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d j is still otherwise engaged and I too have been rather overburdened for the last couple of months. The lorry's crew in reality include couple of friends with a passing interest in aviation. The collusion referred to below was -- again in reality -- the success they had in discovering that Iris's Pilatus PC-9 for FS9 is still for sale and then informing me of the link. The FS9 version is, I think, freeware that was (and still is) bundled in with the full FSX version so does have some minor omissions (starter switch...) but it's a detailed model, flies well and has a good VC. It also has a good paintkit. The original ZM331 is based, I think, at RAF Valley. If I haven't misunderstood, it belongs to 72 Squadron, whose badge is a swift, which - in turn - finally made it from North Africa to overhead my home last weekend, around a fortnight later than usual. It's a comfort to have friends who know the Texan ii is really a PC-9 by another name. I'd been wanting a Texan ii for some time: they are often in the sky where I work, but never for very long... I'd tried a few freeware sevens and nines but none convinced and recently I'd all but given up the search. The boys had gone looking on my behalf-- they must have got tired of my whinging. So now, in addition to catching up in Air Hauler, possibly visiting the other Cleddau and planning (and completing) the next RtW stage, which will take me as far as Florida, I have a new plane to learn. *** *** Sometimes life is quite uncooperative. Back in mid-February, at the end of the southern section of the Australian, d j and I had laid over at the William Inglis. She'd done her homework, choosing the hotel partly for its luxury and partly because it was home to the counterpart to Corryong's Man from Snowy River. Here was Tanya Bartlett's Yearling and Leader, although strapper might be more correct (that's groom and stablehand to us in the rest of the world). Ms Bartlett also sculpted (is that the right word?) the now retired thoroughbred Winx, whose only living foal sold last month for Australian $10 million. Yearling and Leader. d j and I'd had 26 hours in the Arrow and a few more coming over in the C-130 but given long enough the real world was bound to intrude so the following morning, after a somewhat subdued breakfast, we took a taxi back to the airport to collect Smallfry. The crew were getting restless and had offered d j a lift back to work, saying they'd return in a few days. They'd found friends among the like-minded at RAAF Base Richmond, home to 37 Sqn's C-130Js so we quietly flew the 25 miles over from Bankstown before parting. They all went off to greet the spring and I sat in Smallfry for a while, feeling somewhat forlorn. It's not something I can keep up for long though and thoughts of Port of Spain and the Caribbean were getting the upper hand so I wandered back indoors in search of caffeine. I needed something new and mentioned this to a few likely-looking OD overalls who shared my mess table for an AAFCANS coffee. "Ahh mate, we've got just the thing. That is, if you want to trade and can make up what might be a bit of a shortfall..." When I saw it, I immediately thought of Melo's Chipmunk. Pedestrian barely begins to describe little Pipers so I returned to Bankstown and, enjoying the peace of the hotel's ornamental garden, plugged in some Floyd and got down to financial and logistical planning. Repayments on the C-130 are still costing me over a hundred grand a month. No nav with whom to talk things over left me feeling a little uncertain but I couldn't see any reason for keeping Smallfry any longer. In any case, I'd just seen at least one very good reason for disposing of it. The crew returned for me and Smallfry and, far from being surprised (which in turn surprised me), arrived fully equipped for pulling apart a different aircraft. I strongly suspect some major collusion between the crew and those overalls. After all, it's what they're paid for. We drove the lorry back to Cardiff and offloaded our new machine, piecemeal. The crew did their spanner and screwdriver magic and added a few bits & pieces, including GPS and autopilot. It is perhaps not as elegant as the Mosquito but it does around the same speed and, with external tanks, has a good range. Also, its functionality makes it intrinsically beautiful. Now it just needed re-registration and a lick of paint... New duds. d j is still not around so I imagined her in the back seat, remembering the Arrow and complaining. "I like the plane but... really, what is there for me to do? Point this thing at the destination and it's already there." This is so much more fun than granny's golf cart. "How about the Lakes? That's where the Hawks from Valley go to play when the Mach Loop is fully booked." "Ok. Brecon VOR first, then. 117.45 and about 015°. We can visit Snowdon and Valley on the way." Planning the route on the back of the mental cigarette packet, she added "If we're going to the Lakes we can do the highest hill in Wales, England and Scotland before stopping somewhere on the north west coast." Now that's a long itinerary but this thing really shifts, as you'd expect of a basic fast jet trainer. "Let's see how long it takes." Appropriately, FS9 ATC's spoken version of "Pilatus" sounds like Gwladys. I think I may change it to Dragon. Chautauqua flying Cardiff to Ronaldsway? I really must investigate this one. Definitely another Ultimate Traffic mistake. "... living the dream and we are outta here." On approaching my local I discovered exactly how slick this plane is: approach and final (even with full flaps and gear down) both took an unexpected amount of air braking. My turn onto base was rather wider than was comfortable because I wasn't sure how slowly I could go... Jumping the queue. I thought they'd got stuck. Away northwest to Snowdonia and Valley where we behaved disgracefully, overflying the field at about 50 feet before turning tail for the English Lakes. Not landing there. Tal y Bont farm strip. Wales' highest, Yr Wyddfa aka Snowdon. The addition is a definite improvement. Gategill Fell, Blencathra and Hall's Fell in the Lakes. Approaching Scafell, England's highest. Somewhere over Strathclyde. I ran out of RW time so elected to stop overnight at Glasgow. Just about to enter left downwind and this happened. No matter: the photoscenery around Glasgow was never finished and isn't particularly attractive. Third stage tomorrow. Oh **** ** Back to earth in Glasgow. The approach et c. reconstructed. 0630Z and bright, low VFR sunshine. We were intending to head north west with the sun behind our right shoulders. The Caledonian DC-10 on the apron was a bit of a treat. Taxiing into the morning. Don't need much runway when you don't have much fuel... Over the Clyde to Dumbarton, Loch Linnhe, Tyndrum and Rannoch Moor, keeping an eye out for the Buachaille and blasting over the top of Glen Coe with the Ben dead ahead. On then over the CMD arete and down the other side past Observatory Buttress and any number of Gullies with a capital G, over the CIC hut to Fort William in the Great Glen. Buachaille Etive Mor. The Ben. The plan had been to fly to Plockton just south of Torridon and over the water from Skye but as ever, 1) I ran out of time and 2) realised too late that I hadn't reinstated photoscenery textures that I'd been modifying so opted for North Connel instead. It's awkwardly located for a straight in from the north, tucked away immediately behind a steep little hill, so gear down and full flaps long before the runway finally appears as you part the heather on the hilltop. North Connel dead ahead. Look closely: it is there. The unfinished phototextures are extremely drab but give a very good impression of the colour of the hills on a clear and frosty spring morning. Snow lingers on the Ben throughout the summer, disappearing in the autumn. It's said that were it a couple of hundred feet higher there'd be a glacier. I've only been up there once. It rained. When the rain dried up, the cloud came down. I wandered up the tourist route from the Nevis campsite with a retired sergeant who in his past life was an ACE Mobile forward artillery controller. He'd spent years between Germany, the UK and Norway before retiring to repair electronic stuff. Sgt Owen on Crib Goch when we were, well, not as old. The real ZM331 in the Mach Loop. I downloaded this photo a long time ago and have no idea who took it. I think one of these came from the RAF's pages.

Did you ever have a reply? I see Club Chachapoya (CCCP!?) is alive and well and mooting a short challenge in NZ but there's still nothing in the club pages. Is that because members still can't post? Inadvertently giving this a bit of a bump... D

Human/drone hybrid? Personally, I think it looks rather sleek but a 100 mile range wouldn't cut it. Where do the other four people sit? It doesn't look big enough for more than the pilot or does riders mean they're on the outside? Could be draughty.

My point concerning 60 Hz refresh rate and 30 FPS was that locking a game's framerate to a factor of the refresh rate will ensure that the game frame changes at the same moment as the monitor updates. It reduces tearing of images when panning. It can also reduce the flicker that is more easily perceived by peripheral vision. If vertical sync is turned on (or whatever identical function other graphics software implements) then the game's fps should automatically switch between various factors of ther monitor's refresh rate. Although at that rate and with a good game FPS it probably won't make any difference, your 144 Hz monitor might give a better image if you lock to 36 FPS (i. e.144 / 4) or 24 (144 / 6). I suspect that the vertical sync equivalent won't be noticed as it's likely to drop the FPS to 28.8 (144 / 5). I also think that 24 fps is very flickery in peripheral vision and a bit laggy on approaches et c. It is hopeless in first person shooters. If you are in a complex scene where the game could only manage 27 FPS then vsync would drop the game FPS to 24 (next lowest factor of 144). I wonder what Logie Baird would make of today's monitor refresh rates... D

Thank you! to both of you. I really appreciate the responses. The model is Iris's freeware FS9 version of the PC-9 that is bundled in with the retail FSX version. I have leading edges, wings. horizontal stabilisers and errors and omissions left to do, and then learning how to fly it... The wording will be much too small to be clear but not knowing is frustrating, especially as everything else in the reference photos is perfectly clear. D

It never occurred to me to consider the ac supply frequency: the monitor runs on a low voltage dc supply. Here are my monitor's native settings: 2560 × 1440 at 60 Hz (though Windows 10 insists that it's 59 Hz). I'm not sure about TVs, though I believe the old tubes were tied to the ac frequency. If your TV refresh rate is 60 Hz then locking your framerate to 30 should work well, reducing flicker and reducing tearing when you pan your view, because frame and screen will always change at the same moment. D

Catchy title, huh? I've found some free time and am busy priddying the new acquisition. I guess there'll be more on that when it's fully priddied. Meanwhile, do any of you real aviators (I know you're here) know what is surrounded by the yellow ring in this photo of a Texan ii. There are two on the left of the fuselage and one on each upper & lower wing surface. Six total but none on the right of the fuselage. Here's a bonus question for a fudge sundae. Any idea what the legend might say below the two white circles between Z and M? There's a matching pair on the right side and they all seem to have the same words. And for a candle on the dessert, any Beechcraft pilots know what info is on the riveted plate over on the right? It's just under the leading edge of the horizontal stabiliser. Is it manufacturer's serial number etc? Snip of a photo by Taffevans, who has taken some outstanding reference photos.

Hi Hans. I fully agree with your decision to keep some processing power in reserve. I have my framerate locked at 60 fps to match my monitor. FS9 usually runs at 60 but at complex airports with lots of AI it can drop as low as 30 so my PC could be regarded as 'struggling'. On the other hand, I'm happy with anything down to around 30 fps so I don't regard it as an issue. I have a lot of un-mipped 32-bit textures in my aircraft folder. I may make a copy of the folder and compress & mip all the textures. Then I can compare framerates to satisfy my curiosity. Whatever, as you wrote, spare processing power is always a good thing. D

This will be long and wordy but first... @hjwalter Hans, to answer your original question, the only inbuilt mechanism for specifically an image is the computer's graphics engine, which has constantly to resize every texture file in order to create the illusion of distance. BGLs are a different matter and I can imagine that someone has managed to compile one one that does create mips from base textures. Seems redundant though -- the processing power to create mips on the fly and then render them would be exactly the same as simply resizing and rendering the base image. I won't be at all offended if nobody reads this. I won't know unless some masochist points out a mistake... @jgf Thank you for adding that. I thought my explanation was reasonably clear but perhaps it wasn't. It could be a language barrier, I suppose. For anyone who just happens along and has the fortitude, I'll reiterate... First, image compression. DXT3 degrades image quality, right from the outset. And it gets worse with every hard save. I'll come back to that. All compression degrades image quality. Not just game textures and not just the DXT format. Every time you edit and save one of your photographs as a jpeg the image quality will diminish. Zoom right out from your newly compressed photo and it probably won't look so bad. Zoom in and you will see more of the degradation. The same thing happens with music (except for a few formats like .flac) though most of our ears can't hear the difference between a wav and an mp3. Decompressing a compressed image doesn't repair the damage. It is permanent. Converting DXT3 to 888-8 doesn't improve the image quality. I do it to downloads because 1) I'm likely to edit in the future and 2) I'll forget what format it is. I resave downloads as 888-8 to ensure that my future self doesn't mess up. There is some good news though. Image editing software doesn't actually save the file when you click 'Save'. What it does is make a temporary file of what's essentially metadata comprising the sum of all the editing that you've done. The compression part of the metadata is only applied to the image file itself when you 'Save As' or when you save and close. You can save as often as you like as long as you keep the image open, and only one compression will be done, right at the very end. DXT images are compressed. 32 bit are not. So, for the same number of pixels, DXT3 uses up much less disk space. They are arguably quicker to load into FS9 just because they are fewer MB in size but I've never noticed a difference, not even on my old XP machine. On a slight tangent, resizing is also a form of compression: 2048 × 2048 down to 512 × 512 means a file 1/16 of the kB size but the different compression formats we have been discussing don't alter the image dimensions, only the quality. Second, mip mapping. It's one of the more interesting aspects of mathematics that just as you can map a piece of a flat image to a point on the surface of an imaginary 3d model (atlas to globe), so you can map a different piece of the same image to the concept of 'further away'. Referring to the ISS images in my earlier post (which as usual came from Wikipedia), mips don't affect near objects because for close-ups, the highest-res base image is always used. The explanation for mips being necessary dates back to the 20th century. The size of a building, a tree, an aircraft on your monitor is not 30 metres wide by 40 metres long. Its real size changes as it seems to move closer or further from your virtual viewpoint. Sometimes the object may be 1000 pixels wide. A few minutes later it could be 30 pixels. Graphics hardware and software have to edit textures to create the illulsion of distance and perspective. Imagine an FS9 building falling behind you as you taxi past it. As you go by, looking out of your cockpit window, it is a rectangle covering 500 × 500 pixels of your monitor. Taxi onward and look back over your virtual shoulder. The object is now a trapezium 50 pixels tall and 10 pixels wide. The graphics stuff has to shrink the texture to make it look further away and has to skew it to account for perspective. Shrinking has to be done on a per-pixel basis so that's 262 000 pixels that have to be processed for a 512 × 512 texture. It has to be done for every texture in every frame of your fps. For a 2048 × 2048 it's nearly 4.2 million. However, if the texture has mips, then much of the work has already been done. While you are near the virtual building, the graphics engine will still select the high-res, unmipped base image in the texture file. As you taxi onward, the graphics engine will select one of the pre-shrunk images from a different piece of the texture file and then only has perhaps 64 × 64 pixels to process. This is the purpose of mip mapping: reducing the load. Fifteen or more years ago this was absolutely essential: small ram, weak processors, onboard graphics... Nowadays, small textures like those in FS9 -- a maximum of 2048 × 2048 -- are no trouble for modern equipment and mip mapping is not necessary. If you have an old PC and you find your framerate dropping then mip mapping textures may help. It's worth being aware that it may not: the framerate could be affected by the number of polygons in the frame, online weather or even by complex systems in the player aircraft. Lots of things affect it. But... modern PCs don't struggle with unmipped textures in FS9. D

Except possibly from the subjective perspective of personal preference, that's absolutely not the case. As I wrote above, mip mapping has no effect within a certain view distance because up to that point, the largest image will be used and not any of the mips. In that circumstance, mipped is exactly the same as unmipped.. Compressing to DXT-3 degrades the crispness by introducing dithering: blurring of edges and blending of colours as an artifact of the compression process. On top of that it seems also to reduce the bit depth of each channel, which alters the colours themselves. That happens at all draw distances and by the nature of textures, is most obvious at close range. Here's a snippet of a downloaded Shanghai livery for a Fruit Stand plane. I opened the 32-bit version (the repainter was farsighted enough to include it in the zip) and saved a couple of times as DXT3. Once was enough to introduce the artifacts but I made them more obvious by saving a couple more times. Whether or not one or the other looks better in game to any specific person is entirely subjective but compressed formats are lossy and degrade the crispness. D First the 32-bit original: Second, the DXT3 format:

I don't think that's how mips work. Each grade of mipmap is just a smaller, lower-resolution copy of the base texture in an image. Just as different areas of a single-file aircraft texture are mapped to different parts of a 3d model, so different areas of a mipped texture file are mapped to different distances. That is to say, each draw distance will use a different part of the mipped image. If there are no mips, the high-res base image is used at all draw distances so you effectively get full texture detail right out to the horizon. Image editing software such as DXTbmp doesn't show the whole set of mips in one image but mostly they would look like this: Unpipped texture used at all distances: Mipped texture. Larger file but easier on the graphics memory because for distant objects, the graphics hardware doesn't have to load the large hi-res image, just a small blurry version: I strip the mips from all my aircraft textures because high-resolution modern PCs, graphics hardware & drivers, and monitors don't really need them. (As an aside, I also convert them to 32-bit as I sometimes edit them and each hard save of a compressed image degrades it). Stripping them makes the file slightly smaller. (Decompressing them makes them bigger...) The fundamental resolution of a modern monitor is good enough that -- mostly -- the sparkling and the moiree pattern just don't happen. Modern processors and memory don't struggle with the high-res, unmipped textures even when handling hundreds of them at a complex airport with heavy AI. In the past I've also stripped them from other textures but occasionally came across problems so I leave those as the developer made them. D

This, combined with the jitter in your original post, suggests that you have a dirty or worn USB plug or socket. It could even be a broken solder joint in that port on the Acer. The supposition is lent weight by the fact that the joystick works ok when plugged into a different machine. I guess you've tried different ports on the same machine. If they all gave the same result then it's likely to be the USB plug on end of the joystick's lead. (If one machine has slightly tighter sockets then it wouldn't show the problem). Either that or a dirty pot but I'd expect that to give the same result on all machines. VP2's suggestion is good. Have you tried resetting the sensitivities in FS9 or even -- temporarily, so make a backup first -- creating a new cfg file? I didn't know W11 had a prefetch folder. In any case, it won't affect USB or joysticks. It's only a close-to-hand folder in which Windows can put copies of stuff it expects to need later in a hurry. D

Richie, if you know your way around PCs and still haven't had any success, try running FS9 again and, after it's failed to launch, take a look at the windows event log. There should be more info there. D

Just read the first investigation report in this month's AAIB bulletin and had flashbacks to flying into Billy Bishop in Toronto before Christmas, when I forgot I had a backup AI and magnetic compass. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6617eb186b4cf65594d1ea4b/AAIB_Bulletin_4-2024.pdf No 28V dc ess bus, no 28 V dc stby bus, no 28V dc emer bus. No option for Ctrl, Alt, Del... or even a pause to make a cup of tea.

This suggests the gear was still rolling despite the brakes being set. I've forgotten which sim you use but is it possible to alter the effectiveness of the brakes (for FS9 either aircraft.cfg or the air file)? It would allow you to restore the more cooperative wind when landing.