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allanj12

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  1. Thank you - all due to the people mentioned above who made the aircraft and repaint.
  2. Thank you - all due to the people mentioned above who made the aircraft and repaint.
  3. You are welcome! Enjoy the other 'aviation history and flightsim' stories in my blog.
  4. Glad you both like the aircraft - it's David Grindele who added it to the library. Life is a little busy at present but I hope to do more on the blog later in the year ...
  5. [ATTACH=CONFIG]167153[/ATTACH] Edmonton City Airport (CYXD), once known as Blatchford Field, was the first licensed airport in Canada. It ceased operations in November last year. Years ago I travelled on a Canadian Regional flight in and of the airport and later I found myself there travelling on client corporate Citation V jets. It was superseded by the Edmonton International airport a little south of the city. CYXD was an airport a stone’s throw from the city centre. Wiley Post was to make a re-fuelling stop there before the final leg of his 1933 ‘Round the World’ flight in a Lockheed Vega, the ‘Winnie Mae’. It was a remarkable solo flight to beat his own RTW record secured two years earlier in the same aircraft, with Harold Gatty as his navigator. The stop in Edmonton was meant to be as short as possible; refuel the aircraft, refresh the pilot then out on the final leg to New York. That was the plan. Rain and a grass airfield that had turned into mud were now threatening to make the reality somewhat different. However, airport officials had provided for just such an emergency – a Caterpillar 15 from the Union Tractor and Harvester Company had been brought in the night before. After landing in the muddy field, the refueling took place while Wiley had a brief sleep. They towed the aircraft gently on to Portage Avenue, a main thoroughfare, to use it as a temporary runway. No mean feat – the aircraft was very fragile to such lateral forces. Other Edmonton folks had worked for hours, taking down power lines and clearing the area to make the road a single-use runway. [ATTACH=CONFIG]167154[/ATTACH] An an hour and fifteen minutes from the time the aircraft touched down it was back in the air again, en route non-stop to Roosevelt Field, to secure a new world record. The story can be found at the website gasenginemagazine.com in a 1981 article, from the 1933 story by H.H. Orser, who drove the tractor that day. Allan Jones allanj12@gmail.com http://moonscourse.blogspot.ca Allan Jones is the author of In a Moon’s Course, an ebook of World War II flight stories/plans of the Air Transport Auxiliary, available at ebook online suppliers. The Flight (well, it’s hardly a flight unless you want to spend another 9 hours flying the Vega to New York). If you want to take off along Portage Avenue and see the Edmonton City Airport on one side, here is how I did it. Portage Avenue in Edmonton is called Kingsway now. It runs from NW to SE along the southern edge of the Edmonton City Airport site (see Spot View Map). I first added Rick Lackey’s Edmonton City Airport to FSX (edmontonv10.zip) and also David Grindele’s Lockheed Vega update for FSX in the Winnie Mae livery (Vega8.zip), but you can use any aircraft that will fit on the road, really. I then placed the aircraft on the runway, chose Spot View and, in lieu of a virtual Caterpillar 15, used the ‘Y’ slew function to pull it on to the highway. A little alignment when in cockpit view, start her up and … voilà . As you take off have a peek at the airport. The Blatchford Field re-development as a mixed-use community for 30,000 Edmontonians will, over time, make the airport as distant a memory as the Caterpillar 15. [ATTACH=CONFIG]167155[/ATTACH]
  6. (Based on an article by Roger Theiderman in the Sunday Times of Sri Lanka) Sri Lanka, or Ceylon as it was called at the time, gained independence from British rule in 1948. 1952 was the last year of office of its first Prime Minister, D. S. Senanayake. It was still a country steeped in the decades of the colonial ‘norms’ and recreational aviation there was the pastime of the elite, or a certain ‘class’ of society. [ATTACH=CONFIG]165827[/ATTACH] Approaching the Puttalam Lagoon So in August that year when a middle-aged Ceylonese named Paulis Appuhamy turned up at the flying club at Ratmalana Airport south of Colombo, he was something of an anomaly. Dressed in traditional attire including a sarong, his hair long and bundled in a traditional knot called a konde he spoke no English - but he wanted to learn to fly. Something about Paulis must have caught the attention of the duty flying instructor, who took him for an introductory flight in a Tiger Moth before passing him on to two flying instructors who spoke Sinhalese, Captain C.H.S. Amarasekera, and Captain Susantha ('Sus') Jayasekera. Paulis Appuhamy owned a business, a bus line inherited from his father that he had developed into a thriving operation. He may not have fitted the social clique of the flying club (which had doubts about a non-English speaking local learning to fly) but he had the passion, financial means, technical skills and determination to do so. On October 5, 1953 he earned his Private Pilot license. Paulis flew for a further two years, maintaining his license until sometime in1955. His health later deteriorated and he passed away in 1973. He was perhaps the first pilot to learn to fly in a sarong and use bare feet on the rudder bar; the first to challenge through tenacity and personality the social prejudice about what constituted ‘a suitable member’ of a flying club in Sri Lanka at the time. Allan Jones allanj12@gmail.com http://moonscourse.blogspot.ca Allan Jones is the author of In a Moon’s Course, an ebook of World War II flight stories/plans of the Air Transport Auxiliary, available at ebook online suppliers. The Flight. Route: VCCC D107J CA VC15 Paulis learned to fly in a Tiger Moth but around 1953 the club also acquired a de Havilland DHC-1 ‘Chipmunk’ . Paulis took his son on pleasure flights in the club aircraft and once got lost in the Chipmunk, landing at the Puttalam (Palavi) airfield and causing some consternation when he was overdue at Ratmalana. This route heads up to Puttalam but as there is no landing strip there in FSX or FS9, I cut inland to land at Sigiraya airport. I used the default Cessna 172 rather than load another aircraft into my system, but there are Chipmunks available in the Flightsim library. The route will steer you clear of Bandaranaike International Airport (which didn’t exist in 1953) , give you a nice view of the Indian Ocean coastline and take you up to the massive Puttalam lagoon before turning inland to the airfield at Sigiraya.
  7. Recently I tried my hand at making two short YouTube videos to visualize two of the flights from In a Moon’s Course, my flightsim ebook about the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA). So I thought I would share links to them here. The first video ‘ ’ is one of my favorite scenic routings – a flight in a PBY ‘Catalina’ flying boat north from Greenock, a key centre for Catalina ferry deliveries, to Sullom Voe in The Shetlands. [ATTACH=CONFIG]164892[/ATTACH] The picturesque route of this delivery is along the Great Glen; Lochs Linnhe, Lochy, Oich and Loch Ness and then up the east coast to the Shetlands. Over 500 PBYs were ferried during WWII across the Atlantic, many arriving at the Greenock seaplane base west of Glasgow for armament and operational equipment fitting, after which they were distributed to military operating units. While flying boat deliveries were only a small percentage of the 300,000 aircraft movements made by the ATA, Lettice Curtiss wrote about them in her book ‘The Forgotten Pilots’. She noted how pleasant these ‘boat’ delivery flights could be in good weather – unhurried, as the aircraft are not fast, with coastal routings and gorgeous views. I hope I have done justice to this in my video. I used the Abacus PBY Catalina with Garry Smith’s RAF livery. The second video, ‘ ’, is (for me) the quite fascinating VFR flight from Chattis Hill to Colerne made by Ann Welch on 3 February 1942 in bad visibility and low cloud ceiling. [ATTACH=CONFIG]164893[/ATTACH] The story is given in Giles Whitell’s book ‘Spitfire Women’. It was mentioned in one of the earlier ‘Fly & Deliver’ articles on http://www.flightsim.com (see flydeliver2.zip in the library) but more complete details are given in my ebook. I used the A2A Simulations Spitfire Mark I. As a ‘video novice’ I used simple freeware tools for these videos; FS Recorder to capture the flights for replay, EzVid for the video capture and Audacity Sound Editor and Microsoft Movie Maker for the sound and video editing. They are not ‘fancy’ videos. I can now see the value of more versatile video support software for FSX and editing tools and will have to look at these if I make any more, so any advice would be appreciated. I am still a little amazed that I can follow tutorials on YouTube and pull a video together! I hope you enjoy them. Allan Jones allanj12@gmail.com http://moonscourse.blogspot.ca Allan Jones is the author of In a Moon’s Course, an ebook of World War II flight stories/plans of the Air Transport Auxiliary, available at Amazon, Kobo, W.H. Smith and other ebook online suppliers.
  8. From departure to landing these days the position of a modern commercial aircraft is known accurately and tracked on each journey; technology, automation and certainty have replaced manual calculation, radio-navigation and estimation. At the other end of the spectrum not that long ago, trans-Pacific flights had to cover oceanic distances of 6000-7000 nm with travel stops at small islands en route for refueling. [ATTACH=CONFIG]164004[/ATTACH] BCPA DC-4 at Canton Island British Commonwealth Pacific Airways (BCPA) flew such routes. The airline came into existence in the post-World War II era and existed for less than a decade – branded with the 'British' stamp to compete with the ‘American’ Pan-Am identity on the North America-to-Australia/New Zealand routes. BCPA started in 1946 with DC-4s and two years later moved to a fleet of four pressurized DC-6 'sleeper class' aircraft (where advertising photographs show a woman in nightdress having champagne breakfast in her berth and men in the aisles wearing silk dressing gowns). They stayed with this aircraft type through to their commercial demise in 1954. Qantas then took over the route. These flights were dependent on celestial navigation and/or radio-navigation fixes. LORAN systems were in place across the Pacific with centres in the French Frigate Shoals and the Marshall Islands. There is an interesting map of the LORAN coverage of the Pacific in this period here. BCPA flight crews, conscious of weight and fuel limitations, route times and weather changes had also to deal with low altitude turbulence issues in the original unpressurized DC-4 aircraft. They needed to choose courses (or course corrections based on weather updates) to minimize the effects on passengers. At the http://www.airwaysmuseum.com web page for BCPA there is a timetable for the airline from 1946, when the journey from Vancouver through San Francisco, Honolulu, Canton Island and Fiji to either Sydney or Auckland took about 4 days. It was an era when the only barrier between the flight deck and the main cabin was a curtain rather than a security door, when a passenger could ask to see the flight deck and hold a conversation with the flight crew. It is an experience no longer possible, unfortunately. I have memories (from later flights than these!) of young boys and girls returning from such flight deck visits either unable to stop talking about how wonderful it was or struck dumb with awe, often carrying the die-cast metal model of the aircraft given to them as part of their in-flight experience. 1946 was also the year when Trans-Pacific Airlines commenced operations with their first ‘war surplus’ C-47 aircraft flying out of John Rodgers Airport, as HIA was then known. They later became Aloha Airlines operating a range of aircraft (including one of my favorites, the Vickers Viscount) over the decades before they ceased passenger operations in 2008. Aloha to them all. Allan Jones allanj12@gmail.com http://moonscourse.blogspot.ca Allan Jones is the author of In a Moon’s Course, an ebook of World War II flight stories/plans of the Air Transport Auxiliary, available at Amazon, Kobo, W.H. Smith and other ebook online suppliers. The Flight PCIS to HIA Kanton Island (known as Canton in 1946) is part of the island republic of Kiribati. Its airport (PCIS) during and after WWII was an important refueling stop on the Pacific routes. The island had previously been a flying boat port of call. Now its airfield is closed but is still available as an emergency landing strip. It is present in both FS9 and FSX. The DC-4 package by Jens B. Kristensen (DC4_V30.zip) and the BCPA livery repaint by Wayne Tudor (bcpa_dc4.zip) in the Flightsim library provided my aircraft of choice. The Kristensen model is also available for FSX (DC4_V30X.zip). The course was 19 degrees to Hawaii, climbing eventually to 9,500 ft. for most of the journey of about 8 hours. The flight arrives at John Rodgers Airport. Although there are 'bubble sextant' add-ons for the truly enthusiastic 'veteran aircraft' flight simmer in the Flightsim library, I simply checked the GPS at about 30 minute intervals to provide deviations from planned course. Then I applied appropriate course corrections. Apart from water and clouds, there is nothing to see from departure until the welcome site of Hawaii – but that is trans-pacific aviation. [ATTACH=CONFIG]164005[/ATTACH] BCPA DC-4 arriving at Hawaii
  9. I like web sites dedicated to airlines that no longer operate – they provide images of aircraft you don’t see any more and, better still, the stories and camaraderie of former staff bring out how involved and proud they were of their jobs and the service they provided. A good example is the Pan-Am site ‘Everything Pan-Am’. There is a similar site for the airline Dan-Air which is less well known outside Europe, I suspect, than Pan-Am, but relevant to me as my first flight was in a Hawker Siddeley 748 of Dan-Air Skyways. [ATTACH=CONFIG]162602[/ATTACH] HS 748 departure from Lydd, default FS2004 I remember most clearly from the flight the large over-wing engines and props. Then I recalled more of the original trip - looking out of the window as we crossed the Channel, the views of the very different fields of Normandy. It was my first enjoyment of international travel by air. It was advertised at the time as a less expensive alternative flight from London to Paris. It was not quite that; the trip started in London at Victoria Station by coach to Ashford, Kent quite near the coast where passengers transferred to the aircraft for a short hop over to Beauvais in Normandy. It then finished the journey by coach into the centre of Paris. Almost as much road travel as by air, but for new air travellers it provided a very convenient city centre to city centre journey! Dan-Air had a number of ‘firsts’ – everything from the largest fleet of De Havilland Comets to transporting the first live dolphin and, in Europe, putting female pilots on the flight deck of commercial jets. Yvonne Sintes and Elizabeth Overbury were both Dan-Air pilots. So I was pleasantly surprised to find in the Flightsim library a really nice HS 748 package with a set of Dan-Air liveries including the Skyways colours (hs748v1f.zip). Released in 2006 by the team of Rick Piper, Fraser McKay, David Maltby, Saverio Maurri and Eric Marciano, it is a nice freeware aircraft that is as detailed and complex as many payware aircraft you can find today. There are still a few HS 748 aircraft operating around the world; you can find videos of some of them on YouTube. And you can try in MSFS to fly this veteran yourself! Allan Jones allanj12@gmail.com http://moonscourse.blogspot.ca Allan Jones is the author of In a Moon’s Course, an ebook of World War II flight stories/plans of the Air Transport Auxiliary, available at Amazon, Kobo, W.H. Smith and other ebook online suppliers. The Flight. I revisited my first flight by departing from Lydd, now called London Ashford Airport EGMD, although the Dan-Air memorabilia site shows that in 1972-74, Lympne Airfield EGMK (pronounced ‘Limm’) was the base for the Skyways flight. Both are close to Ashford. I made the trip using FS2004, as it has more detailed airport features at Lydd and Beauvais than the default FSX (I did not look for any airport add-ons) but there are FSX versions available also. [ATTACH=CONFIG]162603[/ATTACH] Landing at Beauvais FS2004
  10. Harold Evans ‘Whitey’ Dahl was, to use an understatement, a colourful character. Born in Illinois in 1909 he graduated as a pilot from Kelly Field in Texas in 1933 and served with the USAAC. Trouble with the law seemed to follow Whitey throughout his flying career and around the world, largely due to aircraft or cargo disappearing. [ATTACH=CONFIG]161144[/ATTACH] profile of route used, developed with Plan-G software After his US military service ended (under a cloud, metaphorically) he became a ‘soldier of fortune’ in the Spanish Civil War under the name Hernando Diaz Evans. He was captured by Franco’s forces and first sentenced to a firing squad followed by a dramatic reprieve, the story of which made him headline news. During World War II he served with the Canadian Air Force (RCAF), first as a CATP trainer in Bellville, Ontario and later in South America as a Ferry Command pilot - but was then given a Board of Enquiry for things that went missing. These items included significant bits of aircraft, a motorcycle and a vacuum cleaner. Government-owned vacuum cleaners are very valuable, of course, and he was found guilty of 4 of 14 charges. After the war he flew for Swissair in Europe until some cargo gold bullion also went missing, putting him into more trouble and a stint in gaol in 1955; Swiss gold is even more valuable than Canadian government vacuum cleaners. Whitey filed an Appeal and was released early pending its review. He then headed north - a long way north - working as a cargo pilot for the Dorval Air Transport Company, flying C-46 ‘Commandos’ along the DEW line. [ATTACH=CONFIG]161145[/ATTACH] After take-off and setting course at Iqaluit His last flight was in a Douglas C-47 on 14 February 1956, flying from Frobisher Bay to Fort Chimo (now the communities of Iqaluit and Kuujuaq, respectively). The C-47 he flew that day (CF-BZH) was not a company aircraft; it was owned privately and, heading south on leave, Dahl agreed to fly it out. A WWII surplus plane, it was reportedly not in the best condition - it did not even have a working radio. Dahl almost made it; he crashed 25 miles north-west of his destination. He was 47 years old at the time. More about Harold Dahl’s tumultuous life and flying career can be found here. His daughter’s perspective on her nomadic early years (she is the Canadian author and journalist Stevie Cameron) can also be found here. Allan Jones allanj12@gmail.com http://moonscourse.blogspot.ca Allan Jones is the author of In a Moon’s Course, an ebook of World War II flight stories/plans of the Air Transport Auxiliary, available at Amazon, Kobo, W.H. Smith and other ebook online suppliers. The Flight. CYFB YLC YKG YLA CYVP (a distance of 394.6 nm). I don’t know the exact route Dahl followed but chose the most obvious for the simulation – the shortest crossing of the Hudson Strait from Kimmirut (Lake Harbour) to Kangiqsujuaq (Wakeham Bay). This seems consistent with maps of the WWII transatlantic ferry routes from a decade earlier and would tie in with his crash location being north-west of Kuujuaq, as he would have been heading south near this point along this route. The alternative routes would have been either point-to-point direct, or a slightly longer over-water route to Quaqtaq with a lower total distance, or a flight down Frobisher Bay across a stretch of the Davis Strait to pass over Port Burwell then head south-west. Dahl, for all his foibles, was a skilled pilot. But this was a risky flight. In February there are 7-8 daylight hours and the 3-4 hour flight would have been under VFR conditions over inhospitable terrain (see Plan Elevation). The accident report will be buried somewhere in the Canadian Library & Archives in Ottawa – it would be interesting to know what they concluded!
  11. We most enjoy aircraft with realistic flight characteristics in flight simulation - and, by that, we simmers generally mean aircraft which function well. In the real world, though, there have been a lot of aircraft that were quite unsuited for their role – and in some cases, unsuited to ever being off the ground. The unfortunate flight crews assigned to these aircraft wrestled with these problems - and sometimes they never made it back. [ATTACH=CONFIG]159914[/ATTACH] Ryan Fireball FSX There are more than a few lists in magazines and in ‘Top Ten Worst Aircraft of (choose your era)’ web lists out there. See, for example, the Listverse and Wordpress blog sites for WWII examples. Here are several of these aircraft from that period that caught my interest as, other than the Botha, they have FSX or FS2004 aircraft in the Flightsim Library. Blackburn Roc and Blackburn Botha. The company that brought out the wonderful Blackburn Buccaneer jet fighter had its share of dodos in earlier years. The Roc too was a Blackburn fighter, a derivative of their Skua dive-bomber fitted with a gun turret. It flew more slowly than many of the enemy bombers it was supposed to shoot down and had no forward-firing capability, which rather limited its venom. The sole confirmed victory in one was by a Midshipman Day, flying underneath a Junkers 88 otherwise engaged in combat with aircraft above. The Botha was a reconnaissance/torpedo bomber that had the distinctive reputation of being both severely underpowered and unstable, generating the anonymous quote by a pilot forever memorialized with this aircraft, “Access to this aircraft is difficult. It should be made impossible.†No-one has had the fortitude to reproduce one of these aircraft for flight simulation pleasure yet, I think. Fairey Battle. I give in my ebook an actual delivery flight story/plan for one of these light bombers, made by Peter Mursell of the ATA into France during the retreat to Dunkirk. They flew nicely but were not up to the military challenge they faced. Battles were relatively slow and were defensively armed with only two light rifle-calibre machine guns, one wing-mounted and the other in the rear of the cabin. During the Battle of France in 1940 combat engagements resulted in the loss of 200 of these aircraft in a period of 6 weeks and with them a lot of the RAF experienced aircrews. Victoria Crosses were awarded early in World War II posthumously to two members of a Fairey Battle crew, Pilot Edward Garland and Flight-Sergeant Thomas Gray. They were the lead aircraft of a flight that pressed home an attack on a bridge on the Albert Canal, Belgium. Only one of the six aircraft in the flight made it back. Ryan Fireball. While being an innovative fighter (with a dual propulsion piston engine and a small jet engine) introduced towards the end of WWII, the Fireball had structural weaknesses that affected wing integrity (including one wing that fell off completely) and a variety of nose wheel problems, most evident during carrier landings. One aircraft broke in half on landing on the carrier USS Rendova in 1947 and the Fireball was withdrawn from service shortly thereafter. [ATTACH=CONFIG]159915[/ATTACH] Bristol Bombay Bristol Bombay. As a transport aircraft, the Bombay performed an important role early in the WWII but had already been identified as obsolete for the European theatre. In the Middle East it was used for transport and bombing purposes until sufficient Vickers Wellington bombers were available for Allied use there. As a bomber, the underwing load was supplemented by anti-personnel mines fused by hand being thrown out by crew members. A Bombay shot down in North Africa in 1942 resulted in the death of Lieutenant General William Gott, who was due to replace General Claude Auchinleck. His death led to General Montgomery’s appointment. Models (in the Flightsim Library): Blackburn Roc. b25roc_i.zip FS2004 (Kazunori Ito) Fairey Battle. battlev2.zip FS2004 (Edward Cook) Ryan Fireball. frbl17.zip FS2004 (Kazunori Ito) Bristol Bombay. bbombay.zip (Paul Clawson) You may have other nominees for this unwanted title so comments are welcome – particularly if there is a flightsim aircraft available! Allan Jones allanj12@gmail.com http://moonscourse.blogspot.ca Allan Jones is the author of In a Moon’s Course, an ebook of 28 World War II stories and flight plans of the Air Transport Auxiliary. The book is available at Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, W.H. Smith and other ebook online suppliers at $4.99 or local equivalent – around 18 cents a flight! Adobe pdf, Microsoft Word and on-line reading versions can be bought at the same price at the Smashwords web site book page.
  12. My first flight into Kai Tak airport so many years ago was just what you would want – a late afternoon descent through cloud into Runway 13. Suddenly the ground was in sight, the buildings were dramatically close and, sitting in a window seat on the left side of the aircraft, I saw the chequerboard clearly as the 747 turned on to final. [ATTACH=CONFIG]158719[/ATTACH] Approaching the Fukuoka beacon before the turn out to sea. My flight into Fukuoka airport on the west coast of Japan last month was not to be so lucky. The fourth busiest airport in Japan, it is surrounded by residential areas, hills, radio towers; the approach for some is reminiscent of Kai Tak. The ANA flight from Narita made its descent over the city in the dark, turned over the harbour and landed neatly from the west into Runway 16 - but from my seat there was little to see. During the Korean War Captain William A. Dudding made an instrument procedure landing there in a C-47; a flight that was to cost him his job. The story is given in Felix Smith’s article at the Civil Air Transport (CAT)/Air America web site. Dudding was the newest pilot of a WWII surplus C-47 which has its own interesting story. It was the pilot’s first flight into Itazuki Air Base (as Fukuoka Airport was then known) and routine procedure was to practice the descent and instrument landing into a new airport where possible in good weather, before it was needed in earnest. En route from Korea he had invited his passenger, the USAF Contract officer responsible for hiring the aircraft, on to the flight deck. On approach to Itazuki the weather was clear; blue sky, visibility unlimited. Dudding knew Itazuki’s reputation for radio towers, hills, rain and fog so instead of making an easy straight-in approach he made the instrument arrival. Dudding didn’t explain his decision to the passenger in the jump seat, who wasn't a pilot (he was an attorney) - who then filed an official complaint that the pilot got lost even though the airport stuck out clearly in the sunshine. The manager of the struggling air transport company knew what had happened but the politics of keeping the contract took over. Dudding was let go. The flight. I don’t know the arrival procedure into Itazuki that got Dudding into trouble. There are a variety of Instrument Arrival charts for Fukuoka in Simplates (Dauntless Software), for example, and also a 2006 set are freely available at the Virtual ATC Center website[/url]. Just flying the airport area in FSX in a small aircraft in good weather will give you the feel of Dudding’s experience. Finally I chose the Fukuoka ADF RWY 16 arrival - inbound on the DME beacon from the north, a leg out to sea at 321º and then the turn on to the runway approach at 156º. It is the sort of arrival that would generate the contract attorney’s complaint. Allan Jones allanj12@gmail.com http://moonscourse.blogspot.ca Allan Jones is the author of In a Moon’s Course, an ebook of World War II flight stories/plans of the Air Transport Auxiliary, available at Amazon, Kobo, W.H. Smith and other ebook online suppliers.
  13. Here is a segment of a truly epic flight that is very much part of the present rather than the past. Matevz Lenarcic (I can’t type Matevž LenarÄiÄ constantly) is a Slovenian multi-skilled adventurer; an alpinist, a paraglider, environmentalist and photographer who, in 2004, flew around the world solo in a motor glider, without ground support. He is also a private pilot and has an instrument rating. [ATTACH=CONFIG]156000[/ATTACH] The aircraft he used was designed and built by his fellow countrymen – the Slovenian company Pipistrel. The Pipistrel Sinus 912 is an ultralight motor glider with high cruising speed and low fuel consumption, critical for this journey with its long segments over mountains and water. Like other Pipistrel designs the Sinus seems an elegant match of advanced engineering and beautiful sculpture. Details of his journey, taking 79 days and covering 39,700 km are given at his web site and the diary pages describe an adventure not only in aviation but in the challenge of working through the processes of civil aviation bureaucracies. Here is a simulation of a short segment of the trip made overnight on the 19-20 July 2004 to give a flavour of the journey. It is from Farewell to Anchorage, Alaska. ][ATTACH=CONFIG]156001[/ATTACH] Matevz had just crossed the Bering Strait, including an 800 km ocean section to land at Nome, Alaska – to be advised he needed to clear a customs check in Anchorage. So at 7.00 p.m. in the almost permanent daylight/twilight of July he set of from Nome to cross Alaska, getting as far as Farewell before having to stop. After several hours of rest in his plane he cleared some rocks from the airstrip before take-off at first light. He crossed the Denali range to land his ultralight at the comparatively vast Anchorage International airport to complete, as he notes, “three times as much papers than in Russia and to pay 300 US$.†The Flight: Farewell (PAFW) to Anchorage International (PANC). I used the FS2004 Pipistrel Sinus from the Flightsim library (Sinus.zip by Giovanni Quai) which worked very nicely. If you want to make this flight in an FSX motor glider I would suggest using the Scheibe SF 25C (variations can be found in the library) although you will need to use the ‘control+x’ function to adjust fuel en route. Starting at Farewell the route is direct across the mountain range, albeit climbing and following the valleys initially. Allan Jones allanj12@gmail.com http://moonscourse.blogspot.ca Allan Jones is the author of In a Moon’s Course, an ebook of World War II flight stories/plans of the Air Transport Auxiliary, available at Amazon, Kobo, W.H. Smith and other ebook online suppliers.
  14. April 2013 was the end of the 75th anniversary year of flying for Air Canada (the airline began celebrating this milestone in 2012 at a special web site). There it looks at both its history and the future, in which the Boeing 787 ‘Dreamliner’ features as the next element of innovation. In 1954 its predecessor Trans-Canada Airlines (TCA) showed considerable innovation in being the first North American airline to buy the Vickers Viscount turboprop - the plane which, between the era of DC-3 and the DC-9, proved to be the great success story after World War II for British aviation. [ATTACH=CONFIG]153328[/ATTACH] Air Canada Viscount No. 627 Canadian Space and Aviation Museum Reserve Hangar (Allan Jones) In his book “On Canadian Wings†author Peter Piggott summarizes the TCA/Viscount story. The first ferry delivery to TCA was made in December 1954 and the flight described below began on 9 March 1955. Brian Powell, whose DC-3 flight delivering Churchill was the subject of the May 31, 2013 Flightsim feature article Fine China, Sahara Sand, was the first Commercial Pilot Licence holder endorsed for turboprop jets – in the Viscount – and he flew these aircraft in different parts of the globe until 1970. However he was not on the crew for the following flight, the delivery of the fourth Viscount, No. 604, which I used as a basis for creating this simulation. The captain was Colin Allen. The flight was made in stages from Hurn (Bournemouth, UK) to Montreal, the main base in Eastern Canada for the airline’s operations. On the Vickers Viscount website, truly a virtual museum of this aircraft, there is the detailed story by Robert Blackburn of the delivery of Viscount 604. It carried 2 pilots, 2 radio operators/navigators and a flight engineer. The author of the article and an electrical specialist were ‘supernumerary’ crew. The route was through Iceland, Greenland and Labrador and was navigated by dead reckoning and LORAN fixes. With the article’s references to the Bluie West One and Bluie West Eight wartime airfields and the description of the challenges en route, this ferry flight brings home that although this was the early days of civilian aviation jets, it was also not that long after these routes across the Atlantic were established during WWII. [ATTACH=CONFIG]153329[/ATTACH] TCA Viscount virtual cockpit and aurora borealis The route and times will give you a flight simulation with western sunset departures over the Hebrides, glimpses of the aurora borealis, the coasts of Greenland and Labrador, and an interesting fjord approach into Narsarsuaq. It finishes with a night flight into Montreal, travelling down the St. Lawrence River with the cities and communities of Quebec below. You will happily miss the 5 days lost in weather delays in Keflavik that the original flight encountered! The aircraft had about 30 hours on it on arrival. With the passenger seats fitted it was ready to go – and it then served TCA/Air Canada domestically until 1958. On 10 November that year parked at Idlewild, New York it was hit by a Super Constellation that went out of control. The crew of both aircraft escaped (there were no passengers on board) but the aircrafts were destroyed. Piggott’s book notes that the first Viscount delivery was accompanied on its final stage to Montreal by a TCA ‘Northstar’ with reporters on board. ‘Jock’ Bryce, the pilot in command, was asked to “shoot up†the Montreal airport for press purposes. He skimmed the hangars and made a vertical turn inside the airport perimeter. The Flight I used Jens Kristensen’s Viscount package (viscount10.zip for FS2004 and viscount10x.zip for FSX) available from the Flightsim library. I selected the TCA livery, but there is also an Air Canada paint of the appropriate later period of service in the package. A number of other Viscounts are available, including an FS2004 paint of the first aircraft delivered to TCA (for Rick Piper’s model) in the Flightsim library and there is a payware package (Just Flight) Viscount. The aircraft was empty, apart from a life raft and a few seats (the TCA passenger seating was to be installed on arrival). Therefore ensure in preparation for these flights that you adjust the load way down for each segment from the default (passenger loading) weight. For the arrival at Narsarsuaq I followed the fjord approach described in the article. To do this I planned my descent over the peninsula to arrive at NANORTALIK (NN) at 3000 ft. and then descend to the NDB turn SIMIUTIAK (SI) to enter the fjord at 1000 ft. Under real flying conditions, the travel up the fjord is challenging even when the cloud ceiling is high enough, with sudden wind gusts and areas of turbulence. As you make the turn into the head of the fjord the runway becomes visible and, turning towards the southern shoreline, you then make a right turn on to final approach. This flight is in 5 segments and I used the GPS and waypoints below. You may want to copy their oceanic navigation a little more accurately by using dead reckoning with ‘GPS fixes’ at intervals to simulate the LORAN checks: Bournemouth (Hurn) – Prestwick: EGHH DTY CROFT LAKEY DCS DCG19 NGY EGPK. Departure 3.30 p.m. GMT on 9 March 1955. Prestwick – Keflavik, Iceland. Waypoints: EGPK BCL HL BIKF. Departure 6.22 p.m. GMT. Keflavik – Narsarsuaq (Bluie West One), Greenland. BIKF NN SI NS BGBW. Departure 1 p.m. GMT. Narsarsuaq – Goose Bay, Labrador. : BGBW SI JC CYYR. Departure 7.20 p.m. GMT. Goose Bay – Montreal, Quebec. CYYR ZV BC BV CYUL. Departure 11.29 p.m. GMT. Allan Jones allanj12@gmail.com http://moonscourse.blogspot.ca Allan Jones is the author of In a Moon’s Course, an ebook of World War II flight stories/plans of the Air Transport Auxiliary, available at Amazon, Kobo, W.H. Smith and other ebook online suppliers.
  15. It was the clarity of the northern shoreline of the Brest Peninsula last week that made me think of Adrian Warburton. I was travelling on AC 877 en route from Frankfurt to Toronto. We were at 34000 ft. according to the screen at my seat and the view was crystal clear; a photoreconnaissance pilot's delight when over the target. I was malingering on the flight attendant's request to lower the window shade at least until we had only ocean below. Commercial air travel these days is for moles and movie addicts. Wing Commander Adrian 'Warby' Warburton, DSO and Bar, DFC and two Bars and recipient of the American Distinguished Flying Cross, was an RAF pilot. Born in Middleborough, England, he showed little flair for flying during training and admitted having “two left feet†when controlling an aircraft on the ground, but in the air it was another matter. In 1939 he started as a probationary pilot; by 1944 he had flown nearly 400 missions and had been promoted to Wing Commander. [ATTACH=CONFIG]151383[/ATTACH] P-38 over Schweinfurt, Germany His service as a photoreconnaissance pilot in the Mediterranean conflict is legendary. One of his more famous missions was the pre-raid reconnaissance of Taranto harbour which led to the sinking of half of Italy's capital ships in a single night. He made three passes over the harbour and returned trailing a wire from one the ships in the flotilla; he had flown in so low. His last flight was on 12 April 1944 while seconded to the USAAF 7th Reconnaissance Group stationed at RAF Mount Farm in Oxfordshire, supposedly in a ground liaison role after recovering from injuries in a jeep accident. In a USAAF P-38 ‘Lightning’ he set off to photograph Schweinfurt in Germany, a crucial manufacturing location for the German war effort that was heavily defended. Another P-38 flown by the USAAF mission commander Carl Chapman was to photograph Regensburg and, according to the ww2awards web site, the pilots were then to rendezvous and fly on to a base in Sardinia. Warburton never showed up. In 2002 his aircraft was discovered buried in a field south-west of Munich, near a village. He was finally buried with military honors on 14 May 2003 nearby at the Durnbach Commonwealth War Cemetery. Details can be found in the History Channel documentary “Mystery of the Missing Aceâ€, parts of which can be seen on YouTube. Here is the route I used in FSX to fly Warby’s Lightning and ‘what should have happened’ that day if he had not been shot down. Route: EGLJ AFI SCF LQ PIN LIEO I used the update of David C. Copley’s P-38 package (fsx_p-38_39th_fs.zip) from the Flightsim library for this flight. There are a variety of freeware and payware P-38’s you can use. The departure airfield is RAF Chalgrove, only a couple of miles from the RAF Mount Farm site. After Schweinfurt I chose a route over the Alps and Lake Garda. I don't know the location of the destination airfield so chose Olbia Airport (LIEO) in Costa Smeralda on the northern tip of Sardinia. At least in flight simulation no-one told me to close the window shade as I looked at the ground below. Allan Jones allanj12@gmail.com http://moonscourse.blogspot.ca Allan Jones is the author of In a Moon’s Course, an ebook of 28 World War II flight stories/plans of the Air Transport Auxiliary, available at Amazon, Kobo, W.H. Smith and other ebook online suppliers.
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