Off to Australia

It's been a while since I've updated my travel log for this Earhart Flight. Today I left Southeast Asia and headed for the Australian continent. Larry and I have been traveling this flight plan relatively close to each other and comparing notes along the way. One of the most common elements has been the bad weather the last few legs. A combination of fog and dust have made a number of those flights quiet challenging. Some were near-zero visibility - a landing I would never try if it was a real aircraft. One of the flights has zero visibility until just about 50-feet off the runway. I had to resort to the antiquated ILS navigation equipment available on the Electra to make that landing. With my limited experience with the ILS sysetem, zero-visibility and my inexperience flying manually tracking the localizer and glideslope, I found myself losing situational awareness on more than a few occasions. Several times I came close to hitting the ground before recovering control of the aircraft. Recovering control of the aircraft and then again trying to line up the localizer and glideslope was a handful.

Other than that one instance, a number of the other recent legs had very limited visibility - including my most recent landing...and takeoff again, from WATT as pictured below. Now I'm off to Australia - and hopefully better weather than we've had recently. Lastly I might add that Larry and I are now coming up to that fateful leg to Howland Island that marked the tragic end of Earhart's adventure. Hopefully we will fare better.

<img src="coppermine/albums/userpics/10003/3/watt.jpg" alt="" width="700" height="390">

Hey Smitty,

Sounds like you have quite a setup. I also try to fly real-world weather with most of my flights (ASN). I've registered you as a photo gallery user now, so you should either get an email with a password, or you might have to click on the password reset option and have it mailed to you. Your user name is the same as for the main SPA site and you may want to use the same password for the gallery. It's easier to remember that way.