Getting Real (or at least Medium Real)

As I've mentioned in prior posts, I've been flying the sim thus far on the "easy" setting. I've not fully understood what that meant or how that compared to medium, hard, etc., but I knew it wasn't as real as I wanted the simulation to be.

Of course, a computer simulation has some unreality that works against you, like lack of realistic controls, no peripheral vision, no sense of motion, etc., so a little unreality that works in your favor, like being able to switch to an external view of the plane, is not all bad.

Nevertheless, I decided I was ready for something more so I crank up the reality setting to medium, plus turned on crash detection and some other features. I left "auto rudder" engaged since I don't have rudder pedals, and left "auto mixture" turned on, since I don't have a real throttle set with mixture lever, but I turned on damage detection from hard maneuvers and engine stress, plus turned off unlimited fuel and a couple of other cheats.

I decided on a short test flight, starting from the Dalton airport, taking off, flying the pattern and landing again. This time, while selecting the free flight options, I looked a little closer and realized you can set your start position at the airport. The default is "active runway" which is what got me in trouble on a recent flight. This time, I selected to be parked near the hangers:

I'm in cockpit view, looking over to my right at the main building and fuel pumps. From there, I taxied around towards the runway and saw that the windsock showed a slight breeze coming from the south. Forgot to get a picture of that, but I did taxi to the correct runway, stop at the hold line and check that the sky was clear in both directions and then pulled out onto runway 14:

I've mentioned trim in earlier posts so here's more of the cockpit view, including a view of the trim tab, which I've adjusted to the take-off setting of around 5 degrees nose-up trim:

The trim wheel is just below the yolk to the right. You can't see the mouse pointer for some reason, but when you point to it you get the little pop-up text that tells you how it's set.

With trim set correctly, I throttled up, headed down the runway, rotated and took to the air. As I passed the hangers and tower, I looked to the right and took this image:

You can see that I'm airborne and climbing.

Next, as I gained more altitude, I took this image looking left towards Fort Mountain:

If you're from this area, the mountain range is easily recognizable. I'll continue this account in a series of post since the number of photos I'm trying to include is starting to make it difficult to edit. I must be doing something wrong, because I keep accidentally deleting images and I'm having a hard time getting them in the right place.