Key West Sight Seeing

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.