Bolivar, TN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!