Return to Dalton

Last day of the month, so I wanted to get on back to Dalton so I could start October off with something different, perhaps some IFR training or something. Anyway, this was an odd flight from beginning to end.

I started out where I left off in Greenville, real-time (morning), real weather (nice), did my preflight and started taxiing to the runway when I notice a float plane parked at the airport:

They do make amphibious float planes (with retractable wheels), but this looks like a water only plane that's been sat out here on the tarmac for some reason. Very odd.

So then I took off and headed west, climbing towards my planned cruising altitude of 8500 feet. My rate of climb kept dropping back towards zero during the accent, so I had to keep increasing my nose-up pitch to compensate, to the point that my ground speed (as shown by GPS) got down below 80 knots and airspeed wasn't looking much better.

When I finally got to altitude, I kept adjusting the throttle (manifold pressure), prop control (rpm's), etc. trying to get my speed up, but I never could get anything better than about 115 knots over the ground.

The wind forecast had been "calm", so I wasn't thinking headwind at the time, I kept looking for other issues. I noticed it was warmer by about 10 degrees Celsius than when I started this trip even though I was flying 1000 feet higher. That does effect performance, but it shouldn't be that big of a difference.

Finally I noticed that I was on a heading of 285 degrees by flying a ground track or course of 274 degrees, which meant I was "crabbing" into a cross-wind. So much for "calm". Then I remembered that the weather forecast at the airport is just what's going on at the airport, not what the winds are at altitude. In a real plane, there's no way to measure the winds directly (you're moving through them, so you don't have a reference point), but in FSX there is a way. It took me a while to figure it out, but Shift-Z pops up some info including the wind direction and speed at your current location.

Turns out I was flying west with a 30 knot wind coming out of the northwest, so a mix of head- and cross-wind that was both slowing me down directly (as a headwind) and forcing me to point my nose slightly into the wind to maintain course, which also robs you of ground speed. The flight ended up taking about an hour and a half, where it would have been under an hour without the wind.

Later in the flight, I did manage to get my speed up during the descent. Rather than cutting power, I just pointed the nose down and got my airspeed up to about 140 knots, ground speed just over 130. Then, once over Fort Mountain and getting ready to land, I paused the simulator and started recording a flight video. This is where it starts to get weird again.

To refresh, the reason I've been using the flight video recorder is that FSX, at least for this plane (Rockwell Commander) has a replay problem. During replays, the landing gear and flaps are shown at their current position, not how they were positioned at the point in flight you're replaying. If, however, you record the flight in progress, then play back the recording, it seems to show the gear and flaps as they actually were, which lets you capture screen shots that are more accurate. The best way would be to take screen shots during the flight, but that's hard to do when you're in the middle of a landing approach.

So the actual landing went well. As proof, here's a screen capture of the post-flight analysis:

You can see from the red line that I approach from the east, turn onto the upwind leg, then quickly to crosswind, then fly back down parallel to the runway on the downwind leg, then turn on base and then final approach and land. Nice straight lines and smooth turns, good landing.

So after landing and taxiing back to fuel, I stopped the recording and saved it and the video started going wild. I was not able to return to flight or replay the video, but was able to pull up the analysis (above) and exit the flight. I ended up having to completely exit FSX and go back in before I could even replay the video. When I did, things got weird. For starters, my engine was off during the video:

The above-shot shows the landing gear coming down, but the prop stationary. The other odd part was that the plane kept spinning to the left and right and back to center. During the actual flight, I had looked left, right and then back to center, and somehow that movement got translated to the whole plane in the recording.

The next odd thing was that in the recording, I made no effort to actually land. Once the gear came down, I just flew a straight line, continuing my descent, all the way into the trees:

At the start of the video, you can see Dalton airport behind me, and you can tell from the Flight Analysis, that I actually circled it before landing, but here I just fly straight down into the trees. Bang! Game over! (note video taken by pointing my iPhone at the screen during replay)

Not sure what to make of this. I guess I'll do some research, but in the meantime, I'm not sure how to get accurate screen shots during landings.