Virtually Flying

Bolivar, TN

2011-10-02T09:15:00.000-07:00

For reasons that must remain a secret for the time being, I switched back to the Commander and took of from Dalton en route to Bolivar, Tennessee. It's 245 nautical miles, mostly west (which means mostly into a headwind). I climbed up to 6500 feet but after a while, over north-east Alabama, the ceiling dropped and I was skimming the bottoms of the clouds. In VFR (visual flight rules), you're supposed to stay at least 500 feet below the clouds. I opted to drop down to 4500 feet (remembering that 5500 would put me at the same altitude as west-to-east traffic), but then the ground fogged or hazed over. Plus, in that part of Alabama, there are ridges at 2000 feet and some of them have radio towers on them, so I was a bit nervous for a while.

Then the weather cleared up and I was able to climb back to my original planned cruising altitude. Later, over Tennessee, I got this image of Pickwick Lake, which sits at the intersection of Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee:

Later on, I found my airport, Whitehurst Field, just south of Bolivar. The runway is just over 5000' and 75' wide, but on approach I noticed that there are fairly tall trees at the end of runway 19:
(click to enlarge)

I probably could have gotten lower, or perhaps should have aborted to do a fly-over and check it out before actually landing, but given the runway length I just kept plenty high until I cleared the trees. That put me a lot higher than normal over the runway threshold:
You can see from the shadow of my plane that I'm a lot higher than normal at this point in the landing. I also flared a bit much as I got closer (I was descending pretty rapidly and was worried about coming in too hot on the landing hear). That caused me to climb slightly and use up even more runway, but ultimately I got her down nice and easy and on the center-line:
I did overshoot the taxi-ways, but still had plenty of runway to stop, I just had to turn around and taxi back down the runway itself until I could pull off and park.

I'll explain why I'm in Bolivar, Tennesee in a later post.

Collegedale, Tennessee

2011-10-01T06:47:00.000-07:00

For my birthday, I received a gift certificate for one "Discovery Flight" from a flight school based out of the Collegedale Municipal Airport in Collegedale, TN. They are about the same distance from us as the Dalton Airport, and they're cheaper!

I'll probably take that flight in the next week or two, so I thought I'd switch back to the Skyhawk, since that's what they train in, and fly up to Collegedale to check it out.

This is a smaller airport than Dalton, but not by much. Runway is 5,003 feet long (about 4o0 feet shorter than Dalton, but still more than enough for the Skyhawk) and 75 feet wide (Dalton is 100 feet wide). On approach, I noticed that (due to my terrain mesh upgrade), Collegedale now sits up on a plateau:

(click to enlarge)

It took about 20 minutes to fly up and was an easy flight. I had forgotten how much simpler the Skyhawk is to operate than the Commander. On approach though, the air got really choppy. I was fighting the controls all the way in and ended up landing on one wheel:

(click to enlarge)

Hard to see, but there's a puff of white smoke coming off the left wheel where it touched down first. I'm also nose-left, so after touching down I had to get on the rudder to straighten back out. Otherwise, not a bad landing.

I'm going to stay here for the week and get used to the terrain, the roads around the airport, and to landing the Skyhawk on a narrower runway.

Return to Dalton

2011-09-30T06:17:00.000-07:00

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.

Florence to Greenville

2011-09-25T18:12:00.000-07:00

Wrapping up my tour of South Carolina, I flew today from Florence back west to Greenville. I have a cousin who lives there. I chose real weather, although I knew that would be pretty bad at Florence, but should be OK by the time I got to Greenville. In fact, when I requested taxi clearance, I was turned down because it was IFR (instrument flight rules) only.

Not being much for the rules, I took off without permission and quickly climbed into the clouds for an up-close look at IFR conditions. While I got glimpses of the ground occasionally, mostly I was just looking at the inside of clouds:

I think I'll start working on IFR training though. You can actually do IFR flight plans in FSX, but then you have to be able to fly holding patterns and follow other complex instructions from air traffic control while maintaining very specific speed and altitude settings.

I've often thought about how FSX training would help with real world training and how it might hurt. Since you can't "feel" the plan in FSX, you tend to rely on the instruments more, which would probably help you to become an instrument rated pilot. On the other hand, not feeling the plane means you never get tricked by your senses. Down is always down, you don't get vertigo, etc. So perhaps in a real IFR situation, your FSX training wouldn't help as you wouldn't be prepared to deal with those false readings from your senses.

Anyway, while not IFR, I did request a flight following to help me since I could not see other air traffic. Also, by the time I got to Greenville, the weather had cleared a bit:
For this landing approach, instead of relying on the replay to take screen shots, I turned on the video recorded to record the landing, and then replayed that instead. It seems to be particular to this plane, although I've not fully tested that theory, but I've noticed that if you land, and then raise your flaps, and then replay the landing, it will show the landing with flaps up, even though they were actually down. Likewise, if you are parked after the flight (obviously with landing gear down), then when you replay earlier parts of the flight, it shows you with gear down even though the gear would have been up at that point.

Recording the landing and then replaying the recording seems to solve the problem. And as far as landings go, this one was pretty good, although as if frequently the case, I was off-center:
I just need to be a few feet over to my left. The landing my folks watched was about like this one except that I was lined up correctly. I put the main gear down, and then gently dropped the nose and the nose wheel touch down directly in the middle of the white center-line. I need to do some more landing practice in this plane until I can make that happen a lot more often.

Carolina Touring

2011-09-24T18:38:00.000-07:00

Couple of flights to post about here. On Friday, I left Williamsburg Regional (Kingstree) and headed south to Lake Marion and Lake Moultre, just north-west of Monck's Corner, which is where we stay when we go on our annual family fishing trips to the Cooper River:

The Cooper is not displayed well in FSX. For one thing, it's blue. It should be brown. For another, it's surrounded by marshland, not farms and houses. But the shape of the river is not bad. The fork in the river just off my left wing is called "The T's", although as far as I can tell, there's only one "T".

From there, I flew on to Charleston, where the dock area had several of those tower/crane things like I found near Carter's Lake back home. They look accurate to a dockyard, unlike out in the middle of the forest.

I then headed up the coast and landed at Myrtle Beach International. Landing was pretty good, although off-center (again).

Today I headed north to Wilmington, North Carolina, home of the U.S.S. North Carolina Battleship from WWII. As a child, I recall visiting the ship (now a museum) and even did a report about it, maybe in middle school (or maybe 5th grade). I wasn't optimistic, but I was hoping it would be there. No such luck:
I did however located a couple of cargo ships and an oil tanker. I'm flying about 200-250' off the water here for a better look. You can see my shadow on the water just above me.

After not finding the battleship, I climbed up to 4500' and headed due west for about 80-90 nautical miles to Florence, South Carolina. Florence is where we stay when we got to a family reunion that occurs every September (I missed it this year, but wife and kids made it).

About 20 minutes out from landing, I looked around and my folks were standing there watching me. They had come over for dinner and snuck up on me. My Dad used to be a pilot, back in the 70's, and he hadn't seen my setup yet. They watched me fly in to Florence and land (no pressure, right?)

Fortunately, my landing was flawless. Definitely the best I've made in the Commander and one of the best, if not THE best, since I've been flying. My descent was smooth and steady, speed was just right, landed right on the center line (literally, nose wheel came down right on top of the line!), everything just perfect.

Then, after showing them the landing again in instant replay, I exited the flight without taking a screen shot. D'oh!!

Oh well, at least I didn't crash or anything. They had to have been impressed with that landing. It really was perfect.

Aside from these two flights, I've also been working on another project. I've transferred all of my paper flight log entries into an Excel spreadsheet. Same information, but now I can total it up and run totals for each type of plane I've flown. Some stats:

Total logged flight time: 72 hours, 53 minutes

Total landings: 156 (163 take-offs, but two of the "crashes" were software crashes only, not me actually crashing. Two others were me screwing around and maybe shouldn't have been logged flights anyway. The other three included two stalls before landing and one landing on too short a field with a roll-off into some trees after the end of the runway - none fatal)

Flight time by Aircraft Type:

Cessna Skylane - 34 hours, 9 minutes, 51 landings (one crash)

Cessna Skyhawk - 14 hours, 38 minutes, 39 landings (one crash)

Rockwell Commander - 12 hours, 1 minute, 19 landings

Piper Tomahawk - 5 hours, 47 minutes, 25 landings (one crash)

Aeronca Champ - 4 hours, 35 minutes, 15 landings (one crash - screwing around)

All Others - 1 hour, 43 minutes, 7 landings (one crash - screwing around)

Pretty interesting. I'll have to do something special for my 100th hour in the air!

100th Logged Flight

2011-09-22T10:43:00.000-07:00

It's my birthday, so I decided to take the day off. Among other things, I wanted to fly. Prior to today, I had logged 99 simulated flights and my birthday seemed like a good day to log number one-hundred. (Silly stuff like flying through the St. Louis Arch is not logged, only the "real" fake flying).

Since the last flight, I've been thinking about what to do next. Flight #100 needed to be something different, somewhere I've not flown to before, but also a real flight - not a river gorge run or something you wouldn't really fly in the real world. I decided to recreate the flight I remember as I child when my Dad would take us to visit family in South Carolina. I would not do it in the Skyhawk though, but in the new Commander (which is faster and more fun to fly).

The weather locally was nice, but I checked online and from the mid-point on to the final destination it would probably be raining and might take me into IFR (instrument flight rules) conditions. So I cheated and set FSX to "fair weather" and got ready to go. The flight would be 256 nautical miles by direct GPS navigation, so probably a couple of hours or maybe less.

Here I am still climbing towards my cruise altitude of 7500 feet. Dalton and the surrounding valley area are behind me as I begin entering the mountains. Fort Mountain is directly over my shoulder. Highway 76 is below me and if you zoom in on the image, you can see that weird crane thing in the lower right-hand corner:

(click to enlarge)

I continued to climb until I got to the cruising altitude and then leveled off and adjusted engine settings according to my owner's manual. I've actually downloaded the full Commander 114 Owner's Manuel (from the 1970's) and printed it out. In the "Performance" chapter, there are pages of tables and graphs correlating altitude (pressure), temperature, throttle setting, propeller settings (rpm's), manifold pressure, fuel flow and airspeed.

At 7500 feet, the temperature is in the low 30's, around zero celcius, so at 2500 rpm's (prop speed) and just over 75% on the throttle, my Air Speed Indicator was only reading about 115 knots (about 130 mph), but my GPS was showing a ground speed of about 150 knots (170 mph) and there was very little wind, certainly not a 40 mph tailwind! The reason for the difference is that the Air Speed Indicator shows "indicated" air speed, or KIAS (knots indicated air speed), which is how fast the airplane feels like it's going, but is not a measure of true airspeed (KTAS). Because the air is so much thinner, and because the Air Speed Indicator is calibrated for sea level, it doesn't feel like you're going so fast at altitude. There's a way to calculate KTAS from KIAS if you know your altitude, temperature, etc., but the GPS tells you ground speed, so why bother?

Indicated Air Speed tells you what you need to know to fly and ground speed tells you how long it's going to take you to reach your destination. Here I am approaching South Carolina, which is on the other side of that river:

(click to enlarge)

In fact, another cool thing about GPS is that you can tell EXACTLY when you cross a state-line. Here I am entering South Carolina airspace, with 150 knots left to fly (about an hour flight time remaining):

(click to enlarge)

If you zoom in and look at the GPS screen you can see the state line I've just crossed. The number in the top-right corner is the distance remaining, bottom-right is time remaining.

A bit further into South Carolina, I flew over Lake Murray, which is just west and a bit north of Columbia:After passing Columbia, I jumped the gun and started my descent too early. I was looking at the time and distance remaining and calculating how many minutes it would take to descend at 500 feet per minute and also how many miles I'd fly during the descent, and I forgot to account for the thicker air slowing me down as I dropped. Rather than reaching pre-landing altitude (target -1500 feet) at 10 miles out, I got down low and realized I was still 30-40 miles from my destination! I had to climb a bit and speed back up, which probably cost me a few minutes of total flight time. As I did my slow cruise to my destination, I noticed this terrain anomaly:

(click to enlarge)

That terrain mesh I installed the other day adjusts the ground level to be more accurate, but does not adjust every single airport elevation to match, only the larger ones (Dalton size and up). This is a little grass strip that's still displayed at the default FSX altitude, which is a little lower than the surrounding terrain, so it appears to be down in a hole.

Sight seeing over, I began my final approach into Williamsburg County Regional Airport near Kingstree, South Carolina. My relatives mostly live near Nesmith, about 12 miles east of the airport. I cancelled my flight following about 12 miles out, announced my landing attentions about 10 miles out, and again at 5 miles, then made my final approach into land:
Everything went well. I'm lined up pretty nicely at a nice glide slope and everything. Williamsburg Regional is a little smaller than Dalton, only 75' wide (Dalton is 100' wide), but plenty long (5000' to Dalton's 5400'). I touched down right where I was supposed to and only a few feet off-center. You can see in this image that my right tire is on the center-line:

(click to enlarge)

After slowing down and taxiing to the fuel area (burned about 20 gallons on this trip), I shut down and logged the flight. I then totaled up some of my flying statistics:

Logged flights - 100

Flight hours - 69 hours, 43 minutes

Landings - 152 (recall that some of those flights were touch-and-go with multiple landings)

I'm getting a lot more comfortable with the Commander. I have 9 hours and 20 minutes in this plane thus far, compared to 34 hours in the Skylane. I played with the autopilot more on this trip and figured out how to turn on the altitude hold, so it not only maintains your course, but also your altitude. You really just have to sit back and look out the window with that turned on.

From here, I'm going to do some sight-seeing, fly down to Charleston, up to Myrtle Beach, etc. and then head back home, maybe with a stop in Greenville/Spartenburg on the way back.

FSGenesis Terrain Mesh Upgrade

2011-09-18T19:35:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in the previous Post, I recently purchased (at 50% off), a terrain mesh upgrade from FSGenesis covering North America, or at least the United States (or at least 48 of them). FSX has three levels of scenery detail. The first is the mesh, or the elevation data. FSX defaults to a mesh resolution of 38 meters. The FSGenesis product takes that down to 9.6 meters. The higher resolution should make the terrain, especially in rugged areas, more accurate and realistic. But is it worth it? I paid almost $30 for this (normally $60), so to test it out, I planned a sight-seeing trip around north Georgia.

I took off from Dalton and headed east for a fly-around of Fort Mountain. From there, I headed WSW towards the Pocket, and then north to Chattanooga and Lookout Mountain. On the way back to Dalton, I flew over Rocky Face. Here are the before and after shots over Lookout Mountain:

(before shot - click to enlarge)

(after shot - click to enlarge)

The main thing I'm noticing is that the default FSX mesh provides the road (Highway 52) with a pretty wide shoulder on both sides that's pretty flat. The new mesh narrows that down so just the road is flat, which is certainly more realistic, but sometimes the road actually appears on an angle, which is not realistic at all.

Can't really call that an improvement, and other than the road, I really couldn't tell much difference. I took several before/after shots at the Pocket, but none of them were quite the same angle or view, so none were good for comparison. Overall, I'd say the Pocket looked worse with the new mesh than it did with the default FSX mesh.

Next stop, Lookout Mountain:

(before shot - click to enlarge)

(after shot - click to enlarge)

The road up the mountain here shows similar changes, but the big difference in this shot is that the steepest part of the ridge, the rocky stuff, is clearly more detailed in the after image. In the before shot, it's pretty much a flat cliff, but in the after shot, there are ripples and variation in the outcroppings. That's definitely an improvement, although you wouldn't notice it except on a close fly-by like this.

On the way home, over Rocky Face:

(before shot - click to enlarge)

(after shot - click to enlarge)

Really can't tell much difference at all in these two.

I'll do more testing, including some fights out west where the mountains are bigger. The differences may be more noticeable there. I'm also curious to see the combined effect of better mesh with photo-real scenery. This mesh will cover the Grand Canyon for example, and I have the MegaScenery Earth data for that area, so the two together should be a significant improvement over the default canyon.

Before I move on the the landing at the end of the second flight, I just wanted to pat myself on the back for flying nearly the exact same flight plan in two seperate flights. Other than the Pocket area, I was able to get before/after shots of the three other areas from nearly the exact same point of view. Trust me, that's not easy to do!

OK, on to the landing. As I was about 7 miles out from Dalton Municipal Airport, I called in my intention to land on runway 32. Right after that, a Beechcraft called in from 10 miles on the other side of the airport, intending to land on the same runway. I was closer, but I would have to fly the pattern, turn 180 degrees and land while the Beech would be making a straight in approach. It was looking like we'd get there about the same time, so should be interesting.

As I established in the pattern (downwind leg), he was about three miles out, showing no indications he was going to give me the right-of-way. Not sure who should yield in this situation, so I decided to let him go first. Then I decided that I would let him pass and then cut in behind him and land as close as possible. I wouldn't do that in real life, but you can't get hurt in a simulator, so here goes:

(click to enlarge)

I saw him pass about three-quarters of a mile to the side of me, so I banked hard around and got behind him. The image above shows me on final approach with him about to cross the threshold, still in the air. (Normally, I wouldn't turn on final until he was down and clear of the runway). As I landed, he was slow and turning off onto the taxiway. If you look at my air speed indicator, you can see I'm still going about 50 knots:

(click to enlarge)

I had to swerve to the other side of the runway and cut around behind him to avoid contact, but I was able to get stopped and turn back onto the same taxiway he used and follow him in to the parking area:
He did a better job parking (on the lines), but I've got the better looking plane!

Return to Dalton

2011-09-17T17:11:00.000-07:00

After a few more (non-blogged) test flights, I felt like I had a pretty good handle on the new plane and its various systems. I've still got more to learn to optimizer performance, but I thought it was time to come home.

The return flight was funny in a way, because I barely turned the plane from the time I lined up on the runway at Cape Girardeau and the time I landed in Dalton. The Cape runway was on a heading of 100 degrees (ESE). The Dalton runway is on a heading of 140 degrees (SE), and it's almost a straight line from one to the other, mostly on a diagonal across Tennessee.

The Commander is faster than the Skylane I left behind, so the trip was shorter too. I didn't get her up to full cruising speed as I'm still learning how to optimize the balance between throttle, prop, trim, etc., but while the Skylane flight took about two and a half hours, the flight back to Dalton was over in two hours flat! Here I am crossing the ridge at Rocky Face, with I-75 below me (Dalton right in front of me):

I don't think I had actually put my gear down yet, but in replay mode it seemed to leave the gear down (since that's how the plane was configured at the end of the flight). If that is a persistent problem, I'm going to have to pause mid-flight to take pictures rather than rely so much on the replay. Anyway, it was good to see the Dalton airport again:
Landing was a bit left of center, but otherwise pretty smooth:
Back at the fuel pumps to top off for the next flight:
I haven't installed it yet, but I've purchased a 4-dvd set from FSGenesis that's a North American terrain mesh upgrade for FSX. It basically increases the resolution of the terrain or elevation data so the mountains are more detailed and realistic.

Before I install it, I'm going to use the Commander to do some recon in the area, Fort Mountain, back to Rocky Face, etc. and take a bunch of pictures with mountains in the background. Then after the install, I'll go back and try to reproduce those shots to see how much difference you can tell. Look for some upcoming posts on that.

Commander Test Flight #4

2011-09-15T16:41:00.000-07:00

More touch-and-go practice. These images might look just like the ones from yesterday, but these were actually much better landings. As before, the Commander is very stable and easy to handle so lining up on the center of the runway has not been an issue:

Unlike yesterday and earlier attempts, I started a good bit higher, probably 300-400 feet higher before beginning the approach. That allowed me to maintain a steady descent at 80 knots all the way to the runway on idle. Earlier attempts began lower, which required me to either add power and pull back a bit to keep from landing short, and the later approach tended to reduce my airspeed, sometimes almost to the stall limit. This time I just flew to the runway and flared just a bit at the very end:
Everything was very smooth, although on the last landing I inadvertently pulled up a bit after putting the nose wheel down and at 80 knots or close to it, that resulted in a little bunny-hop, where the plane came up off the ground (all three wheels) for a moment, but settled back down quickly so while embarrassing, it wasn't a problem or really dangerous or anything.

Next test flight will involve cruising to another airport to see how she trims out at speed and altitude, maybe even play with the GPS and Autopilot some. I'll need to have those figured out before I head back to Dalton.

Commander Test Flight #3

2011-09-14T19:15:00.000-07:00

Switched to nice weather, since it makes little sense to test a new airplane in the rain. I did another set of touch-and-go landings (4 this time) and got progressively better, but still don't think I'm doing it just right.

Here I am on the 4th landing, coming in dead-center, which says more about how well behaved the Commander is than how good I am as a pilot:

Another view, a bit further down the runway, and this looks good too. Nose is not too high, about to land on the center-line, right?
Not so fast. At that moment, I pulled back a bit too much, nosed up, and started to climb. My airspeed was around 80 knots or so, and I was coming in probably a bit shallow with some power on the throttle, so too much nose up and your balloon, which caused me to land long and off-center again.

Still trying to sort out in my head how to land this plane more accurately. Speeds seems a bit high, but any lower and I ended up dangerously close to the stall limit. The first two or three landings (not today, but total in this plane), ended with the stall alarm going off.

I'll keep working on it though.

Commander Test Flight #2

2011-09-14T14:50:00.001-07:00

It's raining at Cape Girardeau, but the visibility wasn't an issue, at least not for touch-and-go practice right at the airport. I did two landings, but while I'm centering up well and landing at the right distance down the runway, I'm also landing too nose-high and too slow:

Landing speed is supposed to be 80 knots, but I'm approaching at that speed and then nosing up to slow down even more. I need to come in at 90-100 knots probably, and not nose up so much. I'm risking a stall before touch-down, broken landing gear, etc. Would not want to do that to the new plane!

Commander Test Flight #1

2011-09-13T18:10:00.000-07:00

Not much time tonight (Cub Scouts, etc.), but I wanted to test out the new plane. First impression - this is a much more complicated plane than the others I've flown, even the Skylane. It's not just a Skylane with retractable gear in other words. The start-up and pre-flight procedures are much more involved and will take a while to learn.

In fact, I had shut down the engine (it's always on with FSX starts) and then could not get it restarted! I had to reload the flight and just skip that part for now so I could fly.

That all being said, the plane handled easily on the ground and the engine just sounds fantastic, like a muscle car or something (low throaty rumble and all that). It's a 540+ cubic inch fuel injected engine, so I guess it should sound good!

Take-off was also a breeze and the plane handled easily once airborne. Plus it just looks amazing:

I took off from Cape Girardeau and headed South, climbing to 2000 feet before leveling off and doing some turns. In this next image, you can see the airport in the background:
After a few minutes, I turned back and requested clearance to land. I had to join the pattern behind another plane, but otherwise had no problems. Trimming the plane down to landing speed was easy and it handled very well all the way to the ground:
My distance is good and I'm just a little left of center as I touch down. Not bad for my first landing in a new plane. Total test flight time - 23 minutes.

I'll be doing more test flights in this area before I head back to Dalton. I really need to plan out a series of test to practice taking off and landing, learn how to use the radios, GPS, autopilot, etc.

Master & Commander

2011-09-13T04:36:00.001-07:00

Well, Commander anyway. Just downloaded my Rockwell AC11 Commander 114:

Next post will be a flight test.

Oh, What the Heck...

2011-09-12T16:21:00.001-07:00

When am I going to be back in St. Louis, right?

And while we're being silly:
Note that this last one actually was called a crash by FSX. It just stopped me mid-air and said I had crashed, game over! As you can see from the image though, I've not struck anything. I suspect that while some larger bridges can be flown under, others are considered more like walls for FSX collision detection, even though you can clearly see under them.

Four Good Landings

2011-09-11T19:12:00.000-07:00

Busy 9/11, but finally got some flying in before bed. Decided to do some touch-and-go landing practice after all. Took off from Cape Girardeau and headed south towards Sikeston Memorial, an airport about the size of Dalton's. As I got closer and tuned in their traffic (no tower, like Dalton), I realized there was a Piper Cherokee doing touch-and-goes there already. He was still there when I arrived, so I joined him. Here's my first landing, a bit high maybe, but right down the middle:

That's supposed to be a 100' wide runway, but it doesn't look it. Dalton seems much wider, but it's also 100 foot. Maybe the markings on Dalton's runway make it seem wider? Anyhow, after touching down and then powering back up and returning to the pattern, I got this shot of the Piper landing as I was flying the downwind leg:

(click to enlarge)

Hard to see him, but zoom in and look on the far left of the image just above the runway. We were probably never less than a mile apart, but at that range I could see him without any magnification. In fact, I generally fly at about 80%, so I'm actually zoomed out a bit.

I flew around and made one more landing, lower this time but still right on the number:
The Piper flew off after that one, so I left too and headed East to Mississippi County Airport (still in Missouri). About that time, my seven-year-old came down and wanted to fly, so I let him take the controls for a few minutes until we got to the airport. He let me land it, this time on a 60 foot wide runway, and just perfect:
After we watched that on replay, I had to pause the flight and tuck him in. Then back to the basement to finish the flight. I just did one touch-and-go here because it was getting late, so I headed back to Cape Girardeau. About 20 miles out I requested clearance and was instructed to enter base leg left, runway 28. That means you don't fly the full pattern, just come in perpendicular to the runway and then make a left turn and land.

I followed the instructions, but came in a little too close, so when I made the turn, I was too high. Fortunately, it's a really long runway, 6499 feet (about triple what I need), so that wasn't a problem. I landed long, but right on the dotted line:
All-in-all just an outstanding flight, almost an hour in the air with four nearly perfect landings. I feel a lot better than I did after my first landing here in Missouri. I think I'm ready to try that new plane now.

St. Louis

2011-09-11T04:44:00.001-07:00

Changed my mind about touch-and-go practice, at least for now. I know how to land properly, my problem last time was just not preparing for the landing early enough. I slowed down some, but basically just "winged it" and thus was trying to control too many variables at once. For a good landing, you need to get the plane trimmed out to the proper landing speed early and get at the right altitude and on the right traffic pattern so you minimize the number of things you're having to do during the landing itself.

Anyway, I decided instead to fly north to St. Louis for some sight-seeing. It didn't look too far on the map, although I should have checked to see exactly how far it was. Turns out it was around 100 miles! I took off and established a cruising speed of 124 knots, which somehow (in spite of no apparent tail wind) translated into a ground speed of nearly 140 knots. Still trying to figure that one out. After 45 minutes, I made it and got some nice views of the arch and downtown area:

(click to enlarge)

After a couple of flyby's (but no gratuitous fly-through's), I used by GPS to get some information about an airport just on the other side of the river (in Illinois) and just a bit south of the arch. It's called St. Louis Downtown Airport (KCPS). The GPS had the runway information, elevation, radio frequencies, etc. Very cool!

I called in and got clearance to land, slowed down, entered the pattern and prepared for landing and actually landed pretty good, although still off-center. The only real problem was that I landed on the wrong runway! I had clearing to land on 30R (runway 30, right), but landed on 30L by mistake. The airport had two parallel runways, and I was so focused on making a good landing that I forgot about that and just landed on the nearest one. I wonder how much trouble that would get me in? None in FSX, fortunately.

Later, I took back off, did another fly-around of the city and headed south. I thought about switching to a smaller plane, like the Champ, and trying to fly through the arch, but that would have just been silly. The return trip was uneventful and as I got closer to my destination I went overboard with pre-landing preparedness. I descended and slowed down much earlier than necessary, adding a few minutes to my journey, but by the time I was in the pattern, I was trimmed out at 70 knots and had gone through my landing procedure in my mind several times. This landing was perfect, right on target, right down the middle, nice and soft with the nose up just a bit, etc.

I wish I had a picture of it, but after the landing and after checking the flight analysis (to log the time and distance, etc.), when I went back to do a replay of the landing FSX got one of those fatal errors and crashed out on me again. Grrrrr! I wonder if I added my system RAM if that would fix the problem?

Headin' to Missourri

2011-09-10T08:24:00.000-07:00

So, there's this new plane I've been meaning to buy. It's called a Rockwell Commander, built by Rockwell back in the 70's, after which they sold the design to Gulfstream who sold it to someone else, etc., etc. Currently the rights are owned by Commander Premier Aircraft Company, located at Cape Girardeau Regional Airport, in Missourri, south of St. Louis. CPAC, as it's called, is owned by a group of Commander owners and provides support, spare parts, etc., but has fallen on hard times such that its plan to start building new Commanders has thus far not worked out so well.

Of course, the Commander I want to buy is the FSX version, made by Carenado (same company that made my Skylane), but I thought it would be neat to fly out to Cape Girardeau just the same. Once I download the Commander, I can fly it back to Dalton.

This was going to be a longer trip than usual, and actually turned out to be my longest flight yet at two hours and thirty eight minutes (previous record was two hours and ten minutes). It's 325 nautical miles from Dalton to Cape Girardeau as the crow (or Skylane) flies, so I decided to study my GPS a bit more:

I haven't learned all the in's-and-out's, but I can select an airport to fly to and then use the GPS to determine my course and stay on it. The purple line running up through the middle of the screen is the desired route, so you just have to fly along it to stay on course. The unit tells you the distance to the airport (in nautical miles), your speed over the ground (in knots), and your ETA plus other info. You can actually program in way points with turns to go around areas you don't want to fly over, but I just did a straight point-to-point route as that was easiest.

I also relearned the Skylane's autopilot. Once I got to altitude (6500 feet), I trimmed out for level flight and then used the autopilot to hold a steady heading (based on what the GPS was telling me). At that point, all I had to do was monitor the aircraft (engine, etc.), keep a look out for other planes and just enjoy the ride.

My route took me through Tennessee and then over the boundary between Kentucky, Illinois, and Missourri, at which point I noticed this bridge:

(click to enlarge)

It's the Cairo Ohio River Bridge, which according to BridgeHunter.com is a "Cantilevered through truss" bridge over the Oio River on US 51/60 between Cairo, Illinois and Wickliffe, Kentucky.

I also crossed paths with a couple of other small planes during the trip. Still climbing out of Dalton, I contacted Chattanooga and requested a "flight following" where they assigned you a transponder "squawk" code and track you by radar during your flight. Along the route you get handed off from one control area to another and they alert you to other air traffic that's near you. Near Nashville, I had a Beechcraft cross my path heading south, but he was a good 2500 feet below me.

A bit further on, I was running into some turbulance at 6500' and decended to 5500', which was a mistake. I had forgotten the rules about altitude. If you're heading west, as I was, you fly at an even-thousand foot plus five-hundred, so 2500, 4500, 6500, etc. Flying east, you maintain an odd-thousand foot plus five-hundred (3500, 5500, etc.). North/South traffic stays on even/odd thousands without the five-hundred. That way, the only planes at your altitude should be going basically the same direction you're going, so risk of collision is minimized.

Well, at 5500' I noticed a speck headed my way several miles out. About that time, the air traffic controller alerted us to each other's presence. The other plane was a Maule Orion (see my Darthe Maule post from last month). We ended up passing with a couple of miles between us, but at a closing speed of over 250 knots, so it was still pretty exciting. Had I been at the correct altitude, we would have had 1000' altitude difference so it would not have been as dramatic.

Anyway, I continued my flight and finally made it to Cape Girardeau. I was pretty tired, so unfortunately my landing was pretty sloppy. No excuse, that's just what happened. I didn't trim my plane down to the right speed, so I ended up coming in fast and shallow and when I flared, I ballooned up and then came down on all three wheels at once, and way off center on a runway that's 150' wide! I was embarrassed and don't plan to let that happen again.

After the landing I did manage to taxi back to the parking area and shut down. This airport has a major highway next to it, so I was able to see the ground traffic from the ground, and at a closer range than normal:

(click to enlarge)

As penance for my sloppiness, I'm going to do some touch and go practice in the Skylane this weekend and delay the Commander purchase a bit longer. When I feel that I've earned it, I'll get the new plane and show it off in my next post.

Prater's Mill Flight Park - Runway of the Insane!

2011-09-05T16:15:00.000-07:00

Spent most of the day flying. Came back from Huntsville and landed back in the rain. Switched to the Tomahawk for some rainy touch-and-go practice, and then for something completely different, I turned off the rain, switched to the Champ and decided to check out the Prater's Mill Flight Park. It's a little grass runway north of Dalton that's used by very small planes including RC Model planes as well.

I've never been there in real life, but if it's anything like modeled in FSX, the pilots who use it must be completely mad. It's basically a rectangular field completely surrounded on all side by trees. The Champ has a pretty short takeoff capability, but I still found myself pulling up hard, almost to the point of stalling, and still having to dodge trees on the way out. This made me question whether it was even possible to land here.

I made several attempts, most of which required me to abort and go around for another try. On one attempt, I got on the ground and tried to brake to a stop before I got into the trees but couldn't stop. I even tried swerving between the trees to miss them, but with nearly twenty foot of wing sticking out on either side, that proved impossible as well.

On a later attempt though, I was finally able to land successfully, but this has to be the most dangerous landing approach I've ever tried. Here's the cockpit view approaching the field:

(click to enlarge)

Hard to see the field because of the trees. If I clear all the trees, I'm too high and don't touch down until near the far end (by which time I'm into those trees and tearing my wings off again). Instead, I found this gap and I'm going to have to go between those trees, below tree top level, to land on this end of the field. Here's another view of the approach, a little closer, and from outside the plane:

(click to enlarge)

In this next shot, I'm down "in the weeds" so to speak, below tree-top level, trying to make it through with both wings intact. Almost there:

(click to enlarge)

As I get closer, I passed between these two trees, the larger green one on the left and the smaller yellow one on the right. Recall that the Champ has a 35' wingspan, so at most, these trees appear to be 45-50' apart. It looks like I'm actually brushing the leaves with my left wingtip:

(click to enlarge)

Here's a ground-level view of the same gap. Should have moved a few feet to my right. Definitely touching leaves on the left:

(click to enlarge)

However, I could not have moved much to the right. For one, I only had ten or maybe fifteen feet clearance on that side to the yellow tree, but those weren't the last trees I had to dodge. The next shot is from a couple of seconds later, as I pass another tree pretty close. This time I miss the leaves on my right side by maybe five feet:

(click to enlarge)

But I missed all of the trees and managed to get my wheels down at about the mid-point of the runway, and managed to brake to a stop just off the end of the official runway (hard to see, but the grass is actually mowed where the runway is supposed to be!):

(click to enlarge)

That's quite enough of that! Short field landing practice is good, but this airstrip is just crazy. In real life, I'm pretty sure the trees aren't that big or that close to the runway.

(update - found a web site for this place, http://pratermillflightpark.com. It looks a little more open and from the description, should have plenty more room than what's modeled in FSX. Perhaps the pilots who use this place aren't so crazy after all. Maybe it's just me!)

Rainy Day Flight to Huntsville

2011-09-05T10:40:00.001-07:00

Very rainy day in Dalton, so after a couple of short flights around town I decided to trade up to the beefier Skylane and head over to Huntsville to visit my sister. I took off in the rain, but was quickly above it. Not much to look at during the flight, just cloud-tops, but I'm relearning VOR navigation and I also figured out how to use the GPS.

Some newer planes have GPS built into the panel, but the ones I fly, if they have it at all, it's more like the GPS you buy for your car with the suction cup that attaches it to the windshield. I haven't figured out any advanced features, but I was able to turn it on, zoom in and out, and use it to figure out where I was in relation to the airport I was heading towards.

As a backup, I had also tuned in a VOR about 5 miles from the airport, and was using that as a rough guide and for range. Between the two, I was able to fly straight to the airport, even with no view of the ground from altitude, and only limited visibility once I got down closer to the ground.

It was not actually raining where I landed, and the landing went smoothly. I taxied in to the fueling area and noticed something odd:

See the windsock back there opposite my plane? Seems like in between two buildings is not a great place to put that. Should be closer to the runway, where it might actually prove useful.

Anyway, I may do some more flights around Huntsville and experiment with the GPS more. Still raining here in Dalton, so not much else to do.

Airport Tour of North Georgia

2011-09-03T15:12:00.000-07:00

Last night I decided to take a little tour in the Skyhawk. I wanted to check out some of the other reasonable sized airports in the area. None of those sidewalk sized runways, but real airports.

I started by flying from Dalton down to Carter's lake, then over towards Gilmer County. Along the way, I did another flyby of the tower thing:

(click to enlarge)

I still can't figure out what it is. Nor can I locate anything like it in the area using Google Earth. I wonder if there's a forum somewhere for FSX users to identify odd stuff like this?

From there, I landed at Gilmer County Airport, 1486 ft. above sea-level, with a smaller runway than Dalton, but not too small (3500' long, 75' wide).

I did a touch-and-go landing and then headed south to Pickens County. That airport is more like Dalton's, 5000' runway and 100' wide, but like Gilmer, it's more in the mountains (1,535' elevation). Another touch-and-go, then due west to Tom B. David airport in Calhoun. That was an interesting landing. About the time I announced my position and intent to land, another small plane (Piper Cherokee, I think), announced its intent to land on the same runway. It was a couple of miles closer, so I swung wide south of the airport to give him time to land.

As I passed the airport, I was able to look out my left window and spot the Piper flying the pattern. I had to zoom in to see more than just a smudge moving along parallel to the runway. Then, by the time I had swung around and was about to turn into the pattern myself, I got another view of him on final approach and landing.

Calhoun is actually a little bigger than Dalton, 6000' long and 100' wide, and slightly lower at 647 feet elevation. I did another touch-and-go, then headed northwest towards Barwick/Lafayette airport but with a slight sight-seeing detour:

(click to enlarge)

The mountain range in front of me is called "The Pocket" because of how the ridge comes south, turns and then heads back north. I've ridden my bike through this area a number of times (including a tough climb over the ridge), and have spent a weekend here with my Daughter at the Girl Scout Camp. There's actually a small lake (large pond?) in there, but it was not modeled in FSX.

After flying down into and back out of The Pocket, and resumed my northwest track and started looking for the last airport. The pocket runs north/south, so I should have just turned due west instead. I ended up almost missing the airport on the north side, but sorted things out, turned south and did one final touch-and-go. Barwick/Lafayette is 5350' long, 75' wide and at an elevation of 777' above sea-level.

My tour almost complete, I turned back due East and returned to Dalton. Total flight time ended up being one hour and twenty-five minutes, with five total landings.

Skyhawk Touch-and-Go

2011-09-02T16:44:00.001-07:00

Back in Dalton, I decided to switch planes again. I had called out to the Dalton Airport earlier in the week out of curiosity and found out that they use a Cessna 172 Skyhawk for training, which is not unusual since it's the most popular training aircraft in the world. Anyway, I hadn't flow the Skyhawk in a while (not since I purchased the larger more powerful Skylane), so I took the Microsoft "used trainer" version out for a few laps around the airport.

(click to enlarge)

On the ground, the plane was really tough to taxi around in. I kept over-correcting left and right and just zig-zagging around. Other planes don't seem to have that problem. Not sure if the Skyhawk is really that over-sensitive or just the FSX version.

In the air though, the plane handled nicely. I would take off with one notch of flaps, climb out a 75 knots or so until I hit 1000 feet (runway is a bit over 700 feet), then I'd retract the flaps and turn around, climbing to about 1500 feet and up to 80-100 knots. Then I'd level off, slow back down, extend one and then later two notches of flaps and trim out for about 75 knots for the landing approach.

Finally, about a mile down-range, I'd turn back around and reduce power to start descending to land. After landing, I'd retract back to one notch of flaps, power up and start the process all over again.

All three landings were good. None went long and all were pretty close to center, but none perfect (yet). The last one was tricky because my youngest son was literally climbing on my back while I was trying to land. I think it was the best though (see photo above).

Return to Dalton

2011-09-01T19:08:00.001-07:00

Long day today and long evening back home. Wife working late, me with the kids, school project due tomorrow. Yikes! By 9:30 though, everyone but me was in bed, so here I am flying again.

First observation, if you fly on August 31st, it's summer time and the trees are green. Fly on September 1st, and it's fall, so the trees are yellow, etc. No transition, just BAM!

On the way back home from Cherokee (and back in the Tomahawk), I decided to give that tower thing another pass. I'd really like to know what that sucker is:

(click to enlarge)

I mean, it's out there in the middle of nowhere, just this huge tower with some kind of crane like attachment. What is it for? I've searched around Google maps and have not found anything like that out in the woods in that area. Please add a comment if you have any ideas:

(click to enlarge)

Anyway, after the fly-by I climbed back to altitude and cruised back to Dalton for a nice landing. All of that practice seems to be paying off:
OK, so I'm still not landing right on the white center-line, but I'm getting closer!

Oh, by the way, I was checking my log book and realized that one of those practice landings back at Mathis was actually my 100th successful landing. Woo Hoo!

Goodbye Mathis!

2011-08-31T19:25:00.001-07:00

OK, just one more flight for the month. I did four more practice landings at Mathis Airfield using the Champ. I think I finally figured out the secret. Even when I skimmed low over the trees and then tried to drop down over the lake at the last minute, I ended up having a hard time getting the plane to land. When I'd pull back to flare, she'd just float over the runway, which isn't long enough for you to do much of that.

By my ninth total landing attempt at this airfield, I had figured out a few things. 1 - The Champ's altimeter is none too accurate, and not adjustable like the fancier ones on larger planes. I was assuming it was accurate, when it was reading a little high. 2 - The stall speed of the Champ is just under 40 knots (38, I think), and I've been trying to land at a comfortable 55-60 knots, but on a short field like this, I had to trim the plane out to land at 50 knots or less, which gives very little margin of error against stalls. When flaring, you'd hit right at 40 knots or so over the runway, which is dicey, but necessary. 3 - Rather than come in low and shallow, flying slower allowed me to come in steeper, with a higher rate of descent, which kept the floating to a minimum and helped me stick the plane to the runway.

Here's final shot of my last landing as I come in over the end of the runway, low and lined up correctly:

After that landing, I turned around, took back off and headed back to Cherokee County Airport to pick up my Tomahawk. Flight was uneventful (it's only 15-20 miles between airports), but as you may recall from an earlier post, there's an oddly large tree right at the end of the Cherokee runway, just to the right of center:

(click to enlarge for a better view)

I've been struggling with still photos to illustrate just how close I have to get to these trees some time, but I think I've found a way. In this photo you can see the large tree to my right and can see that the top of the tree if higher than I am. You can also see the four white landing lights to the left of the runway indicating I'm actually too high in my approach at this point. Any lower and I'd be looking up at the tree!
Here's a second view, same moment in time (replay paused), but from a directly overhead view:
Recall that the Champ's wingspan is only 35', so you can see that at this point, the tree is only about 20' from the nearest wing tip, and as I move forward, I'll pass within maybe 10' at my closest approach. They really need to cut that tree down!

Anyway, once clear of the tree, I shifted over to the right to line up with the runway. Here I am crossing the threshold not too high and centered up nicely (see shadow). I did not land perfectly on the center line, but I was not far off. Definitely better than in previous landings due to the practice I've had at Mathis.

Mathis Landing Practice

2011-08-31T16:15:00.000-07:00

Back home and back to Mathis Airfield for some serious landing practice. I took back off in the Champ towards the cliff, circled the airport and came back in for landing number one. Trees seemed scary close on approach, but I was probably no lower than on prior attempts. I overshot the start of the runway and touched down about a third of the way down, on the asphalt at least! I then powered back up for a touch-and-go, but perhaps that was not such a good idea. I was facing the tree filled end of the runway and even with the short take-off capabilities of the champ, I barely cleared the trees:

I'm actually starting to bank to the right just a bit in that image, hoping to get my left wing up above to the top of that tree. Anyway, the next attempt wasn't much better, but at least I did a full stop landing and stopped before the end of the runway.

The third and final attempt before I had to take a break was the best so far. I really was down in the trees on the approach:
Hard to tell from the pictures, but when you pause the replay and pan around you can tell how tight everything is. There's a tree to my left that is taller than my current wing level, and other trees that are right around and just barely under me. Too much lower, and I probably would hit something. At about the point shown or a little before, I killed all power and basically dove through a gap in the trees to try to lose another couple hundred feet over the water so I could grab the end of the runway (but without crashing into the cliff face):
This is probably as good as I could hope for. I've cleared the cliff, lined up on the runway, and I'm only 30' or so in the air at this point. I got the wheels down and braked to a stop at about the midpoint of the runway:
Hard to tell from this image, but the runway is narrower than my wing span, and only about twice the width of my main gear. The Mathis website says it's 35' wide, but that may be a recent improvement. The Champ has a 35' wingspan and the wings clearly extend off on either side over grass. I'd say the runway as simulated in FSX, is only about 20' wide. It feels like landing on a sidewalk!

Anyway, daddy duty calls, so that's probably all the flying I'll get in tonight. August has been a busy month. Looking forward to September.

Champ at Mathis

2011-08-31T05:21:00.001-07:00

Since I've worked late the last two nights, I decided to go in a bit late this morning so I could stay home (after the kids were off to school) and fly a little. I was irritated by my failed landing at Mathis, the little tiny airport that I tried to fly into with too much plane, so I switched to the Aeronca Champ and flew from Cherokee (where I had last landed), over to Mathis, about 15-20 miles to the south-east. Here I am flying the pattern downwind. Click to zoom and you'll see the cliff right at the end of the runway!

My first approach was too high, so trying to be more sensible than last time, I powered up and aborted that one. The next time I turned onto the base leg and final too soon and was off to the right and too close to adjust, so I flew the pattern one more time. On the third try I was lined back up correctly, so I headed in low and slow. To have any shot at all of making this landing, you have to be right at tree top level as you approach from the far side of the lake:
Here's another view of how low I was coming in. That tree on the left is higher than my wing and not far from me. I couldn't have gotten much lower than this without hitting something, but I still ended up too high! Next time, I'm going to need to clip the tops of the trees and then nose down and dive over the lake to lose about another 100' so I can actually touch down on this end of the runway:
Since I didn't know to do that, I overshot the end of the runway and ended up touching down at about it's midpoint. I was also fighting a cross-wind and trying to stay lined up on a runway that's narrower than my own wingspan! Recall that the whole runway is only 1800 feet, so by the time my left wheel touched down (see next photo), I only had about 900 feet left:When that wheel hit, I bounced up and over and ended up putting both wheels down in the grass. I got on the brakes pretty quick and tried to steer back on the runway, narrowly missing this sign as the taxiway comes in from my left:
I finally got her stopped just off the end of the runway, back in the grass:
In the previous flight, this is where I continued to roll until my little Tomahawk ran into those trees down the hill.

I think I'm going to stay here in Mathis with the Champ for a while and do some more landing practice. If I can land on this postage stamp of a runway reliably, then landing at larger airports like Dalton, where the runway is three times as long and three times as wide should be a piece of cake!

One More Time...

2011-08-28T17:32:00.000-07:00

Not wanting to end the day on a sour note, I started over in Dalton, but this time decided to fly to the Cherokee County Airport, which is a bit closer, and which is a larger airport. I did my research, or thought I did, determining that the runway was 75 feet wide x 5011 feet long, so just a bit shorter than Dalton, and at an elevation of 677 feet, a little lower than Dalton. I would take off, head south-east to Carter's Lake and continue south-east until I found the airport, about twice as far from Carter's Lake as Dalton. As I passed the lake, I noticed this odd feature. Looks like a river that ends in a culdesac with an island in the middle:

From looking at Google maps, I think it's actually a hairpin turn in the river but the river gets smaller at that point and FSX stops modeling it, so it just seems to end.

It took 6 minutes to get from Dalton to Carter's Lake, so another 12 minutes or so past that and I found Cherokee County. I circled the airport and determined two things. First, the airport was not at 677 feet, but at over 1000 feet, and second, the runway was at a different heading than I expected. Hmmmm? Anyway, the sun was going down so I flew the pattern and turned on final approach:
Another nice sunset shot. As I lined up on the runway, I noticed something else. There's a big bunch of rather tall trees right at the end of the runway! They are just off to the right of center though, so I lined up to the left of the runway and just slipped over after I had cleared the trees. (oh, and that's I-575 on the left):
Landing was pretty good, although I was a bit left of center. That was not due to any cross wind. In fact, if anything the cross wind should have pushed me to the right a bit. The problem was having to dodge around those trees. I'm pretty sure they are not like that at the real airport.
Anyway, after landing and recording the flight details, I went back to look at the Cherokee County Airport to see why I had my elevation and other information wrong. Turns out I was looking at Cherokee County Airport in Jacksonville, Texas! D'oh!

The Cherokee County Airport in Georgia is at 1219 feet elevation and the runway is only 3414 feet long. Long enough, but not as long as I thought. So as an addendum to the "do your homework" rule, make sure you do your homework correctly!

I'm hanging it up for the night now. I think tomorrow I may take the little Champ down to that Mathis airport though and see if I can land it on that little strip.

Trees Hurt!

2011-08-28T16:10:00.001-07:00

Should have quit while I was ahead, but after taking a break to take the boys for ice cream, I decided to fly down towards Atlanta and try to land at a little airport near where a friend of mine lives. It's Mathis Airfield, a little private airport in Cumming, or maybe it's in Suwanee.

Took off from Dalton OK, and managed to find the airport:

One end of the runway is right over a cliff above a small lake, and there are trees all around the place. Plus it's clearly a lot smaller than Dalton, so I should have (1) done more research before the flight, or (2) aborted and found a larger airport nearby.

Instead, I circled the airport once to get a feel for it, then attempted to land. On the first try, I came in too high and knew I couldn't get on the runway so I powered up and aborted that attempt. Should have learned something from that, but instead I circled for another try.

My second attempt seemed about right, coming in to the end of the runway, narrowly seemed to miss some trees on the approach, but then when I tried to flare to land I floated a bit and before I knew it I was half-way down the strip. I should have aborted again, but I was tired and ready to be done with the flight so I jammed the plane down on the runway and stomped on the brakes.

Landing at about 70 knots though, it takes a while to stop. Apparently it takes a little more room to stop than what I had as I went off the end of the runway, through the grass, down a little hill and into some trees! Ouch!

One thing that really irks me about FSX is that after a crash it just reloads the flight, back to where you started (in this case, Dalton). There's no opportunity to review the flight, do an instant replay of the landing (such as it was) or really learn anything from it.

Sure, I learned the generally lessons (plan ahead and know when to land somewhere else), but I'd like to have rerun the landing and crash to see just how bad it was (and to get some pictures).

(update - did some post-crash research. Mathis has a runway that's 1800 feet long by 35 feet wide. Dalton is 5,496 feet long (3 times the length) and 100 feet wide (total area of concrete is about 10 times as large!). Since I normally use a third to a half of the runway at Dalton, it's no wonder I couldn't stay on this one. Maybe if I touched down perfectly at the very start of the runway, but not otherwise. Lesson learned.)

More Touch & Go

2011-08-28T12:56:00.000-07:00

Beautiful day today. Back at the airport flying with real weather again. This time there was a 13 knot wind from 355 degrees. Runway is at 320 degrees, so direction of wind was 35 degrees off-center. Not a full cross wind, but still something to contend with. Plus the wind was stronger today than yesterday and with gusts up to 16 knots.

I flew seven pretty consistent patterns, with just a couple of wide turns on the base leg/final approach and had seven not bad landings (none on the grass) but none perfect. The picture above is of my fourth out of seven and probably the best. I'm just a bit to the right of center-line, but otherwise pretty good.

I had one short landing, on the runway but behind the white markers, four long ones, generally from flaring too soon and floating (killing instead of just slowing my rate of descent), and two that were right on the money, one a little right and one a little more left of center.

No grass on my wheels this time at least, but I still need to work on it.

Touch and Go in Dalton

2011-08-27T11:00:00.000-07:00

After a 40 mile bike ride this morning which wore me out more than expected, I decided to take a sit-down break and do some touch-and-go landing practice. That's basically where you take off, fly around the airport, land, but then go back to full throttle to take back off and do it all over again. I loaded up the Tomahawk at the Dalton Airport, current time (around noon) and real-world weather, which seemed nice out.

My first attempt was not so great. I had trouble lining up, and in fighting that I overshot the ideal touchdown point (see that big white area behind me), and still only got two wheels on the runway:

After landing, I eased back onto the runway, lined up on the center-line, and went back to full throttle. With this small plane, and Dalton's runway having been extended to handle small jets, I was back in the air before the mid-point of the runway.

Next time around was much better. I eased around for the final approach, nice smooth curve instead of sharper turns with corrections, and seemed to be on track for a perfect landing, but by the time my wheel's touched down, I was off to the left again. At least I landed on the threshold properly and had all three wheels on concrete, but I would like to have been on the line:
The third go-round was the worst of the bunch and really frustrating. I tried to do a smooth easy turn, but overshot and then over corrected and back and forth until I finally went long again and landed full in the grass:
Fourth time was a charm though. Not perfect (sill of to the left a bit), but nice and smooth, right on the threshold and all wheels on runway:
After reviewing the flight (images are captured in replay mode as it's hard to take external shots when you're trying to land), I figured out what was wrong. I have been flying mostly at night, but with the simulator set to daytime and "fair weather" which means no wind. Since this was a Saturday, and I could fly during the day, I used the current time and real weather (downloaded from the internet). That real weather included a 7 knot wind which was almost perpendicular to the runway. In other words, a mild cross wind.

I noticed that there was a 7 knot wind, but did not think to look at direction or account for that on my landing approach. I figured 7 knots is not very fast so not a problem. Had it been a stronger cross wind, I probably would have figured out the problem after the first landing attempt, but it was so subtle, I thought it was just something I was doing to not line up right, or perhaps I was not compensating for the Tomahawk's natural tendency to turn left a bit (due to the torque of the engine - propeller spins to the right).

Lesson learned - always listen to the weather radio and note the direction and speed of the wind before landing!

Mystery Crane

2011-08-25T19:03:00.001-07:00

Kids in bed, time to fly some more. Switched back to the Piper Tomahawk planning for a quick evening flight over to Fort Mountain and back. After flying over the mountain though, I turned south and saw a strange object in the distance.

After flying over and circling the thing, I'm still not sure what it is:

It's some kind of crane or something, but just out there in the woods off Highway 76 (between 411, south of Chatsworth, and Ellijay). This area is mostly wilderness, so maybe this is part of some kind of logging operation or something. Hard to say.

It's just north of Carter's Lake, so I finished the flight with a low run over the lake. As before, I felt like my tires were going to get wet, but after reviewing the flight data, I was never less than about 180' over the water. I did discover though that there are actually two lakes, one at about 1000' above sea level, and the other at about 750' or so, with a dam between them. I flew over the dam at about 1200' and then dove down to about 950' or so over the lower section, then climbed back up to about 1700' and turned back to the airport. Total flight time, 32 minutes.

(update: for some reason this picture, unlike my other recent uploads, got shrunk down so you can't click on it to see a larger view. But trust me, there's a weird crane thing down there out my window)

Darthe Maule

2011-08-25T15:27:00.000-07:00

Not much time to fly tonight, but I was double-checking my airplane inventory and noticed a plane that comes with FSX that I had not noticed before. It's a bush plane (designed for "rough" landing conditions, unpaved runways, etc.) called the Maule Orion. It looked interesting, so I gave it a try:

It's a high-wing tail-dragger, with lots of power (164 mph top speed), and lots of windows for good visibility.
Although as with all high-wing aircraft, visibility in the direction of a turn is blocked by the wing, which stinks when you're turning towards the airport on final approach.

I didn't care for this plane much, but maybe I should have studied it a bit more before just jumping in and taking her up for a flight. The controls seemed too sensitive or twitchy, and the landing was pretty dicey. On replay, it looks like I landed on the left front wheel first, then the tail-wheel, and then finally got the right front on the ground before rolling off the runway into the grass. Not pretty!

Tennessee River Gorge Run

2011-08-24T09:39:00.001-07:00

Took the Tomahawk out for its first extended flight last night and had a blast. I flew back up to Chattanooga, thinking of just another city sight-seeing trip, but got up there and decided to do something a little different.

Just west of the city, and down river a bit, is the Tennessee River Gorge, sometimes called the Grand Canyon of the South (although I must say, it's far less Grand than the one they have out West). I've been through the gorge on a boat though, and it is fairly impressive, by local standards.

I descended to about 1000' above sea-level and lined up with the river at Moccasin Bend. Click on the image below for a larger version. I started where the arrow points in the lower-right corner and headed down river. The start of the canyons is labeled as is Nickajack Lake, where I ended my run:

For most of the run, I held my altitude at about 800', thinking the river was around 700-750', when it's actually more like 650' up near Chattanooga and closer to 600' by the time you get to the lake. As I mentioned in my previous post though, it SEEMS like you're a lot closer to the water than you are. Here's a view from the cockpit in one of the bends of the river:
A bit further down I realized why you might not want to fly this route in real life. You can see a power line tower on the left bank. There's another on the right, but the wires are not modeled in FSX, so I did not hit them:
This was an evening flight, so the sun started to set towards the end and FSX does have some nice sunset (lens flare) effects. In this image I'm turning into a sharp turn in the river, towards the sunset:

Further down, the river opened out on Nickajack Lake. I-24 crosses the lake and I've driven that many times going to visit my sister in Huntsville. You can also see a road going up the mountain on the left side of this image. I rode my bike up that climb as part of the 3-State/3-Mountain Challenge, a 100 mile bike ride that starts and ends in Chattanooga and climbs three mountains in three states (Suck Creek Mountain, TN, Sand Mountain, AL, and Lookout Mountain, GA). The road shown here was a good climb, but not one of the three mountains, more of a bonus I guess:

After leaving the lake, I climbed to 4000' and headed back to Dalton. On the way I passed the Raccoon Mountain Reservoir on my left. It's an artificial lake on top of Raccoon Mountain that supplies Chattanooga with water. They pump water out of the river up the hill to keep it full. You can also see part of the gorge run that I had just come through in this image:
The flight back to Dalton was uneventful, although it started to get dark to the point I could make out some stars and I also started seeing other airplanes' running lights off in the distance. I circled the airport and made one of my best landings of all time.

This Piper Tomahawk is a fun plane to fly. The FSX model is not as visually appealing as some other planes I've bought, as it seems to have been a Flight Simulator 9 plane that was just tweaked or updated a bit to work in FSX. The Skylane is better looking, but I sure like flying this Tomahawk!

Flight of the Tomahawk

2011-08-23T16:20:00.000-07:00

Picked up a new plane for the simulator. It's a little two-seat (side-by-side) trainer, the Piper PA-38 Tomahawk. It's smaller and simpler than the Cessna, but more advanced that the Champ - a good in-between plane to train on and a low-wing to boot:

The low wing is great for visibility in a turn, but not so great for sight-seeing, or trying to look down in level flight to navigate visually. The plane handled pretty well in the two short flights I've made around the airport.

I'm still having some computer issues though. No control resets this time, but I installed a sound card (Sound Blaster Audigy SE) to replace the on-board sound that came with the motherboard. That solved the poppling and crackling issue, but the sound coming out of the card seems to have an echo or something going on and is distorted. I've tried some fixes, but without success. I've since e-mailed Creative Labs tech support for help, waiting for a reply.

Lake Ocoee

2011-08-21T11:42:00.001-07:00

Another great day for flying. I spent Friday afternoon with some friends up at Lake Ocoee and then took the wife and youngest two kids up Saturday afternoon. I've got a friend whose family owns a little cabin on the lake with a dock, pontoon boat and Jetski. Having spent two days enjoying the lake in real life, I thought I'd fly over it in FSX to see it from the air.

I chose the Aeronca Champ as it's a good low-and-slow plane for this sort of sight-seeing, and because the Lake is not that far from Dalton, so the Champ's slow cruising speed (about 70 knots) wouldn't be too much of a problem. Here's my cockpit view approaching the south end of the lake:

The large mountain on the other side of the lake is Chilhowee. I use to do a good bit of mountain biking up there back in the day. My first flyover of the lake was rather high, probably 200-250' over the water. I flew up the section you see above, turned right at the mountain, and flew east along that part of the lake, then climbed out and banked hard around for another pass:
During the second fly-over, I got down lower. I'm probably about 100' off the water in this picture:
It's really hard to judge distances visually though in a flight simulator. The extra screens I've added help, and higher resolution would help more, but it's just not "real" enough so everything seems closer than it is. I would have guessed I was about 50' off the water during the flight. I didn't check on-line to get the lake's altitude (about 840' above sea level) until after the flight, so at the time I just knew my altitude above sea level and had to guess at the Lake's.

After the second fly-over, I crossed over the dam itself, which is not modeled in FSX. In the image below, the straight line section of the lake right under my wheels is the dam, but as you can see, there's not even a river coming out on this side:

My friends cabin was just around the corner to the right of the dam (left side of the airplane). We swam within sight of the dam on Friday and Saturday.

Sightseeing over, I climbed back up to about 2500' and headed south-south-west back to Dalton. My approach and initial landing were pretty good:
But then I had another one of those control reset issues. I had set the toe brakes on the rudder pedals to work as brakes, but they occasionally want to reset to their default control, which is to control the ailerons for some reason. After touch-down, I hit the left toe brake a bit trying to straighten out on the runway and accidentally banked the plane left, lifting the right wheel back off the ground:
You'd have to click on this picture to get a better view of it, but the wheel is definitely off the ground. Doesn't look too dramatic from here, but it caused me to veer left pretty hard after I got her level again and I ended up half on the grass before the landing was over.

I've really got to devote some research time to figuring out that glitch and fixing it - before it gets me virtually killed!

Sight Seeing over Chattanooga

2011-08-20T08:47:00.000-07:00

Ah, Saturday morning and nothing to do but fly (got the yard work done through the week!). After my "crash" last time, I decided to try the Chattanooga flight again but not switch out of the cockpit view. I've not solved the problem, but switching views seems to trigger the error. Here's my (wide screen) view out the cockpit approaching the Tennesse River, about where my last flight ended:

Before turning the south and following the river into town, I glanced to the north to check out the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant:

If you zoom in on this image you can see it out my passenger side window. You can also look at the instruments and see I'm flying at about 2900 feet (about 2000 feet above ground-level).

Heading south we come to the end of the lake and the dam. Again, you have to zoom in to see it, but there's boat traffic on the lake and cars moving across the top of the dam and the highway on either side:

Passing the dam, I discovered a little glitch in the program. In this image you can see that the elevation change between the lake and the river below the dam does not line up with the dam itself, but occurs a little down stream:

As usual. you may have to zoom in on the image to make that out. Also, you should be able to see Watts Bar up-river.

A bit further down, I took this picture of the three bridges in downtown Chattanooga. The one to the left crosses over a little island, that's actually a bird sanctuary (but seems to have houses on it in FSX). The middle bridge is the Walnut Street Bridge, build in 1890 and the now (allegedly) the world's longest pedestrian bridge. The Chattanooga Aquarium should be between the middle and right bridges, but there's no sign of it in FSX (and this is with scenery maxed out, so it's just not there):

Just a bit further down, I took this shot of me over Moccasin Bend, a hairpin turn in the Tennessee River just south of downtown. Lookout Mountain is straight ahead, but after flying over I saw no signs of the Incline Railway, Rock City, or any other local landmarks.

Final shot of the trip shows I-24 snaking up over Missionary Ridge. The roads and mountains at least are modeled accurately. From here I followed I-24 back to I-75 and then I-75 south back to Dalton.

There was some heavy fog at the start of the flight (using real-world weather), but that obviously cleared up by the time I started taking photos. Otherwise, the only problem I had was that some of the controls seemed to reset and start doing other functions during the flight. Particularly, I had mapped the eyepoint movement commands (basically what moves your virtual head around the cockpit) to the buttons on the yoke, but mid-flight when I tried to raise my view higher to see over the "hood", I found the button no longer worked but rather caused a pop-up dialog to appear to adjust some setting or another. I tried using the same command straight from the keyboard and got the same result, so it's not a yoke programming issue, it's that the keystroke got reassigned within FSX during the flight. Not sure how that's possible, but I'll look into it. At least FSX didn't freeze up on me before I could get back on the ground!

Fatal Error!

2011-08-17T09:41:00.000-07:00

Not mine, fortunately. But frustrating. I was making my first real venture outside of Dalton airspace, just a quick hop up to Chattanooga:

(with the new setup, screen captures are REALLY wide - downtown Chattanooga is off to the left as I'm approaching the Tennessee River)

Anyway, as I made my turn to follow the river south, I switched to an overhead view to get a better idea of where I was and FSX froze up, then Windows 7 gave me this Fatal Error message and the option to restart FSX.

That's never happened before, so I have to assume it's some issue with the new monitor setup and Eyefinity. Needs research and a fix because that really stinks!

Control Issues

2011-08-16T18:40:00.001-07:00

Couple of not so quick flights tonight, working on two issues. First was getting my controls set correctly. I finally got the toe brakes (on the rudder pedals) to work as they should, but I'm having other issues. I keep making changes to the button assignments on the yoke, but then one or two buttons will not behave as expected in game. Right now it's the elevator trim buttons which want to move my eyepoint position around instead.

I've also been using the actual pre-flight and take-off checklist for the Cessna 182 and rather than just loading with the plane on the runway ready to go, I'm trying to actually go through the proper steps to start the engine, check the gauges, etc. It's boring, but I'd like to learn that part of it. It would be a lot easier, and more interesting, in a real cockpit though. The FSX virtual cockpit has some clickable controls, but it's still not like being there, and some stuff you almost have to use keyboard commands to do, so that takes something away from the process as well.

Still just doing take-offs and landings here in Dalton; still enjoying the super-wide-screen view. Maybe soon I'll actually try to fly somewhere!

Video Upload Attempt #1

2011-08-10T18:18:00.000-07:00

OK, so here goes nothing. This is just a raw video file from an iPhone, no editing or anything, and since the upload limit (and my internet speed) keep me from sending anything long, this is just the final 30 seconds of a landing - nothing fancy. Also, with only me in the room, I had to stand back for a good view, and so I could not change the view from cockpit, to exterior, etc. But this still gives you an idea:

I probably should have cleaned up my desk a bit first. What a mess! Next time it will be neater, I promise!

Back after another long absence...

2011-08-10T18:03:00.000-07:00

Just started flying again this month and I've now installed a significant upgrade to my system. When I built this new computer earlier this year I used a Radeon 6850 video card which supports "Eyefinity" a system that lets you run multiple monitors like they are one big monitor. See below:

Originally I just bought the one screen in the middle due to budget constraints, but now I've added two identical screens to the setup. I also had to buy a Display Port to DVI adapter to run one of those screens (they don't tell you that when they sell you the video card), and had to tweak FSX a bit, including a change to one of the .CFG files that had to be done manually.

But it works! As you can see from the still image, I'm landing with the normal forward view, but now with peripheral vision as well. It's amazing how much better the experience is and how much easier it is to land when you can more accurately judge your speed, altitude, etc. due to the added visibility.

The still image does not do this justice though. I've made a short video that I'm going to attempt to upload in the next post. We'll see how this works...

Santa's Airport

2011-03-16T16:05:00.000-07:00

Three nights in a row is really pushing it, but I bribed one of the older kids to watch the younger kids so here I am. Interestingly, I was doing some research on Post Mills airport, where I've been flying and found this link: http://www.flypmsc.org/Airport.htm The photo at the top of the page is of some Aeronca's like the one I'm flying.

Anyway, I decided to leave and head south to Massachusetts. The Champ only flies about 75 miles per hour, so I couldn't go far but I felt like I could make it across the border. Also, the Champ has no navigation equipment (or radios, or anything really). So I set the weather to nice and planned to follow the highway and river I'd seen yesterday, which turned out to be I-91 and the Connecticut River, which is the border between Vermont and New Hampshire. I also decided to try some low flying to try to get some pictures of those cars on the highway:

You still can't really see them, although I'm down to maybe 250 feet at this point. Still safely above the trees, although it sure didn't feel very safe. I've uploaded the full sized image, so maybe you can click on it and zoom it in where you can see the cars. I'll have to try a highway overflight somewhere with no trees next time so I can get lower.

Anyway, further south I flew past Mt. Ascutney, Vermont. It's interesting because it's just this one peak, not part of a range or anything. The base is at about 550 feet above sea level, but the peak is at almost 3000 feet. Most of my flight was in the 1500-2000 feet range, so I flew low over the eastern slope of the mountain.

Further south I slowly went, noticing that some of those cars on the highway were actually passing me! I was looking for a point where the river and highway would diverge, as that would indicate I was getting close to my destination. But much to my surprise, the Connecticut River in FSX just stops:

I circled around to make sure it was not an illusion, but there it is - end of the river. I was about an hour into the flight, running out of time, and freaked out by this development so when I noticed a little grass airport nearby, I decided to go ahead and land.

I did an OK job, although the Champ just doesn't seem to want to lose altitude. That's a good thing, I guess, but for this landing it meant that I floated over half the runway before finally getting some tires on the ground and then rolled off the end a bit before I got the plane stopped.

The airport turned out to be "Santa's Airport", still in Vermont. It's a private airport, and you're supposed to get prior permission to land there, but I guess that doesn't matter in a simulator.

Flight of the Champ

2011-03-15T16:58:00.000-07:00

Two days in a row I found time to fly! Today being 10% off Tuesday at PC Aviator, and there being an interesting plane in the 50% off weekly sale special, I dropped a cool $6 and change on an Aeronca Champ:

The Champ is a small two-seater like the Cub I flew yesterday with similar (slow) performance, but easy to fly and as I've learned, with better visibility. I went back to the same airport as yesterday, Post Mills in Vermont, but with the Champ instead of the Cub.

Like the Cub, the Champ is much simpler to fly than the Skylane or other planes I've used. Very few controls, almost like flying pre-WWII. The cockpit on this version, made by CR1 Software, is very detailed, right down to the plywood floorboard!

Taking off was a snap compared to yesterday. I don't know if the Champ is just more stable, has less torque, or if I was just prepared for it this time, but I was able to climb straight out without the hard bank to the left I experienced with the Cub.

I explored further today than yesterday, crossing a little ridge and checking out another lake, a river, and a highway. You can't see it in this image, or in the out-the-window shot I also took, but there are cars moving on the highway below as a result of my higher detail settings now that I have a better computer.

After a few minutes, I turned back to the original lake and the airfield. I made my first approach attempt, but like yesterday I think I started too high and with too steep a descent. When I tried to slow it down towards the end, I just floated over half the runway before realizing I no longer had room to land. I radioed in an abort, went back to full throttle, and climbed back above the trees and hills to circle around for another try.

This time I started lower and slower with a shallower approach and got my speed down to about 40 mph on idle throttle at the runway threshold. Landing was very nice with no bounce at all and I even got the main gear down before the tail wheel (from a post flight replay review):

I'm starting to get the feel back and I'm happy with this purchase. Hard to beat a new plane for $6-7 and this one comes in several varieties, including a float plane and one on skis for landing in the snow!

Starting Over

2011-03-14T17:50:00.000-07:00

Found a little more time to fly. During one of the PC Aviator weekly sales, I picked up Mega Scenery X - Southern California, which comes on 4 DVD's. I installed that and tried it out. This is me over Whittier, where I lived from about 1979 to 1984:

The main thing demonstrated by this flight, was that I really need to get back to basics. I managed to take off from one airport, fly over Whittier, and land at another airport, and even remembered how to use the radio, but otherwise I did not do so well.

A while back I purchased a book called Flight Simulator X for Real World Pilots. The book is designed for real pilots looking to use FSX for extra training, or Sim Pilots like myself who just want a more real-world experience in their simulations. I dug that book back out, downloaded the missions and such that go with it and started on the first one, a short flight in a Piper Cub at Post Mills Airport in Vermont. Here I am in the cub before takeoff:

I started up and taxied to the proper takeoff position at the other end of the runway (not easy to do in a trail dragger where your view out the front is just sky).

I then throttled up and after a few seconds, pushed forward on the yoke to lift the tail (nearly nosing down into the ground in the process), but then I was airborne and banking hard to the left for some reason. I have the realism set back to where it was before, but I should probably go back to easy mode for a while. The torque of the engine and other factors cause the plane to turn left unless you counter that with control inputs, and I'm pretty rusty at that.

Anyway, I got things under control without hitting the mountains and started a more leisurely spin around Lake Fairlee to my left.

The Cub is a simpler plane than my Skylane; basic controls, no flaps, and much slower. For this flight I kept it trimmed at about 60 knots, which is about stall speed on the Cessna.

After getting my bearings, I continued to turn back towards the field to land.

It's a grass runway, so not so easy to tell where the actual runway is compared to the grass on either side, but I figured it out, powered down and descended nicely although ended up a bit high at the threshold. I flared out but touched down a little rough and bounced back in the air. Not being used to a tail dragger on landing also had an effect.

You can't tell from a still image, but I've actually touched down here and bounced back into the air. I'll have to work on that.

Once down for good though I was able to slow down, stop, and kill the engine - successful flight and landing! I'm going to try this flight a couple more times, tour around the area some more and get used to how the Cub handles before I go to the next training mission.

Back in the Cockpit Again

2011-02-28T16:27:00.000-08:00

It's been 13 months, almost to the day, since my crash in Texas. After that flight, I took a break from FSX but did not intend for the break to last this long. I just moved on to other things and got busy with family and didn't have time to fly.

Recently I built myself a new computer so I don't have to use the old laptop, which was a dual-core 1.something GHz processor, basic video, 15" screen, etc. (not so great for FSX anyway, but it worked). The new computer is (for the geeks out there), an i5-2500K 3.2 GHz quad core processor on an Asus P8P67 Deluxe Motherboard and a Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 video card driving a 22" monitor. Now that's what I'm talkin' about!

Anyway, all I did tonight was to install my Skylane, which is an add-on plane, and take her for a spin around the Dalton airport. I kept things simple and even kept the settings on Easy as I've not had time to refresh myself on all the details I used to just know. I did manage to get her off the ground, circle the airport and land reasonably well. Of course, on easy mode there's no crash detection, but it felt like a landing that would have been OK anyway.

I've got some other add-ons to install, some from before which just need to be installed on the new computer, and some recent purchased from www.pcaviator.com as those guys have been e-mailing me almost daily with 50% off specials on this and that. Once I get everything installed, I've also picked up Ultimate Defrag (also from PC Aviator), which not only defrags the hard drive but also puts all the FSX files on the outer tracks for faster access and load times.

Then I'm going to have to pretty much start over and remind myself how to fly again. It's amazing how much detail I've forgotten about trim, navigations, using the radios, etc. Later, funds permitting, I'm going to buy two more of these monitors and run them in EyeFinity mode (which treats them as one really wide screen), so I'll have peripheral vision while flying. The new video card should handle that nicely, but I guess I'll see how complicated it is when I get to that point.

Which me luck as I renew this hobby...

Flight of the Cursed!

2010-01-26T19:03:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I indicated that I planned to fly on to Galveston or Houston on Sunday, but Sunday evening was spent watching football, so that just didn't work out. I decided to fly tonight though and decided to go to Houston. In hindsight, I should have just gone to bed (read on).

The flight started OK with an evening departure from Lake Charles:

My flight plan was pretty simple, just head west to a VOR station about 80 miles to the east, and then turn SSW to a VOR station within a half mile of Ellington Field, a very old (WWI era) airport that serves military, commercial and general aviation traffic. It's located at 29 36'26.00"N, 95 09'32.00"W in Google Earth.

En route, it got darker and I started looking for constellations. It may be hard to see in this dark image, but I believe that's supposed to be the Milky Way coming up from the horizon below me (and extending above, but very hard to see):
Other than the takeoff and stargazing, everything else about this flight went wrong. First of all, I never could get a signal on the second VOR. I double checked the frequency and everything and even checked on-line later. I think it may be an FSX bug, but I'm not 100% sure of that. Needless to say, that complicated my navigation, which needed to be pretty accurate on a night flight into an airport that's very close to another airport (Houston Hobby) and with a similar runway layout.

As I got closer I spotted an airport about where Ellington should be, could not see another airport nearby, and so I requested clearance to land, got it, and started my approach. On final, I decided that the runways didn't look right, paused the sim, went to an exterior view, and realized I was about to land at Hobby. Oops, that's not going to look good:

The above image is me on final into Hobby (in error). As soon as I sorted things out I gunned the engine, aborted the landing, climbed up a few hundred feet and headed east. The correct airport is just a few miles south-east of Hobby.

Shaken by all of the problems, I got lined up and began my final into Ellington. Even it didn't look right, but I called the tower and got directions to the airport and confirmed that I was heading for the right one. With my confidence level falling, I gradually added full flaps and decided to make a really slow and careful landing. That didn't work out so well either as I got too slow right over the runway threshold, stalled the wings and dropped a good twenty feet onto the tarmac, breaking the nose gear and ending an already problematic flight with a bang:
Ugh! Sometimes everything that can go wrong does. I suppose I'll learn something from this, but right now I think I'll have a beer!

UPDATE - After a nice cold beer and a good night's sleep to reflect on this disaster, I came to the following conclusions: Error number one was trying to "squeeze in a quick flight", when I really didn't have time for it. That led to error two, inadequate planning. I should have had a better backup plan to find the airport in the event of navigational problems. I should have drawn a diagram of the two airports and major roads, rivers, etc. nearby to help identify the correct airport when I got to Houston. A related mistake which I failed to mention in last night's post was that when I loaded the simulator, I neglected to check my controls and therefore failed to notice that the throttle was full forward. Either I had left it that way or my youngest son had been playing with the controls again. As a result, when the simulator finished loading, and while I was up turning off lights, the plane immediately started to taxi and actually drove off into a field near the airport before I could stop it. I also forgot to close the cowl flaps which help cool the engine during takeoff and climb-out, leaving them open for a good thirty minutes after they should have been closed. Both of those mistakes would have been avoided if I had and used a checklist for each phase of flight.

When I got to Houston, error number three was just assuming that the first airport I saw was the correct airport. Sure, it appeared to be in the right position and from a distance, seemed to have the right layout, but I knew there were two airports close together so I should have made sure, even if that meant circling the area until I spotted both airports before requesting clearance to land.

Finally, error number four was allowing the series of mistakes already made to alter my landing procedures and attempting to land in an unfamiliar configuration, somehow thinking that would be safer. Flying with full flaps is like flying with a parachute hanging off your tail. It's hard to maintain your minimum stall speed without a little throttle to pull you through the air. I was used to landing with less flap and with the throttle on idle, so the combination of full flaps and idle throttle and not watching my airspeed close enough led to the stall and crash.

Before my next flight I'm going to obtain and/or make a set of checklists for pre-flight, cruising, pre-landing, etc. and actually use them. I'm going to spend as much time as I need to plan my flights, even if I run out of time to fly and have to put that off to the next day, I'm not going to be in such a rush to land that I don't take the time to verify the airport and runway and I'm not going to change my procedures or my plan mid-flight without completely thinking it through, even if that means circling the airport a few times before committing to the landing.

Lessons learned. January 27, 2010.

Houma to Lake Charles

2010-01-23T18:06:00.000-08:00

After a full week of being too busy to fly I got back in the air today. It wasn't easy though. I worked out a flight plan from Houma to Galviston, Texas, but when I loaded up the sim with real-world weather and requested permission to taxi to the runway for takeoff, the tower denied the request!

That's not happened before, but the clouds were down to 600 feet, visibility was less than 2 miles, and IFR (instrument flight rules) were in effect. I'm not instrument rated and did not file an IFR flight plan, so I was grounded. Fortunately in the sim you can just click the weather option on the menu and change the weather to whatever you want. After exercising that god-like power, I was granted clearance and took off. Here I am climbing out over the city of Houma, Louisiana. You can just barely see the airport behind me to my right (left side of image):

I got lined up on my VOR's and headed west with the Gulf of Mexico off to my left. After a while, I looked over and noticed an oil rig off in the distance. I had looked for those on my last flight without finding one, so I had to check it out:
In the image above, I'm about 500 feet over the water, about to buzz the rig. My actual flyby (see below), probably dipped to about 300 feet and pretty close to the rig itself. Pretty neat:
Here's another shot, exterior view, of my flyby. Notice my shadow on the water:Anyway, that detour cost me a good half-hour, so before I could even get to the Texas border my allotted flying time for the day was running out and I was getting tired. I did notice one more oil rig off the coast about that time, but decided not to go any further for the day but to divert to Lake Charles Regional airport which is in western Louisiana. The airport was about 25 miles north of my flight path, so it only took me 10-15 minutes to get there and land:
The landing itself was pretty good, although right at the end I floated a bit (stopped descending while only 10-20 feet off the ground), and when I started dropping again my descent rate got a little faster than I'd prefer. No damage to the airplane, but not my smoothest touch-down.

Tomorrow I'm going to either continue to Galveston, or maybe just go straight to Houston from here. Either way it's about an hour flight.

Houma-Terrebonne

2010-01-15T23:36:00.000-08:00

Today's flight was another for mostly sight-seeing. I took off from Louis Armstrong and flew back over New Orleans. You can see most of the city, including down-town and Lake Pontchartrain in the background:

About this time I had to pause the flight for a while. When I picked back up my father-in-law, who used to have a pilot's license, was visiting so he watched me fly for a while. We followed the Mississippi River south towards the gulf. Shortly before its end, we turned to the right and headed along the coastline, first over Grande Isle, Louisiana:
Part of my reason for flying down to the gulf was to see if FSX modeled the many off-shore oil rigs in this area. Either it doesn't, or they don't show up with my display settings. Yet another FSX scenery disappointment.

There's also not much else to see down here, mostly rivers and swamps, classic bayou country:
After a while I turned northwest, planning to head up to Baton Rouge. My father-in-law needed to leave though, so I decided to land early so he could see that part of the flight. I started looking around and spotted a mid-sized airport ahead and off to the right a bit. Using the air traffic control function, I identified it as Houma-Terrebonne. Houma is the town just to the north and is the largest town in the Terrebonne Parrish.

When I requested clearance too land, I was several miles to the south of the airport and cruising at 5,000 feet. I had to line-up and loose a bunch of altitude pretty quick. I ended up trying a maneuver I had recently learned from a book, Microsoft Flight Simulator X for Real World Pilots. It's a good book for learning how to fly, whether just in FSX, or in real life, using FSX for additional practice and training.

The maneuver is called a slip, and is performed by banking the wings in one direction and then using the rudder in the other direction to compensate and keep from turning. As you bank, the wings lift is partly diverted in the direction of the bank to make you turn. The rudder then cancels the turn so the net effect is to keep flying straight, but with less lift from the wings. You thereby increase your rate of descent but without gaining airspeed the way you would if you just pointed the nose at the ground and kept your wings level.

Anyway, the trick worked like a charm. I got my altitude bled off while simultaneously reducing air speed and made a text-book landing:
Good landings are always fun, but are especially sweet when your father-in-law, who used to be a pilot, happens to be watching.

Anyway, not sure if I'm going to fly from here up to Baton Rouge or not. Maybe I'll just leave from here and head straight to Texas, maybe Galveston to keep me near the coast. There's a bunch of oil rigs along that route (in the real world), so maybe I'll give FSX another chance to show me one. I may even crank up the display settings to improve my odds.

New Orleans Flyover

2010-01-11T17:37:00.000-08:00

Not much time for flying tonight but I decided to cross Lake Pontchartrain and check out New Orleans, then land at Louis Armstrong International Airport. I loaded up back in Slidel where I found it overcast and raining. From the ground it didn't look too bad, but once airborne it was obvious that visibility was going to be an issue. Here I am along the northern coast of the lake unable to see much of anything:

I flew west along the coast until I found the causeway that bisects the lake running north to south. At almost 24 miles, Lake Pontchartrain Causeway is the longest bridge over water anywhere in the world. There's a bridge in Bangkok that's longer, about 33 miles, but is mostly just an elevated roadway, with only part of its span being over water. Here I am following the causeway south across the lake. The weather seems to be clearing up a bit:

Once across the lake the skies turned blue with just a few clouds, so I climbed a little higher and turned back east towards the city. Here I am approaching downtown with the Super Dome at the right edge of the picture and the Mississippi river in the background:
Just past down-town I banked towards the north to check out the French Quarter. Just below me, the bullseye shaped park is Jackson Square, also known as Place de'Armes. You can find it and get more info in Google Earth at 29 57'26.89"N, 90 03'46.61"W:
After flying around a bit more and checking out the sights I turned back west towards the airport. I've been through New Orleans before in real life, but never really visited, so I wasn't really sure what to look for other than just anything interesting visible from the air.

The tower at Louis Armstrong International gave me clearance for a straight in approach so no landing pattern to fly. Had a little trouble staying lined up on the runway but otherwise a good landing. I'll use this as my starting point for my next flight, probably down to the Mississippi River delta and out over the gulf looking for oil rigs and such, then Maybe up to Baton Rouge before leaving MegaScenery Louisiana behind and heading to Texas.

Slidel on Autopilot

2010-01-10T14:49:00.000-08:00

Took off from Meridian (Key Field) this afternoon with blue skies all around. As with the landing, I took off to the north and then had to turn around to head back south. In this shot, you can see the airport behind me and I-58 directly below. I pretty much followed the Interstate on my way to Slidel, Louisiana, but was also navigating by VOR.

Once airborne, I started messing around with the autopilot. Even on a small plane like this, the autopilot has a lot of features, but for this flight I just focused on one, the Heading Select function. With the autopilot engaged and the Heading Select button pushed in, the plane will steer towards a selected heading. Basically, on the heading indicator (compass which shows you which direction your nose is pointed), there's a little knob that you can twist to spin a heading marker around through all 360 degrees. Where-ever you set that marker, the autopilot will turn to that heading. Once on course, you can make adjustments just by turning the knob and changing the desired heading a degree or two left or right and the plane automatically adjusts to the new heading. Then, all you have to do is maintain altitude and airspeed and let the plane steer itself. Pretty awesome!

My direct flight plan would have kept me mostly in Mississippi, only entering Louisiana right at the tip of the toe, just above Slidel, but I've got MegaScenery for that part of the State and spotted the transition between that and regular scenery as I was flying. I naturally had to change course and check it out. A quick twist of the heading select knob and my plane steered westward:

As you may recall from Florida, the transition from regular boring monotonous scenery to photo-realistic MegaScenery is pretty dramatic.

Right at that corner of Louisiana, there's a river that snakes in from Mississippi. I think it's the Pearl River, but oddly enough, Google Earth doesn't label rivers, so it really takes more research than you'd think to try to identify one.

Anyway, I noticed this odd feature in a bend of the river and took a picture so I could get more info later. It's located at 34 51'57.49N, 98 46'35.47W in Google Earth. There's no info there, but looking up and down river at similar features that were named I deduced that this is an old bend in the river that got by-passed when the main channel jumped its banks and took a short-cut around it. There are a number of little horseshoe lakes like this up and down the river for the same reason.
Further south, I located the Slidel Airport (lower left), with Lake Pontchartrain in the background. The weather was still nice, but I was going to have a bit of a cross-wind on the landing. The runway orients north-south, so from this point I need to fly downwind to the west of the airport and then turn back north to land.
Here I am on final approach. With the new rudder pedals I can actually point my nose into the wind and fly at an angle. It's hard to tell in a still image, but the plane is actually moving straight towards the runway, even though the nose is pointed to the left, towards the hangers.

Landing was great and after my taxi to the parking area I discovered a hidden feature of the Corenado Skylane. If you turn the engine off, turn the batteries off, and put the parking brake on, the airplane graphic changes to include wheel chocks and a pitot tube cover (the little red flag handing under the wing). Pretty neat.

Hunstville to Meridian

2010-01-09T17:21:00.000-08:00

Another day mostly snowed in here in Dalton. Actually the roads are pretty clear, but in Georgia if there's one flake of snow on the ground, you have to sit at home and do nothing. I think it's a state law or something.

Anyway, decided to do some flying this afternoon. I started back at Madison Executive, where I had made my snowy landing yesterday. When the simulator loaded up, I had beautiful blue skies and now sign of snow. I don't think FSX draws snow on the ground unless it's currently snowing, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, I listened in on the weather broadcast at the airport, selected a runway for takeoff, and started my taxi. Oddly though, by the time I got out to the runway the weather had taken a dramatic turn for the worst. Instead of blue skies, it had started snowing, and the wind direction had changed almost 180 degrees. I was forced to change my takeoff runway designation and taxi down to take off from the other direction based on the new wind direction.

You can see there's now snow on the ground and falling from the sky, although the sky itself still shows a lot of blue oddly enough.

Takeoff was uneventful. Due to the wind, I took off heading north and then had to bank around to the southwest to pick up the VOR station I would be using to start my navigation.

Once I had flown over the station and picked up my radian heading south and a bit west, I started trying to tune in the VOR in Birmingham for the next leg of the flight. It's only about 70 nautical miles to the south, so I picked it up pretty quickly.

Here's another FSX oddity. As I left the snowstorm behind, I looked back at Huntsville and notice that the snowfall seemed to be confined to a rectangular area around the city. In this image, you can see the southwest corner of the snowy rectangle covering Huntsville.

I continued south and then southwest, picking up VOR stations along the way. I used a total of four to reach Meridian, although there was a fifth on my flight plan that I never could get tuned in for some reason. I even double checked and made sure I had written the frequency down correctly.

By the time I got to Meridian, just across the border in Mississippi, the skies were clear blue and the weather was great. I flew most of the trip at about 10,000 feet to try to stay above the clouds, but about 40 miles out I dropped down to 4500 feet and then down to about 2,000 feet as I approached the airport.

Here I am entering the landing pattern at Key Field (Meridian Airport). That's I-59 between me and the airport and snaking off to the south. The active runway is the one heading opposite my direction so I had to fly downwind, turn around, and come back north to land.

My landing pattern was flawless and my landing was pretty good. No stall alarms or other major problems, just a nice steady descent to the runway.

I did catch a bit of crosswind right before touchdown which made the wings wobble a bit, but I got her straightened out and touchdown just fine.

This was about a 200 nautical mile trip, so almost two hours of flight time. The Skylane handled like a dream, so I'm glad I switched back to it for the time being. I'll obviously need to work my way up to more difficulty and demanding aircraft in the future, but I don't think I'm there yet.

Snowing in Huntsville

2010-01-08T11:22:00.001-08:00

At least according to Microsoft Flight Simulator it is. I decided to give up on the Mooney Bravo, switch back to the Skylane, and go ahead and start my long journey westward. First stop - Huntsville, Alabama.

Taking off from Dalton the weather looks great (better than it does looking out my window at least). No sign of any snow on the ground but we probably got less than an inch last night, so no big deal. In the picture above, you can see I-75 as it zig-zags through the gap in the ridge-line at Rocky Face.

As I crossed the larger mountains between Georgia and Alabama though it got cloudier and cloudier. My flight planned called for a 6,500 feet cruise altitude to clear all mountains comfortably, but that put me right in the clouds. Rather than climb (given that I was nearing my destination), I decided that once I was over the worst of the mountains, I'd dropped down to about 5,000 feet and try to get below the clouds. As I did, I found that it was snowing down there.

Yikes! This was a VFR flight plan (visual flight rules), which requires better visibility than this. I don't even know how to fly IFR (instrument flight rules) yet so that's no help. Hopefully closer to the ground and closer to the airport it will clear up enough for me to land. Otherwise, I suppose I have enough fuel to make it out of the storm and find an alternate airport.

Forgetting about the hills to the east of Huntsville, I continue to descend down to 2,500 feet at which point I looked down and saw the tops of trees not far below me, maybe 500 feet. I was flying over one of those ridges that's almost 2,000 feet above sea level. Good thing I didn't smack into a radio tower and instead was able to throttle up and climb back to 3,500 feet for more comfort but less visibility.

An IFR flight plan would have been nice, but at least I know VOR navigation. That got me to the airport (Madison Executive), where visibility was about 2-miles, not great but good enough to land. You can just barely see the runway and landing lights in the image above, at my 11:00 position. Or maybe you can't, but I could at full screen and with the light blinking.

Lining up would have been harder, but fortunately most of the roads in this area run north-south or east-west, not at angles like in Dalton, and I knew the runway ran straight north-south, so that helped with the turns.
On final approach I got too slow with full flaps deployed and set off the stall alarm. I was able to go full throttle for a few seconds though and hold the nose level or slightly downward to recover and continue my landing. The landing itself was a little choppy as you can see above, with my right rear landing gear touching down before the left. I made it down in one piece though, which is more than I can say for my last landing.

Anyway, here I am parked at Madison Executive Airport. Watching it snow.

Actual Death Experience in Chattanooga

2010-01-08T08:09:00.000-08:00

Unlike my earlier near-death experience, I went all the way this time. I was doing more training flights with the Mooney, which I've decided I hate, and attempted to fly up to Chattanooga and land.

The weather wasn't bad, but the Mooney was bucking like a bronco, just pointing it's nose left-right, up-down, all over the place - just very hard to control. That's bad enough when you're trying to maintain level flight, but really a problem when you try to land.

I came in a little shallow but tried to make it over the buildings and houses short of the runway and failed. The Bravo was just misbehaving too badly for me to compensate given my experience level and I clipped a building just short of the runway - game over!

Unfortunately, I wasn't running the video recorder, and after a crash it kicks out and doesn't give you a chance to use replay, so there's not even a photo to commemorate my demise.

I think I'll switch back to the Skylane, or at least, my zombie will. It's not as fast but it flies like a comfortable old pair of shoes. (If shoes could fly, I mean).

Still Flying in 2010

2010-01-03T16:05:00.001-08:00

It's been a busy few days but everyone had a good Christmas and New Years. I decided to get in a little more Mooney Bravo practice before having to go back to work tomorrow. Here I am at about 4,000 feet over Dalton:

I'm still not sure if I like this plane or not. I definitely like the idea of going 200 knots, especially if I'm going to take longer and longer trips, and I like the turning visibility you get with a low wing. That is, when you're banking left or right and you look in the direction of the bank, you can actually see what you're turning towards. With high-wing planes like the Skyhawk and Skylane, all you see in a bank is the bottom of the wing.

On the other hand, the high-wing is nice when you're trying to look at the ground. In the Mooney at least the pilot sits slight forward of the wing, so you can look left and down and see what's under you, but visibility below is clearly better in the Cessnas. What they really need to invent is a plane with the wing at eye level and with windows above and below it. Yeah, that's it!

Anyway, Tom had mentioned in his comment to my last post about some volcanic activity in Puerto Rico that was causing visibility issues for air traffic. That comment was a few days ago, but I decided to check it out anyway, loading up a quick flight from San Juan Int'l in my trusty Skylane with real world weather turned on:
Nothing to report on takeoff. A little cloudy but other wise skies look blue. After gaining some altitude though the air below me got decidedly hazy:
I doubt FSX has a volcano simulator built into it but this may be it's effort to simulate the visibility data it's getting from its weather service. Hard to tell.

Anyway, back to comparing the Mooney to the Cessna. The main problem is that the Mooney is significantly harder to fly and harder to land. I've not crashed yet, but I've not had a really good landing either. Every one of my 5 landings in the Mooney have been nail-biters. I may rethink the switch and keep flying the Skylane a bit longer until I get more experienced.

Mooney, Mooney...

2009-12-30T16:35:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-26T19:44:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-26T13:28:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-26T10:05:00.001-08:00

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

2009-12-25T16:22:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-25T10:40:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-24T14:29:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-23T19:06:00.001-08:00

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

2009-12-23T15:24:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-23T11:11:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-22T15:47:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-20T13:42:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-18T11:23:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-16T18:57:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-15T18:36:00.000-08:00

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.

Landing in Margaritaville

2009-12-14T18:29:00.000-08:00

Left Key Largo for an early morning flight down the keys. Before this flight I experimented a bit with the airplane settings. I knew you could adjust cargo load, even the weight of the passengers in each seat, fuel level, etc., but had never played with it. Turns out my Skylane was configured for the pilot (heavier than me at 218 lbs.) an equally heavy front seat passenger (shown in external views) and two slightly lighter passengers in the back (our wives I guess, who are not shown in any view of the plane). I cleared all of that out and just put myself in and my correct weight.

Turns out I should have thought that through a bit more. It made the plane 185 lbs. heavier on one side than on the other which made it keep turning to the left. What a pain! I was zig-zagging all over the place as soon as I got off the ground. I managed to hold it steady enough as I climbed to altitude passing over Key Largo proper:

The airport is on north Key Largo. In this image I'm at about the middle of the island. The road on the bottom left is the one coming in from the mainland. Turn left at the "T" and you'll go to North Key Largo and the airport. Turn right and you'll go to South Key Largo which is where my wife and I spent our first honeymoon (scuba diving). Keep going and you'll eventually get to my destination of Key West.

After getting to altitude I started checking the cockpit to see if there was any rudder or aileron trim controls. The old Skyhawk just had elevator trim for adjusting pitch, but nothing to adjust roll or yaw. The Skylane however did have a rudder trim wheel, so after fiddling with that a while I got the left turning problem mostly under control. I never could get it just right though because I was adjusting it by clicking and dragging the mouse. There are keyboard commands to make fine-tune adjustments, but they involve the numeric keypad, and since I'm using a laptop, I don't have the right keys for it. At some point I'm going to have to remap those keys.

Anyway, as I got west of Key Largo I noticed this odd donut shaped island so I took a picture hoping to find out more about it later. It's called Shell Key and can be found in Google Earth at 24 55'23.97"N 80 39'56.67"W.

About halfway down the keys I descended and did a touch-and-go landing at Marathon airport (Google Earth 24 43'34.71"N 81 3'2.41"W). I still didn't have the rudder trim just right plus there was a cross wind so landing was difficult, but I did it. At the very end I got pushed to the edge of the runway and had to get all wheels back on concrete before throttling back up to take off. Had plenty of runway though, so not a problem.

As I climbed back out I took a look at the Overseas Highway and noticed that the bridges from island to island are rendered in 3D, although not with much detail. Continuing west, almost to Key West, I spotted Key West Naval Air Station. That's restricted airspace, so I stayed well north of it. Pretty neat though. It has three runways and looks like a big asterisk.

Somewhere around there I contacted the tower at Key West International and got clearance to land. I had to fly around the north end of the island, circle back heading east and descend for the landing. The approach pattern took me over a couple of large cruise ships docket at the west end of the island:
Here's the tower view as I continued my descent. The cruise ships look a lot bigger from this angle. That little smudge in the sky is me:

With the plane still not balanced or trimmed out just right and the cross wind apparently picking up, this was a very tricky landing. I had to keep adjusting my course and aiming north of the airport to stay on track. I also had problems controlling the descent rate and airspeed. I never set off the stall alarm, but I got pretty close to my stall speed a couple of times and had to pitch the nose down and add power to get back in the safe zone.

Speaking of cross wind landings, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfB4xyM7tMw&feature=related and check out a truly amazing cross-wind landing (attempt) by a large passenger jet. My (virtual) hats off to that guy.

Anyway, I did make it down OK and even hit the middle of the runway, slowed down and taxied off and over to the parking area where I shut the engine down next to a larger twin-engine passenger plane, not sure of the type:

That little red and white toy plane to the left is me. Actually, the white plane is not THAT much bigger, it's just that the camera view is from his right side, so I'm a ways off in the background.

This was a nice flight. Took about an hour to complete, which is about all the flying time I can muster, especially on a week night.

I haven't decided yet if I'm going to do some more sight-seeing from this airport or just head out soon, probably the former. I'll probably fly west to the Dry Tortugas and back at the very least (although I can't land there in this plane as it lacks floats and there's not enough land there for a real airport).

Bahamas, Bimini, Key Largo...

2009-12-12T19:36:00.000-08:00

Sounds like a Beach Boys tune, doesn't it? I got a couple of good flights in today. First took off from North Palm and headed east to the Bahamas. I believe this technically counts as getting my feet wet. At 4,000 feet though, I never really was out of view of land, but I was definitely far enough away from land to be in trouble if I lost the engine.

I started the flight before dawn, hoping to catch a sunrise before I landed, but this new plane is just too fast. I cruised over at 135 knots and got there before daybreak. Landing at Grand Bahamas International in Freeport was pretty easy. I requested clearance to land a good ways out so I'd know what runway to line up for. Based on the runway selection, I angled south of the island and then turned northeast for the final approach:

The sun hasn't come up yet, but the sky is starting to turn purple at least. After this landing I had to take a break for a while, but I got back in the cockpit later in the evening for another flight.

I had considered staying in the Bahamas for a few days, but I decided to save that for a later Caribbean tour. Instead, I took back off from Freeport intent on landing in Key Largo, another old Scuba Diving favorite.

My route was going to take me past the Bimini islands, so I adjusted course to fly to them and check them out. Oddly, just north of North Bimini, FSX shows a little island with a lighthouse but nothing else on it. After this flight was over I checked Google Earth to get more info but could not find the island at all. Hmmmm....

(update, the lighthouse is called Great Isaac Light, you can find a photo of it linked in Google Earth at 26 01.6 N, 79 05.4 W, but the image resolution at that location is not high enough to see the island itself, which is really just a rock sticking out of the ocean. The FSX version of the island is a lot bigger than it really should be, which is why it seemed to odd that I could not find it earlier)

Anyway, I decided to do a touch-and-go landing at South Bimini Airport for a little practice, so I angled southeast and then turned back west to line up:

I've noticed that the Skylane is a LOT easier to land than the old Skyhawk. It's just more stable somehow, and responds better to minor corrections. All of my landings in the 182 have been right down the middle of the runway and nice and easy on the tires.

As soon as I touched down I raised the flaps and throttled up to take back off. As I climbed out from the airport, I flew over Port Royal. Isn't that the starting point of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie?

Regardless, I powered back up to 4,500 feet for the final leg of the cruise back to Florida. As soon as I got to altitude I could see the coastline ahead.

I was using the Miami VOR for navigation, but rather than flying straight to it and into that crowded airspace, I aimed to the south of it so I could pick up the 198 radian which points directly to Key Largo.

As I made the turn to pick up r198, I glanced out to my right and spotted the City of Miami and Miami International beyond:

Probably with a better video card there would be more buildings and such, but there were a few ships in the water to look at.

From Miami I found my radian and continued south towards the Ocean Reef Club airport in North Key Largo. It's a private airport actually requiring prior permission to land, but no matter.

At about 10 miles out I announced my intention to land on runway 22 and started lining up. I came in too high and overshot the beginning of the runway, but managed to get down on the ground well enough and stopped before the grass. I did have to use my brakes though.

As you can see, I'm right on the runway like I'm supposed to be. No more of that one wheel in the grass stuff for this pilot:

Now that I'm back in the State's I probably will slow down a bit and do some island hoping until I get to Key West. After that, it's back north to Dalton, hopefully in time for Christmas.

West Palm Flyover (and 182 Test Flight #2)

2009-12-07T18:44:00.000-08:00

Still not much flying time available, but I have been learning about my new plane, the Cessna Skylane 182Q, by Carenado. The Skylane is 2 feet longer than the Skyhawk, sits a little higher, but has about the same wingspan. It's a little heavier, but has a lot more horsepower (230 vs. 160), and thus a much better power to weight ratio. It also has a much higher operating ceiling at 18,100 feet compared to 13,500 feet for the Skyhawk.

Part of the extra power and higher maximum altitude comes from the plane having a Constant Speed Propeller, whereas the Skyhawk has a fixed propeller. The term, "Constant Speed" is a bit of a misnomer, as you can actually adjust the speed of the propeller. I'm still learning the basics and I'm not very good at using it in practice, but the best analogy is like a transmission on a car (or to me, an even better one is like gears on a bike).

With a fixed propeller, the blades spin faster as you give the engine more gas, but that's basically it. Imagine a car with one gear or your old dirt-bike as a kid. Pedal faster and you go faster, but you're limited to the one gear. Switch up to a 10-speed, or a modern road bike with as many as 21 gears, and you can go a lot faster with less effort.

With a constant speed propeller, you set the desired propeller RPM's as a target. Then, as you add or reduce throttle, change altitude, etc., the blade pitch angle automatically changes in an attempt to maintain the desired RPM's. At higher speeds and altitudes, the pitch angle increases so you're taking a bigger bight out of the air and thus develop more power. For takeoff and landing, you use a lower pitch angle for more low-speed power or torque.

Anyway, I managed to take-off, climb to about 1,200 feet and turn south-east to go check out West Palm Beach and see if I recognized anything. I fiddled with the prop control a little bit, but not much. It's amazing how much power this plane has. With the throttle at about 50% and the propeller pitch slightly increased I was cruising at 120 knots, which is the flat-out maximum for a Skyhawk at full throttle.

Anyway, here's me flying over the inland waterway at West Palm. The actual ocean is out of view to the right. My MegaScenery Earth purchase does not extend this far south, so this is default FSX scenery, which is not very good. The boat docks (not shown) where we used to leave to scuba dive from, are just inside the curve on the other side of that bridge.

I did my fly over, did a sharp u-turn and flew back over the same area, then headed back to the airport. On my way in, I announced my intention to land and selected a runway. As soon as I did, another airplane announced its intention to land on the same runway. We were both about 10 miles out, and I was on a direct approach whereas the other plane would have to go past the airport and turn around to land on the same runway, so I could have probably got in first, but I opted to fly a pattern around the airport and land second.

Hard to see in this image, but as I was flying the downwind leg, I looked back (with zoom) and spotted the other plane, a Beechcraft Baron 58, on final approach about to touch down. It's the little white spot in the water with the shadow below it.

This landing wasn't as good as the last one, but acceptable. I'm able to line up on the runway a lot better in this plane. It must be more responsive or agile or something. I got a little low at the end though and gave it some gas, then got too high and almost stalled like my one-and-only crash, but I got the nose back down and just had a slightly rougher than desired touch-down.

Once on the ground I taxied around a found the Beechcraft and parked next to it. I flew a Beechcraft to Huntsville back before I knew what I was doing and before I turned on crash detection and turned reality up to medium. Nice plane, but I'm not ready to go back to it yet. The Cessna's, with the high wing, are a lot more stable and forgiving for a new pilot.

Cessna Skylane 182Q Test Flight

2009-12-07T17:58:00.000-08:00

OK, so this guy at the North Palm Beach airport made me an offer I couldn't refuse on a Cessna Skylane 182Q. (Actually, Carenado, a maker of add-on planes for FSX had a 30% off sale). I didn't have much time for flying tonight, but I did take the new plane out for a quick circle around the airport to see how it handled.

The 182 is very similar to the 172 I've been flying but slightly larger with a larger engine and better aerodynamics. It flies higher, faster and carries a heavier load (four adults with full fuel is doable in the 182 whereas the 172 is better suited to two adults and a couple of kids)

The first thing I noticed is that the graphics are better than the default Microsoft 172. There's more detail on the outside of the plane and the instrument cluster looks more photographic and less computer animated. Performance wise, as soon as I throttled up for takeoff I could tell I had a lot more power under the hood. The torque pulled on the plane noticeably to the point that it was tough to compensate with no rudder pedals.

Once airborne, I could tell the rate of climb was much faster as well, almost 1,000 feet per minute easy. In fact, I had a hard time stopping it at 1,000 feet. I almost had to cut power back to idle to keep it from climbing further, but I got it under control and flew the pattern back around to land on the same runway where I started.

Landing was about the same, although again it almost has too much power to handle, at least based on my being used to flying its smaller sibling. After touchdown I used replay to grab some images and noticed that unlike the 172 which has only a pilot shown in the cockpit, the 182 has two animated figures, a pilot and co-pilot/passenger. By animated, I mean they look around and move a bit while you're watching from the exterior view. Pretty neat, but I'm hoping you can turn the passenger off. He looks fine on the test flight (presumably he's the seller I'm buying this bird from), but the rest of this trip is supposed to be solo.

As I continue my journey in the new airplane I'll find time to write a full review for the benefit of anyone else interested in Carenado products (www.carenado.com).

Orlando to West Palm

2009-12-06T18:35:00.000-08:00

I mostly spent this afternoon doing chores around the house. Got the basement floor mopped four times in preparation for sealing. I also installed a new doorbell out front for the wife, cooked dinner, and picked the Christmas tree up after it fell over this evening. We've got a ten foot tree and I think our stand might be a little small for that.

Anyway, after dark I found myself with a little time and decided to leave Orlando and continue my journey south. For my destination, I selected West Palm Beach. I've been there for scuba diving a number of times plus it makes a nice jumping off point if one were to want to fly east, say to the Bahamas.

I switched back to real world weather, which was cloudy per weather.com and loaded up the sim for an afternoon takeoff. I forgot to contact the tower and request clearance, but no matter. Soon I was airborne and heading south. Here's a view of Orlando International as I pass just to the east at about 5,000 feet:

Continuing south I managed to get the plane perfectly trimmed out straight and level at 5,000 feet and about 95 knots. My flight plan would take me almost due south from Orlando to Lake Okeechobee. There's a VOR on the southeastern shore that I was using to navigate to and which I would also use to fly outbound from to West Palm.

As I flew south, I realized that the sun was setting pretty quick. I forget it's winter. I had planned to land around dusk, but it looks like it'll be a night landing. It'll take me about an hour to fly to the lake and then 15-20 minutes to fly east to the airport. I did take advantage of the sunset to get some nice pictures:

Here's a neat view looking west with the sunset visible through the cockpit. You can't really tell from this angle, but one oddity on this flight was that my path took me almost directly over the line between MegaScenery Earth photoreal scenery to my left and the default fairly random scenery to my right.

A little while later as I approached the northern shore of the lake it started getting a lot cloudier and the sun got down on the horizon. The effect made for a nice purplish sky.

In this next shot, you can sort of see the north end of the lake under the cloud bank as the sun goes down. Not a nice day for getting a good view of the whole lake, which is huge.

The direct path south to the VOR would have taken me over the lake, but since I knew my final destination was on the east coast, I opted to fly around the eastern edge of the lake. I dialed the VOR gauge to 87 degrees outbound and waited for the needle to line up (which happens when I cross radian 87 from the VOR). I then banked to the left and made some adjustments to line up on that radian. My destination airport would be 25 miles outbound on that course.

As I flew eastward it started getting pretty dark and I started descending. I have also noticed on this trip that while FSX sometimes displays text on screen to indicate other aircraft (type, altitude, distance), even when you can't physically see the other plane, that doesn't always seem to be the case.

The skies around West Palm were more crowded that even Orlando and I spotted the wingtip lights of several planes that were not otherwise identified by FSX. That got me worried and a little paranoid about mid-air collisions so I started scanning the skies a lot more to make sure I was clear.

Anyway, I found the airport easily enough and got on the radio. Some airports aren't really controlled so instead of requesting clearance to land you just announce your intention to land so other airplanes in the area will know where you are and what you're doing. In FSX all of this is selected from menus and then, in a nice pilot voice that you can select from the options menus, you announce your call sign, distance and direction from the airport, altitude, and what you're going to do (inbound to a land on runway 26 left) for example.

I then got my airspeed down to about 75 knots and my altitude down to 1,000 feet and started flying the pattern. As I turned on final approach I found the runway dead ahead. Excellent! Then I noticed that my heading was 330 degrees, not 260 degrees, so I was lined up on the wrong runway. Dang! I throttled up, gained altitude, and banked off to the right to put a little more distance between me and the airport so I could line up correctly.

This time my turn put me a little off to the right but at least approaching the correct runway. I adjusted the throttle to set my descent rate and banked left and right to get lined up correctly. This was one of my better landings except that I'm still have trouble getting directly lined up down the center of the runway. Not sure how well you can see in this shot because it's so dark, but I'm flared out just right for touchdown:

Anyway, time for some sleep. I'll probably stay in West Palm this week looking for the dock where we'd leave from on scuba trips and just generally scouting out the area and maybe doing some more touch-and-go practice.

Then I think I'll head east and check out the islands...

Disney After Humans

2009-12-05T19:04:00.001-08:00

Amazingly, the storm passed and the skies cleared after just a few minutes. OK, I took control of the weather so I could fly without worrying about it. I took back off from Executive Airport planning to head southwest and find Disney World.

As I took off and started climbing out over Orlando I noticed something interesting. This part of Orlando appears to still be within the MegaScenery Earth territory I downloaded, so the ground is a photographic image. But because it's a city, there are also 3D buildings. What's strange is when there's a 3D model of one house, and just the flat 2D image of the house next door.

Anyway, I turned to a heading a 225 degrees and then tried to dial in the 225 radian from the Orlando VOR. I was off to the northwest of my correct line, so I turned south until I found it and then resumed by original heading. By then I was a couple of miles out with Disney estimated at 18 miles.

At 16 miles, I happened to look out my right side and saw the big globe of Epcot going by. I banked hard to the right to get a better look and grab a picture:

It was at this point that I realized Disney wasn't going to look as nice as I'd hoped. They seem to have sold off most of their property, including everything right around Epcot, and let it return to farmland.

I continued my right turn, knowing that the Magic Kindom itself was north of Epcot and should be within sight. I found it easily enough, cut power and descended to 1,000 feet for a flyby.

As with Epcot, the Magic Kindom seemed to have been taken over by nature. It reminded me of that Life After Humans show where they digitally simulate famous places as nature takes back over (assuming all humans have disappeared).

All that's left of the Magic Kingdom is Cindarella's Castle and Space Mountain, plus a few odd buildings including a badly modeled version of the hotel that the monorail goes through. The shape is roughly correct, but they seemed to have skinned it with regular brick building facade, which doesn't look right at all.

I was so stunned by this discovery that I completely neglected to take any exterior shots, so all I got were these out the window views.

Having accomplished my mission, I turned back to the northeast and found a heading to take me back to Orlando. I got back quick enough, requested clearance to land, and returned to the same runway that had vexed me in the bad weather.

This time it was a bit easier. I still didn't nail the middle of the runway, but the landing was smooth enough and at least all three wheels touched down on concrete:

The more I use this joystick, the mushier it seems to get. I've tried recalibrating it, but that doesn't seem to help. I'm surprised I don't crash more often (knock on wood), as sloppy as the controls are and with no rudder pedals to help.

Short Hop to Orlando

2009-12-05T10:11:00.000-08:00

After several days of not being able to fly (Thanksgiving, long hours at work, other stuff that hand to get done around the house, etc.), I finally got to take to the skies a bit today. I decided that before continuing my journey, I'd take a short hop over to Orlando and fly around over Disney World. I took off from Titusville and headed west.

I actually used the Orlando VOR (112.20 MHz) located at Executive Airport which is just north of Orlando International for navigation, but I could have just as easily followed Highway 50:

It runs pretty much east/west from the coast in to Orlando. We've driven it before, although the toll road to the south is a bit faster.

Once again, I opted for real-world weather which (once again), was a mistake. Even shortly after take-off, I could tell it was a little too cloudy and hazy for sight-seeing, but I figured maybe I could stay under the cloud and see well enough when I got there.

The closer I got to Orlando though, the darker the clouds became. About 10 miles out, it became rather apparent that sight-seeing would be difficult and flying at low altitude might even be dangerous. I decided instead to follow the VOR signal straight in to Executive Airport and land.

After a refreshing break at the airport, I could either wait for nice weather, or just force nice weather since this is a simulation after all and do my sight seeing in a clear blue sky.

I've been playing around a bit with the air traffic control communication in FSX. I've not mastered it yet, but I was able to contact the airport, request clearance to land, and even land on the actual runway they cleared me for.

Clearance was for a direct approach to runway 15, but I decided to circle the airport and fly the usual landing pattern instead so I could get a better view of the lay of the land. As I made my turn to final approach I once again turned too sharply and found myself to the left of my correct line. I adjusted, but the wind was also trying to push me to the left so I never could get lined up perfectly. There was also a lot of turbulence, so my airspeed was jumping up and down, the altimeter needle was twitching up and down instead of descending smoothly and the nose of the plane kept jerking to the left and right.

Nevertheless, I flew her on in for a fairly smooth landing. Here I am crossing the runway threshold just 5-10 feet up in the air, ready to raise the nose and flare for landing:

You might notice that while my shadow seems to be over the runway, it's actually in the afternoon with the sun to my west (left), so this picture makes the landing look a little better than it really was.

Not that it wasn't smooth, but when they tell you to land on the line, I don't think this is what they meant:

Or at least, that's not the line they meant for me to land on. After touch down, I taxied back onto the runway and lined up on the center-line then announced that I was on the ground, switched frequencies to ground-control and got clearance to taxi to the parking area.

If I have time later today, I'll just set it on "fair weather" and try my Disney fly-over. The Magic Kingdom is about 18 miles southwest of this airport, so it shouldn't hard to find with good visibility.

Oh, one more note to self - don't forget to raise the flaps after takeoff when you use them. I flew all the way with 10-degree flaps, which kept my airspeed low and probably didn't do much for my gas mileage.

Back on the Horse

2009-11-28T17:08:00.001-08:00

I couldn't go to bed tonight without attempting one more landing and I'm glad I did. With a freshly undented plane I took back to the skies, circled the airfield and came back in for another landing attempt. This time I got my alignment pretty good at a distance although I had to bank gently to the right on the approach to get it perfected. My glide slope was maybe a bit steep so towards the end I gave it some gas to shallow out. I crossed the end of the runway below 100 feet, probably below 50 feet and flared out nicely just above the runway:

Touchdown was nice and easy and lined up just right. I could have easily throttled up and gone around again but I decided to quit while I'm ahead - for tonight anyway.

First Crash!

2009-11-28T09:05:00.000-08:00

Well, it had to happen eventually. I tried some more touch-and-go landing practice in Titusville this morning. The first landing wasn't so great so I throttled up and went around again. The second approach was looking really good. I was aligned with the runway, glide slope looked right, just looking like a good landing all around.

Then the landing lights at the runway started going red like I was getting too low, so I gave it a little throttle to make sure I'd make it to the runway. I throttled back to idle and prepared to land, but my nose had pitched up a bit when I gave it the gas, so my view of the runway was not great. I was still lined up correctly, but I was higher than I thought so I started my flare sooner (higher) than I should have.

The stall alarm went off, but I under-reacted because I thought I was almost on the ground. As you can see though, I'm still pretty high.

Next thing I know, the nose pitches down pretty hard and I head for the runway, nose-wheel first. You can see I'm still lined up good, but it really works better if the rear wheels touch down first.

Bang! Nose into the ground and the plane starts spinning to the side. No control at all at this point, I'm just along for the ride.

My final resting place, as seen from the control tower. Oh, the shame!!

I suppose later on I'll get my propeller unbent and practice landings some more. Lesson learned - treat any stall seriously, even if you think you're just inches off the ground.

Seven More Landings

2009-11-27T15:23:00.001-08:00

Plus one abort. I've been in Titusville today, just flying some touch-and-go and otherwise working on my landing technique. My first couple of attempts were pretty poor excuses for landings. They got me on the ground, but that's about it. Third attempt was off so bad I gave up, increased throttle and aborted the landing, opting to fly around for another pass.

By my sixth and seventh landings of the day, I was improving noticeably. I've identified two main problems. First, I have a hard time judging my alignment at a distance from the runway. In a real airplane with real 3-D and peripheral vision it might not be so tough, but on a flat computer screen, it's just tricky to judge. I'm also still flying with real weather, which means I've got a slight cross-wind with which to contend.

The second problem is my joystick. It stinks! The movement in the middle of the stick is just mushy so you end up having to over-steer just to get anything to happen at all. I'm also convinced that rudder pedals would be invaluable for making minor corrections to alignment during the final approach.

Anyway, here's a shot from my last landing:

Not too shaby on this one. I'm a little off to the left from the correct alignment, and the lights say I'm a little low, but that doesn't really seem to be the case.

Jekyll to Titusville - Part II

2009-11-25T20:03:00.000-08:00

As I gradually descended through the clouds without any sign that they were breaking up, I began to get nervous - especially when I dropped below 2,000 feet and still couldn't see a thing. Finally, at about 1,700 feet I broke clear of the clouds and found myself just north of Daytona Beach in MegaScenery heaven! Here's the view out the right/starboard side of the plane at actual photo-real terrain and houses, not the generic farmland I had left behind in Georgia:

Continuing south towards Daytona, I noticed an odd shadow on the ocean ahead. As I got closer, it resolved into a black triangle. I've heard of the Bermuda triangle, but didn't know Daytona had one as well. It didn't look that big or threatening, but I was careful not to fly over it just in case.
About then the clouds began to rise a bit so I climbed back up to about 3,500 feet for safety. Then it started to rain. Not bad, but enough to be distracting. It's hard to even see it in the still images, but this external view shows the streaks of rain maybe better than the cockpit view:

A bit further south, I finally picked up the Melbourne VOR station, which like Brunswick, appears to have a range of about 60 nautical miles. Once I had the signal, I locked in the appropriate radial and turned south-west, heading inland to intercept. I got lined up on the signal about 50 miles out, or about 20 miles from my destination.

About 10 miles from where I expected to find the airport, I spotted it dead ahead and began my approach. Being fairly tired at this point, and not having a clue yet how to use the communication features in FSX to request clearance to land, I just did a direct approach to the nearest runway. It had stopped raining by then, and the wind didn't seem too bad, but as I got closer I noticed the airport looked funny:

One problem with add-on scenery, like MegaScenery Earth, is that it doesn't always line up correctly with the default features of FSX, like the runways. The runway I'm lined up on is the FSX runway graphic, while the lighter runway angling away to the right is the photo-real aerial image of the runway that comes from MegaScenery Earth. I suppose for the larger airports, they check and try to avoid this kind of conflict.

Anyway, I proceeded in and made an acceptable landing, although it seemed more difficult than it should have. As I coasted down the runway, I glanced to my left and saw the wind-sock pointing in the same direction I was headed, meaning I had just landed with the wind instead of against it. That means my ground speed was a good bit higher than if I had landed in the other direction which explains why the landing didn't feel right.

I think I'll spend some time here in Titusville practicing landings and learning how to communicate with air traffic control, request clearances to take-off and land, etc., before I begin the net leg of my southward journey.

Jekyll to Titusville - Part I

2009-11-25T19:39:00.001-08:00

As stated in the previous post, I decided it was time to leave the not-so-realistic scenery of Jekyll Island and head south into Florida in search of the MegaScenery I had previously installed stretching from about Daytona Beach almost to Miami. My particular destination will be Titusville, Florida, home of my in-laws. I selected a morning flight from Jekyll and real-world weather, although in hindsight, I should probably find out what the real world weather is first, and decide if I'm qualified to fly in it, before just clicking "start flight" and seeing what happens.

Anyway, I had a nice smooth take-off from Jekyll and enjoyed a nice sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean:

Although I must say, the darkish clouds were a a bit troubling. I flew south as planned, using the Brunswick VOR to keep track of my progress. As I crossed into Florida and flew past Jacksonville I noticed what appeared to be a nuclear power plant off to my right:

A little research revealed that it's actually a coal plant, the JEA Northside Generating Station, but it does have cooling towers similar in design to what you see at a nuclear power plant.

As I got south of Jacksonville, the cloud cover started getting thicker, making it harder to see the ground and determine my location along the coast. Since I was already flying pretty low, I decided to try getting above the clouds. In this image, it doesn't look like that should be too difficult:

In reality, as I began to climb I encountered nothing but grey nothingness, or clouds as thick as pea soup in front of me. I got up to about 6,000 feet and got into some small patches of openings, but from those I could tell that the clouds extended even higher and that even clear of them, I wasn't going to have much of a view of the ground or ocean. Here's what it looked like out my front windshield through about fifteen minutes of the flight:

I decided to head back down, figuring that there would be no mountains to contend with, so that as long as my altitude read greater than zero, I should be fine. Surely somewhere above 1,000 feet I should break clear of this stuff and be able to see where I'm going, right?

Intermediate VOR

2009-11-25T09:25:00.001-08:00

Having tired of the unrealistic scenery around Jekyll Island I've decided to head further south. The next leg of my journey will take me a couple hundred miles further south to Titusville, Florida where my in-laws reside and where I've previously conducted some test flights using MegaScenery Earth downloads (see earlier posts).

The navigation on this one is going to be a little more complicated, so it's time to talk more about VOR. In a prior post, I described VOR (Very High Frequency Omni-directional Range) as homing in on a radio signal to find an airport and that's basically how I've used it so far. Of course, it's a little more complicated than that. In fact, each VOR station emits two signals, one omni-directional, and one uni-directional but rotating through all 360 degrees around the station. By interpreting these two signals, the equipment in your plane can tell you where you are in relation to the station, and to any of the 360 radials (vectors/directions) going out from the station.

In addition to the nav radio in the plane, there's a VOR dial. It has a knob that lets you rotate through the 360 degrees, plus it has an arrow that can point straight down or to the left or right. Finally, it has an up arrow or "to" flag and a down arrow or "from" flag. To get to Athens, and then to Jekyll, I justed tuned in the frequency of the VOR at my destination, then rotated the dial until I got a straight arrow and a "to" flag. I'd then turn my plane until my heading matched the degree heading indicated at the top of the VOR dial. In other words, with the straight arrow and "to" flag, that heading would take me "to" the VOR station I had tuned in.

To get from Jekyll to Titusville is going to be a little tricker though, mainly because my destination airport, the Arthur Dunn Air Park in Titusville, has no VOR station of it's own. What I've learned from a bit of Googling though is that Arthur Dunn is 32.8 miles out from the Melbourne (Florida, not Australia) VOR along the 343 radial. That means if you flew from the Melbourne VOR on a heading of 343 degrees, you'd get to the airport after flying 32.8 miles.

Conversely, if you're approaching Melbourne VOR on the reciprocal course (163 degrees), you'd fly over the airport 32.8 miles before you got to the VOR. My trick then, is to find that 343 radial, get on it, and follow it towards Melbourne. The nav radio will tell me how far I am from the signal, so at about 40 miles or so out I should be able to spot the airport.

Of course, it's going to be a while heading south before I'll even pick up that signal, so I'm going to use the Brunswick VOR at the start of the trip. I'll tune it in and fly south, using the range finding feature to tell me how far I've traveled. I expect to lose the signal after about 60 nautical miles, by which time I'll be about 100 nautical miles out from Titusville. There will probably be a gap in there before I pick up Melbourne, but I can manage that by keeping ocean to my left and land to my right. No problem!

Here's a closeup of the equipment I'm talking about, taken during my flight to Titusville which will be detailed in my next post:

You may be able to right click the image and open it in another tab at a larger size. If you do, you'll see that on the top radio there are four frequencies displayed. The first two, 128.30 and 128.25 are communication frequencies. The second two, 110.00 and 112.25 are navigation frequencies, with 110.00 being the one currently tuned in. To the left of the radio stack there's a dial with a white plus sign in it. That's the VOR dial. It's currently turned to about 165 (between 150 and due south, which is 180). The vertical axis of the + sign is the needle I mentioned, which is offset slightly to the right. At the bottom of that needle, there's an up arrow which is the "to" flag I mentioned. This shows me that I'm slightly to the left of the 165 radial to the VOR at 110.00 MHz (which is Melbourne). Also, towards the bottom of the radio stack, you can see that I'm 53.1 nautical miles out (or just over 20 miles from the airport in Titusville).

This probably doesn't make any sense at all. A video demonstration would be a lot better, but I'm not sure how to make one of those yet. Anyway, coming up next - my actual flight from Jekyll to Titusville, which was completed in the midst of trying to write this particular post.

Jekyll Touch-and-Go, Day 2

2009-11-24T18:28:00.000-08:00

I decided to try another round of touch-and-go landing practice at Jekyll, but without spending too much time taking pictures or trying to record videos. I also abandoned real world weather for today, since it would probably be pretty poor. Here's a fair weather view of what I've dubbed "Jekyll Farm" since that's what it looks like in FSX:

You'll notice I'm flying south along the beach where yesterday I was flying north. That's because the sim had me positioned on the opposite runway this time. I figured it would be a nice change of pace until I got lined up for my first landing. Look closely and you'll see four white landing lights, which indicate I'm too high; but look even closer and you'll see a big dang tree right at the end of the runway. Any lower and I fly right through that thing. I had to dodge up and around the tree and try to still land on the end of the runway. Trying too hard, I actually landed in the grass just short of the runway and almost landed on the fence surrounding the airport. Not good!

After touching down and taking back off again I switched patterns and resumed landing from the north. I also pretty much ignored the landing lights. Any time I got the correct signal, two while lights and two red ones, I was way too low. At least, I was way too low given my descent rate. I suppose if I could dial in a shallower descent I would be OK. Instead, for my next three landings I just ignored the lights, came in a bit high (but safe), cleared the end of the runway then flared out for three very nice easy landings. Satisfied with that, I quit for the day.

Oh, before I could fly I actually had to let my five year old on the computer for a while. He prefers the faster planes and has actually logged more hours in the F-18 than I have. Here he is buzzing a lake somewhere in Canada:

He actually did pretty well until his chaotic maneuvering resulted in an "aircraft overstressed" warning which terminated his flight. I suppose I should turn off crash detection and some of those other features when he plays, but I just didn't think about it.

Jekyll Touch-and-Go

2009-11-23T18:18:00.001-08:00

I went to the doctor today and got a steroid shot and some other meds, so I'm feeling a little bit less like I've been hit by a truck. I actually tried to go to bed early and skip flying tonight, but my two youngest boys (ages 5 and 3), kept coming in and turning on the lights or trying to climb in bed with me, so that didn't work out. Instead, I retreated to my man-cave basement and fired up the simulator.

As I mentioned yesterday, I felt like I needed some landing practice so I decided to do a couple of touch-and-go landings at the Jekyll Island airport. The plan was to take-off, fly to the south-end of the island, swing around and fly north along the beach at about 1,000 feet, then turn around between Jekyll and St. Simons island to the north. After that, I would land and then throttle up and take back off to repeat the course.

I chose real world weather, which was probably a mistake. It was a bit windy, and around the north end of the island where I'd be making my final approach was cloudy and hazy, reducing visibility. On the first take-off, I pulled back too hard. Cessna's aren't jet fighters so they aren't meant to climb out this steeply:

I managed to get my nose down and into a more proper climb angle, but since I was distracted by that I let the wind push me off-course, so that I drifted east, off the runway and over the airport terminal and hangers. I'm sure they wouldn't have appreciated that in the real world.

The flight around the island was fairly uneventful, although I let my altitude creep up to 1,500 feet, which meant I had to descend a little steeper than I wanted on the landing approach. I also turned too sharply around the north-end of the island, so my approach angle was all wrong. I finally got lined up on the runway, but by then I was pretty close to it. I probably should have just throttled up and aborted that one, but I decided to land it anyway. The frantic maneuvering that ensued resulted in a fairly rough landing and even rougher take-off as I forgot to retract from full flaps after the touch-down. Here's a shot of me banking furiously to stay over the runway just before landing. The wings really aught to be straighter than that, but without rudder pedals, the only way to adjust course is to bank the wings.

I've also confirmed my suspicions from yesterday that the video recording feature in FSX is next to useless. While my first landing today was a bit rougher than I'd like, the same landing viewed on the video had me bottoming out the plane (wheels sunk into the runway, sparks flying, smoke, etc.). In fact, the impact caused the engine to cut off, but the plane continued to fly the second pattern with the propeller not moving at all. Very strange.

The scenery on the island was also disappointing. From the looks of it, you'd think Jekyll was mostly farmland with only a few houses. It's actually mostly wooded, with a golf course in the middle and houses all up and down the beach, plus a few older hotels near the middle. Here's a view out of the cockpit on the northward leg of my second lap. You can tell that I'm flying through some haze or a low cloud:

Another odd thing I've noticed is that when you switch to external view while flying through a cloud, the airplane itself does not appear to be in a cloud. It's drawn clearly which makes it look more like fog on the ground than a cloud in the sky. That makes sense from inside the cockpit, where you wouldn't want it to look like the cloud was in there with you, but doesn't make sense on the external view. Here's a shot of me banking to the west with the northern tip of Jekyll to my left and the southern tip of St. Simons to my right:

On the second landing approach, I did two 90 degree turns around the north end of the island instead of a single 180. That put me on a better line into the runway which allowed me to focus on the landing itself a little better. The actual landing, while not perfect, was smoother than the first one. On the recorded video though, it ended up being even rougher, with the plane bottoming out again. I wasn't fast enough on the take-picture button, and was too lazy just to back it up and try again, but here's an aftermath shot showing the smoke cloud just after touch-down:

Notice that the propeller is not turning at all. The shortcomings of the video recorder are really annoying. I wanted to use the recorder to review my landings as a training aid, but since they aren't accurate enough, they're worse than useless. I can't even use the system to get realistic screen shots during portions of my flights when I'm too busy actually landing to switch the camera view and take a shot.

Oh well, I think I'll try some more touch-and-go tomorrow, but with "fair weather" selected so visibility will be better and the wind won't be such an issue.