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.