Mooney, Mooney...

I'm working out a rough itinerary to take me westward, ultimately to California and back. Because some of the legs of this trip are likely to be longer than the flights I've made to date, I've decided to upgrade aircraft again, this time to the Mooney Bravo, a 200 knot sports car of a plane:

It's still a single piston engine, but it's supercharged and puts out 270 horse power, compared to 230 in the Skylane or 160 in the Skyhawk. It's also a low-wing design with retractable landing gear, so it's more aerodynamic. It's at least twice as fast as the Skyhawk I started with and a good 50% faster than the Skylane. It's probably going to be a little more challenging to fly, but hopefully I'm up to it.

For this plane, I'm going to try to learn proper procedures more so than I have been with the other planes. I want to handle the fuel mixture and other settings manually and learn how to keep track of manifold pressure and other data from instruments that tell you if the engine is running correctly or not. I had looked at a 2D view on the instrument panel and liked the design, but the 3D panel you see in the virtual cockpit (where you can look around), is uninspired. I'm a little spoiled from flying the Skylane which is a 3rd party add-on and looks a lot better than the default FSX planes.

This first test flight will just be a traffic pattern around the Dalton airport, with flaps at 10 degrees and gear down the whole way. I just want to see how she handles for takeoff and landing.

Flying the Bravo wasn't so bad, maybe a bit twitchier than the Cessna's. There's a trade-off for faster and more nimble in that you lose some stability. Landing the Bravo was harder than I thought it would be and my first landing was right on the corner of the runway, with at least one wheel in the grass.

You're going a little faster than in the Cessna's (75 knots versus about 60), and it's so responsive it's really easy to over-correct. I had intended a single flight but decided to touch-and-go and try another lap and another landing. Second landing was better:

This should be a good plane for my next big adventure. I'll be flying more around Dalton over the next week or two getting used to the handling before I set out for California. Tentatively I plan to fly to Huntsville, then down to New Orleans, Houston, San Antonio, El Paso and then work my way up past Meteor Crater, Arizona and on to the Grand Canyon. I'll probably stop by Vegas and then head to L.A. or maybe shoot up to Lake Tahoe, over to San Francisco and then work my way down the coast.

Tile Proxy Test

Tried out a free download tonight. The program is called Tile Proxy and it runs in the background as FSX runs, acting as a Proxy Server and downloading image date from an on-line map provider (in my case, Yahoo Maps since Google apparently got wind of this and threatened to sue). Tile Proxy then converts that data to the format used by FSX and uploads it as you fly. It gives you something like the MegaScenery Earth visuals (see earlier posts), but at no charge. The drawback being that the imagery is not as good, it takes forever to load, and at least on my system, seems to reduce your frame rate making it more difficult to fly.

Once I got it installed and running I took off from Dalton Municipal and headed to town. On the way, I looked for and managed to find my parents house:

Unless you know exactly what to look for, this won't look like much, but trust me, it's down there. Next I flew over town and I think spotted the courthouse. On my way back towards the airport I spotted Heritage Point Park easily identifiable by its baseball fields arranged in circles of five:

I was going straight back to the airport but decided to check out Fort Mountain again. Here's some more Tile Proxy scenery of Murray County:

It's clearly better than the default FSX scenery, but unless I can get it to run more smoothly, I'm not sure it's going to be worth the effort. Anyway, I flew back over Fort Mountain. I was able to see the road leading up to the Fort area, but the resolution wasn't good enough to see much else:

After Fort Mountain I did decide to hang it up for the night and flew back to the airport and landed. The reduced frame rate made it pretty difficult. In fact, I almost stalled and repeated that Titusville Crash, but I reacted to the stall warning a lot faster this time, gunned the engine to full throttle and pointed the nose down (but not too much down because I wasn't more than 50 feet off the ground). That brought my airspeed up just enough that I could cut power again and complete the landing.

No final decision on this yet. I'll fly with it some more tomorrow and maybe try tweaking the settings a bit.

Milestones

Made another short flight this afternoon. This time I headed southeast and flew over Carter's Lake. As I was looping back northwest, I found myself at about 3,000 feet amongst mountains that weren't much lower than that. Up ahead, I spotted the mountain just to the south of Fort Mountain with its large TV antenna tower. I decided I need to buzz it!

As you can see, I'm not much higher than the trees on top of the mountain and lower than the top of the tower itself. Just call me Maverick.

Anyway, once past the tower, I banked back to the west to find the Dalton airport and land. I also cut power and started dropping altitude as I flew back over the valley floor and out of the mountains.

On my first landing attempt I turned to final approach too soon and was too high, probably 500 feet up as I crossed the end of the runway. I aborted, powered up and turned around for another pass. The second attempt was perfect, right on the numbers:

By "on the numbers", I mean I landed on the runway number "14" painted at the very end of the runway, rather than flying over that and landing somewhere further down the runway as I've been doing lately.

After logging this flight in, I realized that was my fiftieth successful landing. I also added up my flight time and realized I've flown over 25 hours total. Cool!

Fort Mountain Flyover

Needed to fly some today but didn't feel like more touch-and-go around Dalton and not ready to do another long distance trip yet, so I decided to fly over Fort Mountain and have a look. It's only about 20 miles from the Dalton Airport, so not a long flight. Here it is at my 11:00 with some clouds above it:

As I got closer I reduced power and dropped down so I could get a closer look. It definitely looks like a good place for a fort, but FSX doesn't have anything up there to look at.
I continued to descend and flew around the mountain and then back to Dalton. Landing was looking good until the end when I started over-correcting with theses sensitive controls, but I finally managed to get down on the runway and not too rough either. Also, no further problems with unexpected roll-overs, but we'll keep monitoring that.

Near Death Experience in Chattanooga

So I decided to fly around some more with the new Saitek flight controls. I did another pattern flight around Dalton earlier but then decided to fly up to Chattanooga and back. The flight up was uneventful and landing was pretty good. The main problem now is my chair rolling around while I try to push the rudder pedals. I definitely need to figure out some other kind of chair for flying.

Anyway, on take-off from Chattanooga I went to full power, accelerated and started to climb. Less than 500 feet up, I was climbing and with an increasing climb rate, so I felt like it was safe to retract the flaps.

As the flaps came back to fully retracted though, the plane rolled suddenly to the left. I jerked the yoke back to the right which had some effect but then the plane rolled even more dramatically to the left, all the way on it's side and started diving towards the airport (since wings don't lift too well when they are perpendicular to the ground).

In this cockpit view you can see I'm sideways, and if you zoom in you can see my altimeter is reading 1,000 feet, which is less than 300 feet up in the air since the runway is at 7-something.

Unbelievably, I managed to level off and pull up, probably about a hundred feet off the deck and start to climb again. Once I got her leveled, she didn't misbehave any more and the flight back to Dalton went fine. Probably one of my best landings in fact:

Not sure what to make of that. Was it an FSX glitch? An issue with the add-on (non-Microsoft) plane I was flying? An erroneous control input from the new flight yoke? Or do some planes suddenly go into a roll like that when flaps are retracted?

I replayed it several times and couldn't figure out anything I had done differently from prior takeoffs. I also Googled looking for answers but couldn't find anything.

Best guess is an issue with the Saitek yoke, since that's the only thing that's changed with my setup as of today, but I'm still not sure about it. I'll add an update if I figure this out, but for now I think I'm done flying for the evening.

(UPDATE: Still working on this, but in FSX I was checking the settings and saw that the toe brakes on the rudder pedals were set to control the X and Y axis, same as the yoke. Perhaps during the climb I pressed the left toe brake in error, sending me into a roll. I've reconfigured those to the brake function, so we'll keep flying and see if this happens again)

Dad Scores Big for Christmas

Wow! Everyone had a good Christmas morning, including yours truly. I got a Saitek Pro Flight Yoke and Rudder Peddle system - check it out:

No more clumsy cheap joystick for me. Hooking everything up was pretty easy. The yoke plugs into an open USB port and then everything else plugs into the yoke. Windows recognized them immediately although there's also software that comes with them so you can program different profiles for different games.

Flying with them was trickier than I thought though. Everything's more sensitive that my old joystick, so on my first landing attempt I was over-correcting to the point I thought I'd probably crash. I finally managed to get over the runway though and level the wings enough to land.

On my second attempt, I restrained myself and made smaller adjustments, which worked a lot better. That landing was much smoother:
I've still got to experiment with the settings before I get really comfortable with this, but I know I'm going to love them. The rudder peddles make taxiing a lot easier (as long as you don't over-steer), and are especially helpful on take-off when you're trying to steer the plane down the runway without banking the wings before liftoff. The yoke is a lot more precise than the joystick and has more buttons on it. The throttle quadrant is also nice for throttle control but the prop and fuel mixture controls didn't seem to work. I think I've got to reverse them or something but I'll experiment with that and see.

More updates to follow...

Rainy Homecoming

Barely squeezed in enough time today to make that final flight from Atlanta back to Dalton. Took off with overcast skies and headed north. About mid-way the weather seemed like it was going to clear up, but then got even worse and started to rain:

Not sure how well you can see the streaks of rain in this image, but handling got choppier and visibility got pretty poor. It rained all the way into the Dalton airport, so my landing wasn't the best I've had, but it wasn't that bad either. I think there must have been a little bit of a cross-wind, because it was hard to stay lined up on the runway.

This is the tower view with the rain coming down as I clear the trees. I made it down OK and taxied off the runway. Home at last! Merry Christmas!

Epic Dynasty

Hmmm, wonder if I should get one of these for myself for Christmas:

This is an Epic Dynasty, cost over a million in real life, but only $12.50 on sale for Christmas. It's an all carbon fiber airframe so very light, very aerodynamic and built for speed. It's attached to a 1,200 horse power turbo-prop engine (basically a jet engine turbine with its drive shaft attached to the prop). It's also got a state-of-the-art glass cockpit with GPS, etc.

For more info in the real plane, check out www.epicaircraft.com. This baby will do almost 300 knots, so about twice as fast as the Skylane. It can also cruise a lot higher, like 31,000 feet. Not sure I'm ready for it, but it sure looks nice, even with a partially buried big blue blimp in the background.

Speaking of which, I've checked Google Earth and I'm totally unable to find a big blue blimp anywhere around Charlie Brown Airport. I'm really not sure what to make of it.

(UPDATE: Go to Google Earth at 33 46'56.45"N, 84 31'12.52"W and then use the history function (little watch face button that brings up a time slider) and back the date up to April 29, 2002. In that image, there's a blimp parked (docked?) just north of the airport, although it's not blue, and presumably the whole thing is above ground. I suppose Goodyear, MetLife, etc. use Charlie Brown to park their blimps before and after Falcon games or something)

Merry Christmas Charlie Brown

Heading back to Georgia this afternoon. Took off from Gainesville with the real weather still nice. Nothing but blue skies:

I climbed out heading north and got up to 12,000 feet, at which point I could see the Atlantic Ocean off to my right and the Gulf of Mexico off to the left. Pretty neat, but screenshots don't do it justice since you're just looking at a blue line on the horizon.

The engine didn't sound right at that altitude so I became concerned that there were adjustments I should make for the thin air (even though I had the fuel mixture on auto-adjust). I decided to drop back down to about 8,000 feet. Once I got the airplane trimmed out again and everything seemed to be running smoothly, I climbed into the back seat to take a break:

Again, this was done by moving my virtual head position back, and down a bit, until it seemed to be in about the right place for a back-seat passenger. Kind of weird with no pilot up there though.

I also experimented with opening the doors in flight which worked fine (in spite of the 100+ mph wind blowing against them). The open doors also seemed to have zero effect on flight performance.

Enough screwing around, we're getting close to Atlanta now. I still have air traffic turned down to minimum, but even then Atlanta is kind of busy. The ATC at Hartsfield called me to verify that I had seen another plane to my 4:00 a few hundred feet up and 4 miles off. I had not seen it at all, but found it once they pointed it out. It was a large Airbus passenger plane apparently heading into Macon. It's amazing how you can pass something that big and that close and not even notice it. Of course, with a high wing, visibility for what's above you isn't so great.

I started my descent and was looking around when I spotted this strange building south of Atlanta:

Looks like a grand stand with an airport behind it. As best I can tell (from a post flight check in Google Earth) this is probably supposed to be Atlanta Motor Speedway.

Further north I spotted Hartsfield and flew around it to the south and west. I've been using their VOR frequency to find Atlanta, but I'll be landing at Fulton County (Charlie Brown) Airport to the west of town.

Here's Hartsfield with some of the Atlanta skyline in the background:

There was a 737 taking off as I flew past but I didn't manage to get a good picture of that.

Charlie Brown, named after an Atlanta politician some time ago and not the Peanuts character, is about 10 miles NNW of Hartsfield. Finding it was not difficult and the tower instructed me to enter the pattern to the right and downwind to line up on runway 14.

I managed the pattern entry without a problem, but then became rather confused when I spotted a big blue half-a-blimp sticking out of the ground on the north side of the airfield:

Not sure what to make of that. I was so bothered by it though that I completely forgot that the airport was not at zero elevation like the coastal airports I've been used to. You generally fly the pattern at about 1,000 feet, but the altimeter is set at sea level, not ground level, and Charlie Brown is at 844 feet. As I got down to below 1,500 feet I realized something was wrong, but I was probably only a couple hundred feet off the ground before I figured out what I had done, gunned the engine, and began my 180 turn back toward the runway.

I then managed to climb too high and make a poor turn which put me at a rather awkward altitude and angle to land.

You can see the white lights mean I'm too high and I'm obviously not lined up. I could have aborted and flown around again, but I decided to go for it.

I angled hard left and pointed the nose back towards the ground. As I got closer, I angled hard right to get lined back up. I'm still too high, but my line is looking better:

More flaps, less power, keep the nose pointed down and level the wings. Pretty soon I was over the runway, still pretty high but it's a long runway and I had manage to get lined up correctly.

I just kept the nose down until the runway looked close enough to land on and then started nosing up. I probably touched down about the middle of the runway, but like I said, it's a long runway and my Skylane doesn't need that much room to stop.

You can see in this last image that I'm lined up perfectly. In spite of my altitude screw-up, I manged to pull of a nice landing to end the day.

I'm going to take a break now and then fly back to Dalton tomorrow (Christmas Eve) so I'll be home for Christmas.

MegaScenery Disney

Time is running out if I'm going to get back to Dalton by tomorrow night, so while I did go ahead with my planned Disney flyover (take 2, with MegaScenery installed), I opted not to fly back to Tampa, but to continue northward after.

Took off from Tampa using real weather, which was nice for a change, mostly blue sky with a gentle east to west wind. Flew towards Orlando using the Orlando VOR to find Disney (it's about 15-20 miles southwest of the airport). About 10 miles out I started spotting the landmarks and angled east to fly over Epcot first:

Epcot looks better than before - at least it's not out in a field anymore. This MegaScenery looks great for general landscape at anything above say 3,000 feet, but for specific landmarks where you need to get down low (1,000 feet or so), it's not so hot. At this low altitude, the scenery looks flat and photographic (which it is), and the 3D objects don't line up just right.

The Magic Kingdom is even worse:

I mean, at least it's not two buildings in a forest anymore, but look how far off the 3D space mountain is from the MegaScenery image!

So that was interesting, but a bit disappointing. From Disney I headed north towards Gainsville. Along the way I came to the end of my MegaScenery Florida area:

Kind of weird how it just stops like that all of a sudden. Further north, the graphics got even weirder. I accidentally switched into the 2D cockpit mode and when I switched back out the ground was all white. In exterior view, there were also these odd 2D clouds and diamond shapes in the sky:
I think the white diamond is the sun. Not sure about the black one, maybe another aircraft way up high? I guess you really shouldn't do LSD while operating an airplane...

I managed to fix the problem by temporarily going into windows mode and then going back full screen. That seemed to reset things which was good because I'm not sure I could have found the airport and landed on a featureless landscape. But find the airport I did, Gainsville Regional:

Even made one of my nicer landings with a perfect pattern flight around the airport and a straight down the middle of the runway approach with a nice gentle touchdown. Landing straight into a headwind didn't hurt I'm sure.

From here I think I'm going to bight the bullet and just fly all the way to Atlanta, that's 270 nautical miles or about two hours of flying. Probably do that later tonight.

Homeward Bound

Time to leave the keys if I'm going to get home in time for Christmas. I got off work early today, plan to take a furlough day tomorrow and thus don't have to go back until Monday. After I got home this afternoon I fired up the simulator and planned a flight from Key West to Tampa, a trip of just over 200 nautical miles.

So goodbye Margarita-ville. Here I am shortly after takeoff from Key West Int'l. I'm about 500 feet up and banking to the north. You can see those cruise ships still in port in the background.

Two-hundred nautical miles is a long way to fly, so I got a little interested in why nautical miles and regular miles are different, and why nautical miles per hour are called "knots" and not "nauts" or "nmph's" or something else.

One nautical mile per hour (1 knot) is the speed at which, traveling north or south on a meridian line, you will traverse 1 minute of latitude per hour. That works out to 1 knot = 1.151 miles per hour and thus one nautical mile = 1.151 regular miles.

Here I am about 50 nautical miles north of Key West. Up until this point the coast was just a thin line on the horizon but now I'm getting closer. That's Marco Island off to starboard.

Back to the lesson and the term "knot", which comes from the days of the British sailing fleet. They would measure speed by dropping a small wooden float thingy in the water attached to a line with knots tied in it at regular intervals.

While one sailor used an hour glass (or rather, a 28 second glass), another sailor let the line pay out and counted the knots. If you counted 10 knots during that time period you were traveling 10 knots or 10 nautical miles per hour.

Later more advanced and modern measuring techniques and more accurate, but only slightly so, than the old sailors technique.

Further north, at about the half-way point, I made landfall over Sanibel Island (Ft. Meyers area). I probably should have flown more directly to land since I just got that new Florida scenery, which doesn't do much good over the ocean.

Now that I'm over land, we'll see how it looks. Recall that over Key West, at low altitude (below 1,000 feet), even the MegaScenery left something to be desired.

Fortunately, a little higher (like my 4,500 foot cruising altitude), everything looks great.

Flying over Sanibel, I looked down from my right-side window. I believe that's Sanctuary Golf Course, based on a post-flight check on Google Earth.

The rest of the flight north was either along the coast line or a bit east over land. I was using a VOR station south of Tampa to navigate by. It's about 30 miles south of my destination airport, so the plan was to fly directly to the VOR, and then use the 14 degree outbound radian to navigate from the VOR to my landing point.

Here I am flying past Sarasota Int'l. Based on the readings from my VOR equipment, I'd say the tower is down there at that airport. Just thirty more nautical miles and I'll be to Tampa and to Peter O. Knight airport.

Knight is just south of downtown Tampa and right on the bay. (in Google Earth, look at 27 54'56.87"N, 82 26'54.33"W). At about 20 miles out I started descending down to a thousand feet and making preparations for landing, including calling in my position and landing intentions on the Knight traffic channel. There's no air traffic control there, so I don't have to request permission to land, just announce what I plan to do to other air traffic in the area.

The landing went well, although you can tell from this tower-view image that I'm a little high. Fortunately I had plenty of runway to work with and good brakes.

This airport should make a good jumping off point for a quick trip back to Disney. I'm curious what it looks like with the MegaScenery installed and specifically whether Space Mountain is in the correct position.

Anyway, I'm 200 nautical miles closer to home at least. After the Disney over-flight I'm going to head north again, probably to the pan-handle somewhere (maybe Panama City), and then a couple of hops up to Atlanta before the final leg back to Dalton, probably on Christmas Eve.

Fort Zach

The good folks over at MegaScenery Earth made me an offer I couldn't refuse, so I now own photo-real scenery for all of Florida (or rather, for all of it that they have available). I had previously purchased 4 tiles for about $20.00 but recently figured out that you get a big discount when you buy the whole state. It's a bigger discount than just the volume discount you get for buying more tiles.

So I e-mailed them and asked them what they'd do for me on Florida, since buying the whole state would mean repurchasing those 4 tiles. They said if I'd buy the whole state they'd refund the purchase of the four tiles I bought previously so I didn't have to pay for them twice. Woo hoo!

So far I've only installed the keys, since that's where I'm currently at. I did a quick loop around Key West to check it out. Here's Fort Zachery Taylor on the southwest corner of Key West, not shown at all with the default FSX Scenery:

Of course, at just a few hundred feet up, it still looks a little rough, and very flat (which it is), but it's better than the inaccurate stuff from Microsoft.

Upside Down Over China

Last night my five-year-old wanted to fly some. I let him pick the plane, location, etc. Crazy kid ended up flying upside down over the mountains of China for a while:

He's actually not bad at this. He's patient and seems to really want to understand the mechanics of how to fly correctly (just upside down).

The Arid Turtles

Found time to make my run out to the Dry Tortugas and back. The Tortugas (or "Turtles") are a small group of keys about 70 miles west of Key West and only accessible by boat or float plane (no bridge, and not enough room for a runway). There's also no VOR station out there and I don't have GPS in this plane, so I had to dial in the Key West VOR and chose a radial out roughly west and follow it for 60 nautical miles (70 standard miles) and hope to find them. I figured with enough altitude, I could be miles off and still spot them, no problem.

Of course, I should have done this on a clear day, but I once again made the mistake of flying in real weather without first checking to see what that would mean. Turns out it was cloudy and even stormy, with particularly poor visibility at my destination.

Back at Key West though, it was just partly cloudy, so I took off hoping for the best. I climbed out and turn back west and headed out. About 20 nautical miles out I passed by a series of keys that make a horseshoe shape:

The largest island (closest to me) is Marquesas Key, with Gull Key and Mooney Harbor Key completing the semi-circle. Looks like a neat place to sail out to from Key West for a day on a secluded beach. A short while later, the weather started deteriorating and the cloud layer got lower, a lot lower. I knew if I tried to get about the clouds I wouldn't be able to see the islands at all, so I started descending from my already low altitude of 2,500 feet hoping to break clear.

Below 1,000 feet I could see the ocean, but everything was still hazy. I ended up dropping all the way down to 250 feet, which is crazy low, but even then visibility was poor, and of course at that low altitude, you can't see nearly as far as you can higher up. I decided to climb back up to about a thousand feet and keep looking. At about 55-60 nm out from Key West I spotted what looked like a smallish island off to the left, but thought the main group of Tortugas should still be ahead or even to my right a bit. After a few more miles I wasn't seeing anything, so I circled around and tried to find the one island I had spotted.

That turned out to be Loggerhead Key:
Not very big, and not much there. The real Loggerhead Key can be found in Google Earth at 24 38'04.07"N, 82 54'16.51"W and has a lighthouse on it. The FSX version reminds me of Jekyll Island with its odd farm-like appearance - no sand, no beach, etc. There is a small house on the island, but no lighthouse. Just beyond Loggerhead in the haze you can barely make out Garden Key, the next island in this chain.

Arriving at Garden Key I found the lighthouse that should have been back on Loggerhead, but no sign of Fort Jefferson, which should take up the whole island. At least Bush Key, the one beyond it, looks about right. No sign of the other keys and sand bars that make up the Tortugas.

By the way, the Dry Tortugas are "Dry" because there's no fresh water available, and they are called the Tortugas (Turtles) because of the abundance and variety of sea turtles in the area. Great place for scuba diving or even snorkling.

Also note in this last image that my altimeter is reading 700 feet. During the actual fly-by I got back down almost to 250 feet before going to full throttle and climbing back out.

The trip back was uneventful and took me back over the horseshoe shaped group of keys I had seen on the trip out. This time I figured out how to get a more interesting visual:
In the virtual cockpit view in FSX you can move your virtual head position up/down/left/right/forward and back as well as panning around and zooming in and out. I didn't realize until today that you can move so far left or right (etc) that you're virtual head is actually outside the plane! Neat way to take pictures though.

All the way back I had been gradually climbing, up to about 8,000 feet trying to get above the storms and turbulence. I even saw some lightning flashes, but was never fast enough to grab a snapshot. Next time I fly in bad weather I'm going to try harder.

Realizing I needed to loose 7,000 feet over the next 15 miles or so I cut power and nosed up to reduce airspeed and start a gradual glide downward towards Key West. As before, there was a crosswind from the north but the wind speed was not as fast today so it was easier to deal with. With minor power adjustments to stay on the glide slope I eased on in to the runway for a very nice, very straight and very smooth landing:
This makes my 39th successful landing since turning on crash detection and cranking up the reality settings. It would have been number 40 but for that unfortunate incident back in Titusville.

Key West Sight Seeing

Long day at the office today, then a committee meeting for a non-profit I'm involved with, Family Promise of Whitfield County, then stuff to do at home, so very little time for flying tonight. Instead of leaving Key West I just circled around it a couple of times, including one touch-and-go landing before stopping for good.

Having been to Key West and having studied it on Google Earth a bit, I was curious to see how certain items were modeled (if at all) in FSX. I took off heading east, climbed up to several hundred feet (tried to stay under 1,000 for a closer view of the terrain), and started around the north end of the island. There's a separate island or key called Fleming Key jutting out from the north side of Key West, or maybe separated by a sand bar at low tied or something. Here it is in FSX:

The shape is right and the big stretch of sand is accurate, but this end of it just looks like a bunch of bushes in Flight Simulator. Now check it out in Google Earth at 24 35'35.57"N, 81 47'49.26"W. There's actually a compound or maybe a hotel or something out there, swimming pool and everything.

Continuing around the island I circled up around the south side and flew back over the interior looking for the Hemingway House. On my most recent, and only adult trip to Key West, my wife and I got there just after the Hemingway House closed. We looked through the gates and saw some cats hanging around, but that was about it. In Google Earth, you can find it at 24 33'08.10"N, 81 48'02.82"W, but no sign of it in FSX, just a bunch of generic houses and buildings:

I circled over this area a couple of times to see if any of the houses looked like they had any special significance, but nothing jumped out at me.

Another odd thing about flying, or maybe just virtual flying, is the perception of altitude. In this image, I look like I'm up pretty high, but I'm actually not much more than 500 feet off the ground. That's about as high as a 50 story building though, so I guess that is pretty high, but in a plane going about a hundred miles an hour, and with even small movements of the controls capable of costing you dozens of feet of altitude, five hundred feet is practically dragging the ground. It's fairly nerve wracking, even in a simulation.

Not far from where I couldn't find the Hemingway House, on the southwest corner of the island, I really expected to find Fort Zachery Taylor (or Fort Zach to the locals). In Google Earth you can see it 24 32'51.56"N, 81 48'36.51"W. It's a pretty substantial structure, although it almost looks half built. It even has a moat and everything, but as before, no sign of it in Flight Simulator:

It's hard to see in this image, but directly below the plane, in the middle of this corner of the island, there does appear to be a little building with a tower or something, but nothing that looks like a fort or a moat. I checked Google Earth, but couldn't find anything to match the building in FSX. Also, around the corner there's a black-and-white lighthouse, which also does not appear to exist.

The missing fort seems really odd to me, because other buildings on the island, like these X-shaped hotels are based on real buildings:

They're just past the airport or in Google Earth, you can find them at 24 33'31.48"N, 81 45'04.94"W. Although in another odd twist, one of the three seems to have been demolished in FSX, as all you can see is the shape of it on the ground. Very strange indeed.

Hopefully I'll have better luck when I fly out to the Dry Tortugas. There's a fort there that surely is modeled. If not, I'll be really disappointed in the folks at Microsoft.