and I'm intending to fly at 13000 feet. A bit low, perhaps, but it's a novelty and with RC taking the first and last 40 nm for its procedures, that leaves a cruise of only 120 miles. Little point in going higher. I have fuel to spare so, as we'll be below the critical altitude, will simply aim for around 240 kias. ARRIVAL On arriving, we'll be around 1800 kg lighter. Speed restrictions notwithstanding, V-REF will be 120 kt so our approach speed will be 140 and short final 130. We'll have 20% flap again and our stall speed will be 91 kt. The only peculiarity I've found in this plane is that stall speeds with 40% flaps are higher than stall speeds with 20%. Weather at Ottawa is 300@11 with broken cloud at 2100 feet and 15 miles visibility. FS9's CYOW has two runways with ILS: 07 and 32. Runway 07 will have a tailwind so I'm guessing that AI will be using RY32. It's not much of a tailwind though so I may be wrong. I'm hoping for 32 -- there's less taxiing and it's probably the one the real world would use. ILS 32 is 110.30 on 306° ILS 07 is 109.50 on 056° Threshold elevation is 374 feet Decision height will be 200 feet and the missed approach for both is simply to fly runway heading to 3000 feet and wait for instructions. It's a relatively low and short flight. I will accept Approach & Tower's vectors to intercept the localiser. It's nearly midnight and the cargo is valuable: I won't request an early turn. Accepting vectors means that after I reach 40 nm from Ottawa, RC will dictate my heading and altitude. My last waypoint, LANRK, is within the terminal area at 36 nm but it's close to the boundary and on a straight line so RC is unlikely to cause me to miss it. All other things being equal, I expect a 55 minute flight plus ten or so for the approach. Let's see what happens. *** *** *** The Air Canada flight is scheduled for a 22:10 local time departure. I'm ready early. At 0240Z, twenty to ten local, we're rolling off the apron for the long drive to 05. There's a lot of traffic here: everyone from Air Canada to Transat. At 0244Z (having taxied at up to 50 kt) we're accelerating down runway 05, clearing the way for an Air Canada 767 from Vancouver, who'd been cleared to land almost in the same breath as I'd been cleared to enter the runway. I was stressed. Perspiration dried but I never heard him ordered around. Little to report concerning the cruise. It was so dark I could barely see the clouds that kept thumping the keel. Did spot a Caravan at one point and I didn't use the autopilot, doing the whole flight by hand, which was quite engrossing. For whatever reason, the plane flew like a heavy Mosquito, inclined to accelerate away with whatever instability I'd introduced. I even had to pause to take screenshots. Happily RC, like FS9, will tune radios for me so while flying I didn't have to look away for too long. Dark up 'ere, innit? On arrival I nearly messed up the turn onto 140° while maintaining 9000. Spot the VSI. Lucky I had a few feet in hand... Oops. Immediately on completing the turn, "Descend and maintain 4000". CYOW appeared as a dot of light abeam at around 10 miles. Then "Descend and maintain 3000. Fly heading 050." The flying, like the scenery, was getting more interesting. Turning off what would normally be the downwind leg. I did wallow onto the localiser, and was rather too high (another dodgy turn) so was glad of the good visibility. Still, it was another greaser. I've had to get good at soft landings in this plane -- you lose Air Hauler income for damaging cargo. Decision height. Land. I parked up and shut down at 0344Z. it only later occurred to me that Air Canada would possibly have been relatively low too on the short flight so would have been subject to the same speed restriction, making our flights about the same duration. Offloading. As it happened, I failed to set RC up for a full departure procedure and it sent me first to 5000' and then almost immediately up to cruise. I also used rather less fuel than estimated and parked up with 9260 kg useable in the tanks, a burn of 1440 kg in 200 nm equating to 7.2 kg/nm and enough to get me to CYTZ in the morning. Flight analysis. All crafted from the finest hand-flying, just for the practice.. D

I'm laughing at this. You're welcome. I didn't really think of it as a tutorial. We all do more with our sims than kiosk-mode but we very rarely cover flight planning or fuel calculation, weather, balancing loads, repainting or whatever else in our narratives. It was more of a behind-the-scenes flight report, although there might be some useful thoughts embedded somewhere in there. D

I think you should add a trailer for the 151° proof.

That road train only constitutes one truck. You want a few? What are you flying?

Sorry it took so long. I've been putting it off, knowing it would be a long job. C-130 with no flight management software -- I spend my working days poking buttons on electronic things and refuse to do it at the weekend. I think the remaining two legs will be a lot simpler. I used to use Flight1's C441 in Air Hauler. Its autopilot had a great facility for an automated cruise climb whereby I could trim in the climbout to give the min drag speed and at ceiling setting a silly FL like 700 combined with setting a VS of 0 allowed the plane to float upwards as it burnt off fuel. A CDA at flight idle and MDS was then possible by disengaging alt hold and retarding the throttle. That gave the most economical profile for an entire flight. This is to say, your climb out and your descent will depend on what you want to achieve. For a procedural arrival, the attached pdf narrative pretty well covers it from a FS9 perspective. D ttpp-cyyz.pdf

I at least know what I'll be doing for the Carrera Panamericana: "it was widely held by contemporaries to be the most dangerous race of any type in the world." Right down on the ground as fast as I can.

On a per challenge basis perhaps? Plan v. time seemed to work for the Route 66. Fastest was great fun in the Bendix Trophy. I've just started on AirBasil_1's Toronto flight and my goal is no more thanto fly a commercial route and a reasonably accurate arrival & approach with Radar Contact while having a good look at the Ultimate Terrain. The Australian AOPA... I don't know yet... maybe just the chance to visit some obscure fields I've never seen. If it's happening well after new year, I will make the missing fields for FS9 even though they are all 'overfly' waypoints and I'll probably drop in. If I fly something unfamiliar (most of the hangar...) I'll need the practice so that I don't make a fool of myself in front of you all at the final landing.

Just dropped into this so forgive me if I missed context. In UK vintage road rallies, special stages are done on a regularity basis where penalties are equal for arriving early or late. Thus 1 minute early followed by one minute late results in a two minute overall penalty. I think it's done to ensure a consistent adherence to national speed limits. It's also a lot more taxing for both driver & navigator. I think, if you plan 23 minutes, getting there in 22 should also be a fail. In these planned & timed challenges, the question is only one of whether the sum time is for a leg/stage or for the entire course. Overall course seems reasonable to me: if someone has a busy evening they can rip through one leg in the knowledge that they can take it easy on the next. It also means there's more scope for sightseeing while making up time on the dull sections. Personally though, and regardless of how the challenge is run, I'll probably have a private competition with myself on a per-leg basis. D

There's death, taxes and dead donationware. I hate that silly mistake: it plays hell with planning long flights in which I want to arrive at a specific local time. I guess MS never thought anyone would care enough for a patch to be a priority.

Kamarang to Piarco. ... was a beautiful flight bobbing around among the clouds, with a growing sense of release. The last flight on the continent. departing SYKM. The entire South American section has been based on visiting airports I've modified for traffic and downloaded addons. Well, I just wanted to get over the coast so did only a touch & go at SVPR. Entering R downwind at SVPR. I made a small deviation at Port of Spain, to have a look at the port itself, another Roger Wensley addon in collaboration with Jim Turner. Port of Spain port. Clearance to land at Piarco was given prematurely. "Follow the Cessna on base" necessitated a 360 to give it time. "Follow the Cessna". Starting an impromptu hold. Short final #1. Reestablished and over the threshold within touching distance of the tarmac and I heard "Siai Marchetti ENU go around". 'bout bleedin' time. Shouldn't that be "... onto the runway"? This version of Piarco was another framerate killer. A perfect landing (by my standards) and brakeless rollout was followed, on exiting the runway, by a CTD. Excatly as happened at Rochambeau, the other Delblond Christian addon. That sort of thing is so disappointing. Still, I got some good shots of Port of Spain and reflew the flight at 16× for an accurate log entry and fuel consumption, and confirmed it's the airport scenery objects (probably the billion trillion polygons) that cause the problem. Yeah? Just try it. Lucky for you I'm in a good mood pal. Now, fourteen years on, I've finally left South America.

Sorry. I should have thought of that. Here's a revised plan including VOR CAG 112.500 for Caiguna. As far as making airfields goes... One problem will be airport elevation. I'm using FS Global 08. Default mesh and addon mesh are invariably very different so anything I create may be on a plateau or in a pit. Should be close to every other addon mesh though. I can use stock scenery objects, but they're for FS9, and have low res textures. Better to use Rwy12 or EZ objects, but I no longer know which download any one of them came from. I could list the names of the objects used. That should give some idea. The biggest problem though is that anything made for FS9 will exclude any other sim. possible AOPA Australia plan.pdf

I thoought I'd see how many stops it took from Piarco. Two! My main AI schedule is still Flight1's Ultimate Traffic from, I think, 2003 but the schedule itself is about all that's left now. The times are from Flight1's timetables; I think they are local time without seasonal adjustment. Air Canada A319 depart TTPP Tuesday 1530 and arrive CYYZ Tuesday 2030 Air Canada A321 depart CYYZ Tuesday 2210 and arrive CYOW Tuesday 2311 A C Jazz DHC-8 depart CYOW Wednesday 0800 and arrive CYTZ Wednesday 0910 I could walk between CYYZ and CYTZ in half the time.