Kick'en Back in the Pilot's Pub celebrating the first leg of Earhart Tour

Hey Pilots,

Since I'm not big on flying these long-haul flights, I've decided to keep a diary...ok, flight log of my journey. So, as I sit back in the glow of several Chardonnays and a Pino Noir, let me share my first impressions of this long journey to come. First things first - I installed my version of Howland Island (the one for FTX Global/Vector), as that's what I use. Larry mentioned that the original addon resulted in trees very close to the runway threshold, requiring skillful high approach and dropping down late onto the runway to land safely by avoiding the trees, yet having enough stopping distance to avoid the trees at the other end of the runway. In practice I managed to accomplish both, bouncing to a stop well before the end of the 4000 foot runway at Howland Island before hitting the trees, while avoiding flying into the ones on the approach side of the runway. Anyway, after a sleepless, obsessive-compulsive night, I added a file to remove the trees from the likely approach side of the runway, so now weary pilots can fly straight in without worrying about trees. Most importantly, I verified that the scenery is installed correctly and there's a safe landing area when I get to that fateful stop that poor Amelia never found. I then moved on to my own flight and aircraft.

I hopped over to KOAK, Oakland California, where our flight begins...and hopefully ends at some point in the future. I'm flying P3Dv4, and -being a Lockheed product, it conveniently included a number of Electra 10 planes similar to, if not the same model used by Earhart. Now about the fuel issue. As our Tour Page notes, Amelia's plane was modified to hold many more gallons of fuel than our simulated planes will hold. After looking into altering the aircraft.cfg file to increase fuel capacity, and finding it a bit more complicated than changing a few numbers, I opted for just checking the box in the P3D/FSX Realism settings for "Unlimited Fuel". Ok...I know this is cheating a bit - but I can live with this modification. I'm not out to prove anything, and I'd hate to get a few miles out of Howland only to run out of fuel and find out what really happened to Amelia by joining her by crashing my fuel-starved plane next to hers. Also...I don't want to have to repeat or try to rescue a PIREP of such a misadventure for sending to our website. Therefore, this seems to be the best alternative.

I started off from Oakland, jumping into my aircraft with little preparation other than my practice takeoff and landing at the newly-constructed Howland Island airfield. I'm currently using real-would weather (ActiveSky for P3dv4), but fortunately found the weather relatively accommodating - some clouds, but primarily VFR conditions. Once airborne, I figured I better learn how to fly this plane. Yep...a bit backwards - but like I said, I was eager to get going. I finally figured out how to get the plane to fly a heading and a relatively stable altitude, but there is no following a GPS track - not surprising right? Anyway, I ended up sitting through the 2-hour flight flying VOR to VOR to Burbank. This plane does have a rudimentary ILS, which will come in handy if I continue to fly with real weather settings. Not sure if I want to do this on those really long legs across the open water, but we'll see. As long as there's a transmitter that I can hone in on to bring me back as I near a destination, I might be ok. By the way, I think I averaged a cruising speed of about 180 Kts, so this is really going to be a long journey. The good news is that the plane is stable in the p3d environment and the view along the way was spectacular, as you can see by the one picture posted so far.

Any other pilots who want to join me on this journey, feel free to get going now. You won't be too far behind, as I may not leave Burbank until Thursday - too many photo ops and speaking engagements with VIPs this evening and tomorrow.

Happy flying,

John

Not much to it Robert. Get JoinFS to connect to another pilot(s) plane (similar to FSHost only it doesn't require a server) and TeamSpeak3 client to connect to our teamspeak servers for voice communications.

John

Ok, so here I am in Sunny Tucson Arizona after just landing on the second leg of this round-the-world tour. I'm still flying VOR to VOR, but practicing longer range flights for those coming where there won't be navigational aids for long distances. After getting on the proper heading, I set my nav radio for last VOR that was about halfway, and could already pick it up leaving Burbank. I set Nav2 to the Tucson VOR and the audio button on so I'd hear when it was picked up. I followed the VOR at the half-waypoint (forget the exact VOR), but I flew past it and watched the needle of my Nav1 swing around so that I could see that I was still on course - pretty close to vertical needle.

Eventually I picked up Tucson's VOR signal, verifying it with the beeps on my flight chart to ensure it was, in fact, the correct VOR. I followed that into Tucson, and then switching to the ILS for runway 11L to practice the ILS approach. I was able to track both localizer and glideslope into runway 11L, even though I could see the runway. It's nice to practice the instrument approach while verifying out the window that everything is working as expected. I was again flying real-world weather, so I'm sure that I'll be needing those IFR skills soon enough.

John<br /><br /><!-- editby --><br /><br /><em>edited by: jer029, Oct 31, 2019 - 02:34 PM</em><!-- end editby -->

Hah Philippe, I'm sure you'll catch up and probably pass me. I missed yesterday because I updated my P3d from v4 to v4.5 and it messed up my setup (addon conflicts). I ended up having to remove all addons. This took out all my scenery, but the FTX/Orbx Global/vector installed without redownload which saved lots of time. Unfortunately, a few other addons including FSUIPC and all my other scenery - including all of RTMM stuff had to be re-installed, and a number of addons needed updating to be 4.5 compatible.

Anyway...I was back up and flying today - but spent literally all day yesterday correcting the damage from the p3d 4.5 update. I'm not sure it was worth it.

I must say I'm having some fun flying cross country VOR to VOR on this flight. not exactly looking forward to the 11-12 hour legs to Howland Island and from Hawaii to the mainland again, but I guess I can live with just a couple of those. I'm flying 'real time' - not speeding up the sim rate, so the hours posted are actual hours that my plane has been in the air.

A note to pilots on this - and the use of SPAACARS with Unlimited Fuel set in your sim settings. I found that my setup (p3d), once the fuel got to zero, the plane kept flying. At some point SPAACARs determined that, first the fuel was not correct. My fuel showed empty but it thought that I should have a certain amount left - and displayed that in the error box - telling me to set my fuel to that amount. I did that, and once I clicked "OK" button to set that fuel amount, I could close that SPAACARS fuel warning window and then immediately got a time change window. Not sure what that was about, but I'm thinking that it remembered the time when the fuel warning first came up ( I must have missed it). Anyway - I set the time (Zulu time) it was looking for just like I did with the fuel, and that cleared the messages - apparently satisfying SPAACARS that things were the way they were supposed to be, and it let me stop the logging and then send the PIREP. This seemed to work because the flight data shown seemed relatively accurate for my flight.

So...if you get those annoying messages during these flights that exceed fuel capacity. Just set the fuel and/or time to that shown in the SPAACARs window and you should be able to clear those error boxes and carry on with SPAACARs.

Hope this helps,

John<br /><br /><!-- editby --><br /><br /><em>edited by: jer029, Nov 02, 2019 - 11:10 PM</em><!-- end editby -->