Return from Alabama

It's Halloween, so not much time to fly, but I did manage to sneak off a few times and (using the pause button between sessions) managed to fly back from Madison Alabama. Before takeoff though, I had to help carve pumpkins. My five-year-old insisted on carving a Darth Vader pumpkin, but then decided that the smell and feel of pumpkin guts was too much for his delicate stomach to handle, so Mom and Dad had to do all the work. Mom handled the messy work of disemboweling the pumpkin, and then Dad got to work with the knife. The results were better than I would have expected:

My wife carved the traditional jack-o-latern while my teenage daughter gummed up my power tools drilling out the polka-dot pumpkin on the top step. She cleaned the drill and drill bits afterwards though, so no harm done.

Anyway, back to flying. I did just barely manage to clear the trees coming out of Palmer Field. (need picture) I climbed out and turned east to head home. I climbed to a higher altitude and starting experimenting with trimming the airplane. I had tried this a little on earlier flights but I'm still not very good at it. The idea is to get the plane at the desired altitude and speed, or the desired climb or descent rate and then set the trim tab so the plane stays in that attitude without constant control inputs from the pilot. The result is a smoother flight and less fatigue.

Having put my landing gear up earlier in the flight, it didn't take nearly as long to get back to Dalton as it originally took to get to Huntsville. I flew back over the Tennessee river and the nuke plant, and then spotted Chattanooga to the north. This flight was made at dusk, not during the day, so the night scenery, with city lights turned on, actually makes it a little easier to navigate.

After passing Chattanooga I turned SSW and started looking for the Dalton airport. I started my descent and flew straight to the airport, skipping the landing pattern and just going for a direct approach. My landing was better than the one in Alabama. At least I stayed on the runway.

Megascenery Earth

Not much flying time the last few days. Still stuck in Madison, but I decided to download and try out some scenery from megasceneryearth.com The default scenery in FSX is generated from a set of standard ground textures, and looks OK I guess. Probably better at higher video settings, but the folks at Megascenery Earth are working on downloadable aerial imagery that can be used in FSX in place of the default scenery. At this point they have Washington State and California done, plus most of Utah, some of Colorado, the area around New Orleans, some parts of New England (Long Island, etc.), most of the way around Lake Michigan, south Florida, and an odd little section on the North Carolina/South Carolina border. Eventually the plan to cover the whole US and then the whole world.

While the western states no doubt have more dramatic scenery, I wanted to fly over something familiar, so I downloaded four tiles along the east coast of Florida, from Daytona Beach down to about West Palm. My in-laws live in Titusville, near the Kennedy Space Center, so I figured I could try to find their house. The imagery is billed as 1 pixel = 1.19 meters, which aught to be excellent. Each tile is $7.49, but the more you buy the cheaper they get, plus I took advantage of a promotion, so I got the four Florida tiles, plus a freebie from Washington for about $20.

I switched by to the Cessna and took off from the Shuttle landing facility. Actually, I did a short flight without the scenery and took some screenshots from that for the "before" views. Here's a shot of the Shuttle Landing Facility runway with normal scenery:

I then loaded the scenery, and tried to fly roughly the same flight path for the "after" shots, but I mostly failed at that. I'll have to get a lot better at precision flying to do any more before/after photography. I did get an "after" shot of the same runway, but from a lower altitude and slightly different angle. Also, installing the MegaScenery made other changes to the display settings, like turning on more 3D tree objects and such, so it's not really a fair comparison:

I did manage to find the golf course where my in-laws live, but not their house. The imagery is nice, but to really appreciate the detail you have to fly low, and when you fly low, the illusion is broken when it becomes obvious that you're looking at 2-dimensional photography painted on the ground and not actually 3D houses. I think if you were using this for the Grand Canyon, or mountains out west, it might work better, or trick your brain better, than for flying over cities. Alternately, at higher altitudes it would probably still be better than the default scenery, but then you can get lower resolution aerial imagery for a lot cheaper and it should still look fine at high altitude.

Alabama Bound

With the yard work behind me and the kids in bed I decided to fly some more. This time I tried out the Beechcraft Baron 58, a low-wing twin engine plane, possibly the same model I failed to successfully fly around Edwards. It's also similar to, if not the same plane I recall my Dad taking us in for at least one vacation.

I also decided to leave the Dalton area and actually fly somewhere. My sister lives in Huntsville, Alabama, or rather in Madison, which is just west of Huntsville. I decided to simulate a trip to visit her, so I did some checking and found that there is a small airport in Madison. I made that my target and checked Google Earth for some landmarks for navigation. The Baron has a cruising speed around 200 knots, compared to maybe 100-110 for the Skyhawk. It's about a hundred miles from airport to airport and I didn't want to take an hour to get there (although that's how it ended up).

I took off fine and climbed to altitude but notice my cruise speed would not get above 150 knots. Then I remembered that this plane has retractable landing gear, which I had left down since take-off. Somewhere around the Georgia/Alabama line I finally retracted them and made a mental note to put them back down before landing.

Once over Alabama, I spotted the Tennessee River and the Bellefonte nuclear power plant near Scottsboro. Not sure why the nuke plants are modeled in 3D at my display settings when almost nothing else seems to be, but I guess I'll start using them more for navigation. From there I turned slight southward, looking for a branch of the river that would lead me to Hunstville. If you follow that branch northwest, it starts zig-zagging just south of town forming an "M" shape. The eastern hump of the M points towards Huntsville while the western hump points to Madison. I turned north at the second hump and started looking for the airport.

Following that line, I flew over a big airport, Huntsville International, I guess, and then tried to find the Madison airport (Palmer Field). It's a little grass runway, so not easy to find, but I spotted it after circling around a couple of times. The real trick was lining up on it to land. The Beechcraft with full flaps is still running about 120 knots, so you have to go well past the runway and loop back around, but I kept lining up on the wrong north-south road and missing the actually landing strip. I finally got the right line and tried to land, but I was too fast and too high and had to abort. At that point I realized that the grass runway was on the same alignment as the big runways on the other side of the interstate, which are only a bit to the east. Using them to line up by, I was able to get the right line on the small airport far enough out to slow down and descend even before I could see it. I nailed the landing, even remembered to put the landing gear back down, but the runway is so short I rolled off of it into a field before I could get the plane totally stopped.

I'm calling this a successful landing, although I now realize that on "easy" mode, any time you hit the ground pretty much counts as a landing. In reality, I may have landed OK, but there's probably a ditch or fence or something between the end of the runway and where I finally came to a stop. At the very least I would have damaged the airplane. In the future I really need to do more research about my destination airport and make sure I'm flying a plane that can land there.

Assuming optimistically that whatever damaged I caused was easily fixed, my plan for tomorrow night is to try to take off from this runway in the same airplane. Whether I can clear the trees remains to be seen, but if I do, I'll head back to Dalton. Hopefully the flight home won't take as long as this one. I'll remember to put the landing gear up after take-off and shouldn't have to circle the airport a half-dozen times before landing, so that should help.

Sight Seeing Tour

Got off work a little early today to do some yard work but decided to get some flying in while the house was empty. I took off from Dalton again, still in the Skyhawk, and headed up to Chattanooga like last time, but on this trip I used the Chattanooga airport as a landmark and turned north at that point. I flew up to the Watts Bar nuclear plant, which is modeled in 3D in the simulator. Flew around the cooling towers and headed back down river to see if the Aquarium was modeled. It's not, which seems odd. Also, only one of about five bridges were even shown, and it appeared to be laying in the water. Maybe if I had a faster machine with better video I could crank up the display settings and it would show a lot more. Not fair to judge it on a laptop with just the Intel built-in video chip set.

Anyway, from downtown Chattanooga I picked up Lookout Mountain and flew parallel to that heading south. I had checked Google maps earlier and was looking for a break in the ridge as a reference point at which I turned ESE, towards Calhoun. I was trying to find "the pocket", a camping area between two ridges where I've ridden my bike a few times. After one false lead, I did finally manage to find it, then flew over Calhoun, crossed the interstate, and turned north, keeping the interstate in sight on one side and using the mountain range to the east to judge my latitude. Fort Mountain and the range around there is pretty easy to recognize if you're from here.

When I got far enough north, I started looking for and found the Dalton airport. Almost flew right over it. Once I found the airport, I positioned myself south of it, and actually flew the correct traffic pattern to land. You have to come around to the south, then fly parallel to the runway heading NW, fly out a couple of miles and do a 180 coming back SE to line up with the runway and land. I remember that much from the flight lessons I took years ago.

Altogether, this flight took me about an hour. I'm not sure I learned that much, although I did experiment with trimming out the plane so it flies level and straight without any control inputs. I think I improved the handling, but didn't make it perfect.

Of course, I did manage to fly my plan and to do some basic visual navigation using landmarks, so that's something. Not sure what the next test flight will involve, but I need to learn more about actually handling the plane. One thing I need to figure out is fuel mixture. On a Skyhawk, you don't just have a throttle control, but also a mixture control. At higher altitudes, you're suppose to "lean" the fuel/air mixture for better performance and gas millage. I'll have to study up on that.

I should also try for higher altitudes and do some stall recovery and that sort of thing. So far I don't think I've gone over 5000 feet (above sea level), which is only about 4000 feet about ground. You can still see the houses and trees and such at that altitude. The Skyhawk has a ceiling of 16,000 feet I believe, so I need to get up to 10,000 at least and play around where I've got some recovery room if I mess up.

I also need to read up on the simulator reality settings. I've got it at "easy" right now, but not sure what that means exactly, or what the other options are.

Well, I guess I should get to that yard work now.

Second Flights

Continued with the tutorial missions today. Mission #5 had me in a Piper Cub in flight approaching an airport. Guided by the voice-overs I flew the correct traffic pattern and landed reasonably well. That makes five landings thus far.

Mission #6 had me back in the Rocky Mountains flying from one small "bush" airport to another. This one was funny because I took off with the cabin door still open. In prior missions, it was always closed so I didn't even know it could open (and I'm still not sure how you close it). This was my first Cessna Skyhawk mission and I did fine, flying up a river valley and then turning 90 degrees to make a steep landing approach with a mountain at the end of the runway. I didn't realize the door was open until I started sight-seeing during the flight and then couldn't figure out how to close it. Oddly, the open door seemed to have no effect on the flight characteristics of the Skyhawk. I suspect that the simulator has different reality levels and that I've got it set on easy. I need to look into that.

The remaining tutorials have to do with sail planes, jets and helicopters, so I skipped those and tried the first of the real missions, although still at "beginner" level. This one had me in a low-wing, twin engine plane flying a government big-wig around Edwards AFB for sight-seeing on a rainy day. You had to stay below 1000 feet to see the ground, which was the point of the flight, and the passenger had a bad back, so any rough flying resulted in a mission failure. I tried this a couple of times without success. I either crashed trying to maneuver at low altitude or just turned too sharply for the passengers comfort. The plane and weather was just more than I could handle. I've decided to give up on missions at this point and just do free flight, making up my own training missions as I go.

Under Free Flight, I selected the Cessna Skyhawk and the Dalton Municipal Airport. My first non-mission flight was just to take off, fly out from the airport a bit, turn around and land. Second was to fly up to the north Dalton area and try to find my house. Unfortunately the scenery either isn't that accurate or I've got the detail level turned down too low. Other than the general outline of the city and a couple of major roads, like I-75, I didn't really recognize anything. I turned back towards the airport and made an acceptable landing.

For my third flight out of Dalton I got a bit more ambitious. I took off and flew north towards Chattanooga. One of the runways at the Chattanooga airport is on the same orientation and almost in-line with the Dalton runway. If you fly a straight line from Dalton Muni, you can't miss it. I landed at Chattanooga, taxied to the end of the runway, did a 180 turn and took back off, flew back to Dalton and landed successfully again. That makes 10 successful landings so far, which really makes me think I've got the simulator set on easy mode. Surely I'm not a natural at this.

It also seems like there aught to be some real training missions where actual flight school type instruction is given. Maybe there's an add-on for that.

First Flights

Fired up the simulator and completed tutorial missions one through four. These are basic flight concept sorts of missions so I didn't learn much more than I already knew. You pull back on the joystick to pitch the nose up, etc. The first mission was in an ultralight, which has to be the easiest plane to fly, and set at Edward's Air Force Base in California, which has to be about the easiest airport to fly around since it's out in the middle of the desert. I took off, climbed up and flew through an imaginary gate in the sky, then cut power and landed back on the same runway. Not too challenging. Next I took back off and actually flew around the air field a bit. There are some SR-71 Blackbirds parked there so I landed again and tried to taxi around one to get a better look. Unfortunately I failed to take my own wingspan into account so as I taxied around the back of the SR-71 I clipped it with my wing. Oops! While probably not fatal, crashing into parked planes is definitely not how I want to start my flying career.

Mission #2 had me in the ultralight again, but starting already airborne. This mission was over the bay area around Hong Kong. The goal was to maneuver through a series of gates in the sky to practice turning. As with mission #1, this wasn't too challenging. I even flew a series of bonus gates including one over the deck of a moving ship. That was the only tricky one, but I got it without crashing into the ship or the water. With the mission complete I decided to try to land, although that was not a mission objective. I gained some altitude and found an airport off in the distance. I flew over and touched down on a runway built for jumbo jets.

Mission #3 involved another ultralight flight, this one taking off from an airport out west (Colorado maybe), and then locating and flying around three hot air balloons, then returning to the airport and landing on a small grass strip, more suitable to ultralights than Hong Kong International. This was also easy to do, although the landing on such a small strip was certainly harder than at Edwards or Hong Kong.

Mission #4 was a taxi exercise. Given my experience at Edwards with that SR-71, I suppose that's something I should be practicing. You start in an ultralight, taxi to a Piper Cub, switch to that plane then taxi to a DC-3, switch to that one and taxi to the runway for takeoff. I took off in the DC-3 but then decided I wasn't ready to try landing that one and ended the mission in-flight.

Not a bad first day, but I'd prefer something closer to actual flight training than this.

First Post

Welcome to Virtually Flying. This is my first attempt at a blog so bear with me. I'm good with computers, having built a couple and having written a number of programs over the years, but at 42 years of age, the whole blogging thing came along "after my time" so I've never really understood the point of it. I don't have a My Space or Face Book page either. Don't even ask me what Twitter is all about. I have no idea.

Why Virtually Flying? I've been an airplane and flight enthusiast since I was a kid. My parents and extended family are from South Carolina, but we moved to Dalton (north Georgia, about 20 miles south-east of Chattanooga, 80 miles north of Atlanta), when I was five. Some time thereafter, my Dad got his private pilot license and I recall us flying back to South Carolina for weekends. It only took about three hours to get there in a Cessna Skyhawk compared to eight hours in a car. I need to ask him more about his planes, but it seemed like Dad owned (either individually or with partners) a couple of different Skyhawks and maybe a twin-engine low-wing plane, as I remember taking a trip in one of those one time. He may have just rented that one though.

My other early memory of airplanes was watching A-10 Warthogs fly low over the trees near my grandparents' home in South Carolina. They flew out of Myrtle Beach Air Force Base and I guess were practicing maneuvers over the sparsely populated farmland where I spent several summers and lots of weekends. I also remember my Dad talking about how he was inspired to get his pilots license by seeing military planes flying over the same countryside when he was growing up. Dad was born in 1937, so when the Myrtle Beach airport was taken over by the military in 1940, he would have been three years old and would have seen military pilots practicing throughout the war years.

OK, so why the "Virtually" in the title. Well, unlike my father, I've never obtained a private pilot's license. I did take some flight lessons, along with my younger sister, when she was in high school and I was in college, but that's about it. Instead, I've always had an interest in flight simulator programs on the computer, having been hooked since the early days of Microsoft Flight Simulator when everything was drawn in wire frame and you had to use a great deal of imagination. Recently, I got a new laptop through work, a Dell Latitude E6500 with a dual core 2.4 GHz processor and 2 Gigs of RAM, and decided that while not ideal, this computer could probably run FSX (Microsoft Flight Simulator, version 10) reasonably well. I picked up Flight Simulator Gold, which includes the Acceleration add-on pack and gave it a try.

The simulator runs pretty smooth with the graphics settings at modest levels. Eventually I'd like to get a gaming desktop with a multiple monitor setup, fancy flight controls with rudder peddles and everything, but for now this will have to do. I did manage to find an old joystick in my basement, which I suspect once belonged to my brother, since I don't remember buying it myself.

So there you have it. My intention is to learn to fly correctly, primarily flying out of the Dalton Municipal Airport, which is modeled nicely in FSX, and flying planes like the Cessna Skyhawk and others that you might legitimately train in. I'm going to avoid the unrealistic, like flying jumbo jets, military planes, and trying to fly between buildings or through the legs of the Eiffel tower and all of that. Future post will detail these early flights. Eventually I would like to move up to more powerful aircraft, although I have little interest in flying jumbo jets. At some point, I would like to fly military planes (like the A-10) and at that point might move on to the more realistic aerial combat simulations (as opposed to the arcadish variety)

I'll keep you posted!