Jump to content

csemar

Registered Users
  • Posts

    15
  • Joined

csemar's Achievements

Expert  Simmer

Expert Simmer (3/7)

  • Week One Done
  • One Month Later
  • One Year In
  • First Post Rare
  • Collaborator Rare

Recent Badges

10

Reputation

  1. It happened to me today in the Skyhawk, trying to cross Greenland. When the windshield started icing up, I thought it was a cute touch to the graphics. When the pitot system failed and engine started losing power and I couldn't find the handle for the carb heat, things got very interesting. No carb heat and the pitot heat switch appears to be a dummy. For awhile, it looked like I was going to mush down onto a glacier, but I managed to hold her up long enough to get down to lower terrain and the problems started clearing up. Nothing like this ever happened in fs9.
  2. If you are having trouble with configuring CH yoke or rudder pedals, like me, there are several helpful videos on youtube. Search on "CH flight sim yoke fs2020" and take your pick. I was pleasantly surprised to find that, despite the overly sensitive pitch and roll control, the sim seemed easier to fly with the USB controls than with the keyboard and mouse only. My biggest problem with landing using keyboard controls was getting lined up with the damned runway, but with the yoke and rudder pedals, it was a lot easier. Heading in to runway 36 at Scholes field, I had no trouble maintaining runway alignment or descent angle. My only error was I had clearance to land on 32, but nobody's perfect.
  3. Yesterday I completed the upgrade to MSFS 2020 after three tries. My first attempt was to install it on my windows 8 machine, but that failed. I tried again after applying a windows 8 to windows 10 upgrade, but the simulation would not run on that hardware. After pondering for a month or so, I decided to invest in a "high end" gaming machine. I wound up in an online chat with a salesman at Dell. I told what I was trying to do and how much I was willing to pay and went with the Alienware Auro RA R11, with some upgrades which came in just under $1500 plus tax. The Specs: 10th Gen Intel® Core™ i7 10700F (8-Core, 16MB Cache, 2.9GHz to 4.8GHz w/Turbo Boost Max 3.0) Windows 10 Home, 64-bit, English NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 2070 SUPER 8GB GDDR6 (OC Ready) 16GB Dual Channel HyperX™ FURY DDR4 XMP at 2933MHz; up to 64GB (additional memory sold separately) 256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD (Boot) + 1TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s (Storage) Not sure what all that means, but there it is for those who are interested in that sort of thing. When the computer was finally delivered, I plugged it in and as soon as I could, I installed STEAM, downloaded Flight Simulator and started the lengthy process of downloading all of the updates. That took six or seven hours, I reckon, but I got a chance to play with it a little bit and make sure the game was working. I learned how to work the throttle and the ailerons, crashed three times, then I went to bed. This morning I tried a flight out of Ellington Field (KEFD) in the Cessna 152, the same plane I got my SEL rating in some 40 years ago. My home field, back in my flying days, was Houston Gulf, which lives on in FS2004, but alas no longer exists, so I selected Ellington where the astronauts come to play with their T-38 jet trainers. This was my first flight in FS2020 that did not end with uncontrolled flight into terrain, but it was something of an adventure, nonetheless. I could not get my CH yoke to work, so I put that aside and headed southwest along a familiar course, toward Victoria Regional. I chose that route because I happen to remember the nav frequencies for Victoria and Palacios. It took me awhile to figure out how to work the nav radio. Fortunately you can do most things with the mouse just by touching the knobs in the right place. I was well on my way before I noticed that the fuel tanks were only half full. There were plenty of places to refuel on the way, so I pressed on, however, I failed to pay attention to the gauges and ran out of gas near Victoria. My first successful landing was an emergency landing in a grassy field. I did not want to abandon that flight, so I used the menus to put some gas in the tanks (let's pretend a local farmer showed up in a pickup truck with a barrel of 100LL in the back). With that I managed to take off and fly on to my ultimate destination, which was Beeville. When I spotted Chase Field out the left window, I decided to set her down there instead of continuing on to Beeville Municipal on the other side of town. It was a pretty good landing, considering, except I am not sure I really cleared that tree at the approach end of the runway. MSFS let me get away with it, anyway. It took me awhile to stop because I did not know how to work the brakes. With the throttle closed, the darn 152 rolled and rolled and seemed like it never was gonna stop. I finally resorted to putting on the parking brake and that was that. Notwithstanding the many horror stories I have read on this forum, I am looking forward to a lot of fun this holiday season with FS2020. I intend to avoid updates for awhile, if possible.
  4. csemar

    My Old Plane

    I googled the tail number on my old PA-28-140 and found her. I sold the plane at Houston Gulf in 1993, but now she is at some place called Carenco, Louisiana. She looks nice with the new paint and wheel pants. I sold her for 15K. Probably cost 30K or more now. This the way she looked in 1990 at Beeville Municipal. I kinda like the old blue and white scheme better.
  5. If at first you don't succeed, try again. This discussion motivated me to give third party aircraft another try, just to be sure my claims were correct. First I tried a free model from the library; it was cxan3398m.zip and it worked fine. I also tried a payware model from the store. It works great and has a virtual cockpit. Good job.
  6. I tried this one in fs9, windows 8.1. It works great. No problems.
  7. DONEGAL When I started taking flying lessons at Houston Gulf Airport, I was fast closing in on forty, and my instructors were significantly younger than me. One of them was an ex-naval aviator and the other was so young he seemed like a kid. One of the things they kept on about was the dangers of carburetor ice, although it probably doesn't happen much here in the sultry southwest. One day while we were flying straight and level the kid went through the drill about carburetor ice. He pulled out the carb heat handle and noted the RPM drop, then pushed it back in then exclaimed "See the RPM jump! We had it! We actually had it!" He seemed delighted to have something interesting happen for a change, and I was happy for him. That was a long time ago, but this morning, in the flight simulator world, I was in Donegal and I decided to hop over to Paris; to come so far and not fly in to Le Bourget (LFPB) seemed a waste of time. I guess I tarried too long over my scones and tea, because it was mid afternoon before I launched from EIDL, headed for LFPB, a distance of 624 nautical miles, according to the GPS. THE IRISH SEA I climbed slowly up to 8000 feet, just to make sure I didn't hit any mountains while crossing Ireland and Wales, then started a slow descent down to 1500 feet as I neared the English Channel. ANGLESEY EGOV Since I had plenty of gas, I flew past Le Bourget and got a look at the city at night, then turned back to the airport. PARIS, AFTER DARK The tower vectored me straight in to runway 3. FINAL RUNWAY 3, LE BOURGET I had about 18 gallons of fuel left when I parked the plane.
  8. FS2004 does have a reputation for frequent program crashes, and that is consistent with my own experience. When I started this odyssey, after not having used the program for a couple of years, I was surprised how stable the program suddenly appeared to be. I completed 20+ hours of real time simulation without a single program crash and I grew complacent. Another problem I have experienced is that I have not been able to get third party add-ons to work, e.g. new airplane models. I would love to have a piper cherokee 140 model that works in fs9, because, despite its problems and because of the graphics, I still like it better than fs2002, which never crashed and worked well with third party add-ons. I am using Windows 8.1, so I tried upgrading to Windows 10, but I found a whole new set of quirks and frustrations to deal with. After being away from flight simulation for a long time, I was drawn back to it by the release of fs2020, and I spent a week trying to get it to work, but it looks like I would need to do a serious hardware upgrade to be successful. So I came back to fs2004 and Windows 8.1 to while away the hours of the corona virus pandemic. What can't be cured, must be endured so I have adopted an attitude of "dignified resignation."
  9. KEVLAVIK, ICELAND The first time I flew my Cherokee 140 was the demo ride with an instructor on board. It was a short flight, because the pitot system failed on the downwind leg. The airspeed started dropping and I kept pushing the nose down until the instructor said, "Something's wrong. Hear that wind rushing by? We're going really fast." He took over and landed the plane by the seat of his pants. I bought the plane anyway. A few years later the same thing happened to me after I took off for a trip up to Gladewater to visit my brother. By that time, I had gotten so comfortable in that plane I just said to myself, "Heck, I am going to Gladewater," and made the trip without an airspeed indicator. It wasn't hard. In FS9, you never get a bug in your pitot tube. For the next leg of my transatlantic odessey in the Skyhawk, I did not have any trouble, for the first 7 hours of my planned flight from Kevlavik in Iceland to Donegal in Ireland. Just before starting the final approach to the Donegal airport, however, the simulation crashed, and my last save was back at Kevlavik. To avoid keeping my computer tied up for another 8 hours of real time simulation, I reran the first part of the crossing using time compression. To activate time compression, you hit the R key, then press '+' to increase the compression and '-' to decrease the compression. The amount of time compression is displayed in the upper right corner of the screen. About 30 minutes out from Donegal I turned off time compression and flew the last part of the flight in realtime. APPROACHING THE COAST OF IRELAND The airport has a control tower, but no paved parking area. I parked near the refueling station, just off the runway. There were 9.16 gallons of fuel remaining. PARKED ON THE GRASS NEAR THE RUNWAY AT DONEGAL
  10. Before I got married, I did some dumb things in my Piper Cherokee; like the time I had a sudden impulse one night to fly down to my South Texas hometown and visit my mom. I called flight service and got the weather briefing, which sounded pretty benign, so I took off from Houston Gulf. There were a lot of 1000-2000 foot tall transmission towers around Houston, so I stayed over a road because there was an overcast between 1000 and 2000 feet and I didn't want to get caught on top. However, the ceiling started coming down on me as I proceeded southwest along Highway 59. At a little town called Edna, I put her down on Jackson County airport, which was deserted at that hour, and slept in the plane. The nice thing about FS9 is you can do all the dumb things you like without serious consequences. My planned next leg in my transatlantic odessey was from Narsarsuaq in Greenland to Reykjavik in Iceland, but it took two attempts. The map shows the direct course to Reykjavik, but it goes over a glacier covered range of mountains. For my first attempt I took off from BGBW, circled a bit to gain altitude, then started east over the glacier thinking I could outclimb the rising terrain. This relatively short flight was aborted when I heard the sound of my wheels rolling on the ice! For my second attempt, I stayed over the fjord and flew out to the Atlantic before turning east toward Iceland. This cost me a big chunk of my fuel margin, so I kept careful track of the fuel burn rate for the next few hours. Not far from the coast of Greenland, I spotted an iceberg. About two hours in, at 1000 feet and 2000 rpm, my fuel burn rate was 5.4 gallons/hour. This did not look promising, so I brought the rpm down to about 1900 and let the altitude drift downward slowly at 82 knots. The fuel burn rate came down to about 5 gallons per hour and the altitude drifted down to about 32 feet before it stopped decreasing and started slowly upward as the plane got lighter. The numbers looked pretty tight for Reykjavik, so I reset my destination to Kevlavik International on the western tip of Iceland, which saved me about 60 nautical miles. As the coast of Iceland came into view, the LO FUEL warning was on, so I squawked emergency (7700) and flew straight in. When I parked the Skyhawk at Kevlavik, there were 4.16 gallons of fuel remaining. I probably could have made it to Reykjavik, but it would have been tight.
  11. NARSARSUAQ, GREENLAND When I had my piper cherokee one place I used to go was Gladewater where my brother lived in Northeast Texas. One cold frosty morning my brother dropped me off at the airport for the flight home and headed off to his teaching job. It was so early, the FBO was still closed, but I had filled up with gas after landing, so I wasn't worried. I did the preflight, and got aboard, ready to launch into the sky for home, but when I hit the starter, the prop turned slowly over one time and ground to a halt. It sounded like a low battery and I was feeling forlorn because I had never hand propped a plane and wasn't about to try it on my on. I switched off, got out and pulled the prop through several times, hoping the oil just needed loosening up. I tried again, but the engine did not start. I did this again, then sat and waited to rest the battery. Finally, I got up the nerve to give it one more try, fully expecting failure. I primed the engine again, cracked the throttle, and hit the starter. The prop moved one turn, the engine fired, belched blue smoke, and began to tick over. What a relief that was. The next leg of my transatlantic odessey starts at Fox Harbor in Newfoundland, and takes me to Narsarsuaq in Greenland, about 629 nautical miles. Fox Harbor is way up north in the boonies. It is probably cold in the morning, even in the summertime, but in FS9, the engine always starts, as long as you have gas. The runway looked pretty short so I used a short field takeoff procedure to get away. I set my destination as a place called Narsarsuaq (BGBW), because Juliane hab does not exist in FS9. Not only that, but although the airport is marked in Google earth, the area is all blurred out like it was some big secret black site. With GPS navigation and the autopilot, I was able to catch up on some back issues of The New Yorker, but I used this long flight of 629 nm to play with the power setting and get some data on fuel burn rate at different altitude and speed. Since most of this leg was over the ocean, I settled down at 1000 feet msl and rpm 2000 which gave me a burn rate of 5.8 gallons per hour and 85 knots. I figure I could get about 750 nautical miles at that rate. The most interesting part of this leg was the last twenty miles. The terrain is mountainous and majestic and you have fly up a fjord to find Narsarsuaq nestled between two hills. A straight in approach takes you over a mountain and you have to drop down pretty fast to get on the glide slope, but I flew around the high ground, and then turned sharp right to line up with the runway. It's a nice field, with a terminal and refueling station. My next leg will be the longest yet, BGBW - BIRK (Reykjavik, Iceland), about 667 nautical miles.
  12. The airport where I learned to fly was Houston Gulf, near League City Texas. I remember my first flight instructor told me that the airport was owned by "some Arabs." Those Arabs were the Bin Laden family. Shortly after 9-11, the property was sold to a real estate developer who bulldozed the site and built houses. The location is now called "Tuscan Lakes." However, in fs9, Houston Gulf (KSPX) lives on. About a week ago, I decided to go roaming in the Skyhawk. I started at KSPX and used GPS navigation to fly into KACT, or Waco International, and then up to Fort Worth Spinks (KFWS), reliving a trip I took many years ago in my old Piper Cherokee 140. When I reached Spinks, I decided to see if it were possible to fly the Skyhawk across the Atlantic by taking the northern route. With a range of 750 miles, it might just barely be possible. From Spinks, I flew the simulator up to Lambert Field in St. Louis. I used the auto pilot to do the flying, and went outside to put up the storm covers on the windows in preparation for Hurricane Laura which was scheduled to make landfall the following day. During breaks,I checked out the progress and when the time came, made the landing at Lambert field (KSTL), the field Lindbergh once made his home base. From there I worked my way east in easy stages, with refueling stops in Indianapolis (KHFY), Pittsbergh (KPIT), and Republic field on Long Island (KFRG). KFRG is where the Spirit of St. Louis starts from in FS9 for the transatlantic crossing. I needed to find a place to hop across to Greenland, so I flew from KFRG to Halifax Intl. (CYHZ), on autopilot while I took down the storm covers since by that time Laura had passed on to ravage southern Louisiana. From CYHZ, I flew up to a field in Fox Harbor Newfoundland (CCK4) which turned out to be simple gravel strip in the middle of a barren landscape. That is not precisely accurate, however, for according to Google Earth there is a building on the field which must house an FBO and there is a town nearby, so I felt that it was fair to consider myself refueled. That is where I am today after my most recent session in FS9. The next leg to a place called Julianhabn in Greenland (BGBW) is only 629 miles, which is long, but I should be able to make it easy with a full fuel load, although I intend to keep the RPM down to 2100 lean out the mixture as much as I can. I did a test on the way up to Halifax and it appears I can get the fuel burn rate down to just under six gallons per hour. From BGBW, the distance to Reykjavik in Iceland looks doable. The biggest challenge will be crossing from Iceland to an airport in the British Isles. The closest one to Reykjavik is Donegal, Ireland at 683 nautical miles.
×
×
  • Create New...