SPAACARS Helpful Tips for Earhart Flight (and other long flights)

<div>Some reminders for those flying the Earhart Flight:

<strong>Earhart Flight Scenery
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Don't forget to install Howland Island scenery prior to that flight leg (or before so you don't forget). Otherwise you may arrive to Howland after a long flight only to find you have nowhere to land. Our P3d/FSX scenery addon has an NDB signal of 236.0 on your ADF receiver. It has a 100-mile range that should help you locate the island. The signal originates from the Coast Guard Cutter Itasca just offshore of Howland Island to simulate the failed radio navigation that was attempted during the actual Earhart flight.

Again, all pilots are welcome to do this flight tour regardless of the simulator you use. If you're not using P3d/FSX you might have to find your own scenery for Howland, land on an unimproved island, or just do a fly-over and pretend depending on your simulator setup. Most of the other stops should be available in most simulators I would hope.

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<div><strong>SPAACARS
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If you're flying the default Electra or other plane that doesn't have the correct fuel capacity (I use the default P3dv4 Electra), then the easiest thing to do is to set your simulator for "Unlimited Fuel".

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<div>On these flights with that setting (for me anyway), I encountered several issues and work-arounds:

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<div>- Fuel and Time Errors from SPAACARS
Ignore these errors until the very end of your flight. After you land your plane and park it, go into your Fuel/Payload settings and/or the time setting and set the fuel and/or time to that which the SPAACAR error message box shows. For the time error, SPAACARS is showing Zulu time -GMT time, so you might need to be sure you're setting the time using the Zulu-GMT setting.

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<div>For the fuel error, SPAACARS doesn't know what's going on when your plane runs out of fuel and keeps flying. When it next checks the fuel and finds that your fuel is at zero it goes into error mode and wants you to reset it to the last known fuel amount usually a few lbs or gallons (I forget which SPAACARS shows in the error box). Set the fuel to the correct lbs or gallons shown in the error box and close the Fuel/Payload window and/or Time setting window of your simulator to return to your regular simulator view showing your airplane. Now go to the SPAACARS error box(s) and you should be able to close those boxes with the "Ok" button on the error message boxes if you have things set the way SPAACARS is looking for them.

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<div><strong>Simulator Crashing</strong>
It can be a real pain if the simulator crashes during any flight, especially a long flight like these Earhart flights. The best solution is to use an autosave function like that included with the registered version of FSUIPC. That is the preferred method, but if you don't have the registered version, SPAACARS has an auto-save feature that you can enable in the settings area.

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<div>Each of these options will regularly save your flight at various intervals so that after the crash you can restore your flight to approximate time of crash. When the sim crashes, SPAACARS gets very excited and makes a repeated chime noise to let you know that it's no longer communicating with your sim. Leave SPAACARS alone (Don't close or change SPAACARS program in any way). Instead, restart your sim and load the most current saved flight from either of those options previously listed. Once your flight is reloaded it will be flying at about the time of the crash and SPAACARS should automatically reconnect and stop the annoying chime sound. Again, this situation might cause either time and/or fuel errors to appear after restarting the flight. Correct them as previously mentioned.

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<div>I hope this helps,

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<div>John</div><br /><br /><!-- editby --><br /><br /><em>edited by: jer029, Dec 10, 2019 - 10:17 AM</em><!-- end editby -->