Le Sigh the France

Ok, folks. Let's - for a minute - forget that cycling enjoys the same societal acceptance as two-armed outdoor onanism at the moment and that some psychopathic Texan just took an explosive crap all over the sport, while the man supposed to run it doesn't realized that he's also completely full of it. Let that all be little details to worry about later, because:

The ASO has presented next years Tour de France. Hosianna!

Now let's for a moment assume that cycling will not have sunken so deep that next year's Tour will be broadcast on the Porn Channel with an X-rate and we all have to pay for it in shady roadside Motels. Let's just assume it will return on Eurosport or any other channel in countries where pro-cycling hasn't  been outlawed or throughly bumfucked yet.

Let's have a look at it, shall we? Let's start with the good things.

1. The profile

While this year's tour was tailor made for Sky's poster boy Mr. Ridiculous Sideburns, next year's tour will most likely see Froome in the team leader's position (assuming he hasn't confessed to some chemichal misdeeds by then). The time triallists will be utterly disappointed with it. There are three time trials, but they could be won by just about anyone who has good legs that day.
The first one is a team event and it's only 25km long, although I'm not sure the word 'long' is really applicable here. So at least it won't be wreaking havoc in the GC as earlier such events have done in Tours past.
The second one is 33km long and will probably be just about long enough to favour the big engines - Sideburns, Froome, Spartacus or Martin (if he somehow manages to stay on his bloody bike next year)
The third one is a humdinger. 32km mountain timetrial. 12km of climbing in it. If any of the Schlecks, Froome or Contador should still be unbanned by the time, one of them will nick that one. Just think about it - a Schleck could actually not suck donkeyballs in a time trial. That alone is worth my time.

Sorry mate, have run out of good things to make up so there be a RANT.

What in the name of all that's holy were Prudhomme and his cronies smoking? They nail it spot on with reducing timetrial distance and then completely fuck it up by placing them in all the wrong places. Why isn't the team time trial the opening stage? The way they have constructed the route, the bloody jersey will go directly to a sprinter sissy - most likely to Mark Horseteeth, because he's psychopathic enough to simply wreck the others, like he did in last years Tour de Suisse.
The first week of a Tour has always been utter boredom to begin with: Some poor idiots waste a perfectly usable day of their life out in the wind, while we see a mad dash at the end between 7 guys trying to kill each other even harder than the day before. It's called a sprint stage and bores the raw shit out of me. But at least we always had a bit of entertaining watching if one of the sprinter ladies would manage to claw back enough time on the prologue winner to be in yellow for a day before it went to a man, who's name has been stricken from existence lately. Next year it will go to the lady boy right away. *sigh*

Then there be the third, the mountain time trial, which one would expect on the penultimate day, setting up an epic showdown between whoever hasn't confessed to or been busted for doping yet. But, no, that would make entirely too much sense. There are thee more mountain finishes to follow it. Monsieur Prudhomme, if that what thee smoked this morning art legal, send me some of that shit.
In one foul swoop, he shafts viewers and barroudeurs alike. The users, because the GC contenders will ride half-arsed to avoid being burnt out on the last three finishes. And the barroudeurs (that be folks like Jens Voigt, the one hundred eleventy year old V8 engine from Berlin), because they don't get a chance to grab a stage in the last week.

Seriously ASO, you guys suck donkeyballs.

And now for something completely different...

I've been a cycling nut all my life. I've learned to ride a bike when I was just old enough to stop crapping my diapers - ok, my mother brutalizing the raw crap out of me when I failed the first time might have sped up my progress a bit. But anyways. Even now at age 38, weighing more than Belgium, I still love a good bike ride.
And I love watching the Tour de France on TV. Lovely Landschaft, epic mountain stages, the lot. But there was this pissy arrogant Yank who took a crap all over the race.
I was fairly neutral towards Armstrong until that 2004 stage where he buttfucked poor Simeoni in plain view of the camera. At that point I started to hate the shithead with a passion. I fucking hate bullies. Me getting perpetually getting beat up at school by playground bullies might have contributed to it. It's just such a soothing feeling. After the bully beat the raw crap out of you at school, you arrive at home and your mother goes apeshit and beats you up with just about anything she can lift high enough - Iron pans were our lucky days back at the time.
Don't think I'm doing the drama queen here - it happened and I have 4 months in a psychiatric clinic, being treated for depression, to show it. Little household hint - if you find yourself in the loonie bin, make sure the doc doesn't tick the 'suicidal' checkbox on your patient form. It's no fun tying to have a wee with someone else looking over your shoulder to make sure you don't off yourself with the chain on the fucking toilet flush!

I digress...

Anyway. Five years ago It came to light that Team Terrorkom and Jan Ullrich were serial cheats and cycling in Germany was truly and thoroughly fucked. Admitting to a cycling enthusiasm since then was just about the same as telling people 'I like to fuck sheep. Push them to the edge of the cliff, They'll push back.' And just as you think that things are starting to return to normal, Armstrongs monumentally drugged up arse appears on the horizon and shits the fuck all over the place.

So what did we learn since Oct. 10th? Armstrong cheated, blackmailed team mates into doping, physically assaulted Tyler Hamiton, bribed Phat Mcquid and the UCI, applied psychoterror to Levy Leipheimers wife, slandered Franky Andreu's wife. Sweet Jebus on a Pogo stick - I thought I was messed up!! This guy is a certifiable psychopath!

What do the media do? Well they're diddling the family jewels and apart from that they're doing diddly squat! Bribery McQuid had a jolly funny press conference, threw Armstrong under the bus and said everything's fine in UCI-land. Whae'Aye Man. Ever heard of Comical Ali? You make the dude look like Hemingway you idiot! Seriously, the day Phat pat is thrown to the wolves will be the day I relieve myself all over my keyboard. And you know what? He's doing it all by himself. He wouldn't know common sense if it danced stark-naked in front of him, so sooner or later that Irish idiot will make himself obsolete.

Cycling will have have a wild party that day, punk!

Life on the line...

Dave's chatch line is "Life on the Line continues...." as he plows his way through the skies of Americaland in his Fi-Fi jet. Having now completed my tour around the globe, it is time for me to get a taste of that as well.

As I've described earlier, I've bought 7 Beech 1900's for my virtual reincarnation of our former communistical flag carrier Interflug. Said company was wiped out back in 1992 under circumstances that would even make a west african dictator blush in shame. In cold war times, the old Interflug, as all east bloc carriers was forced to operate outdated russian equipment, that guzzled fuel by the shiploads. In 1988 they finally convinced our east german gouvernment to buy three long range Airbi A310.


Then story of how the Interflug was killed is a long one, but the short version is, that the Gouvernment pilfered the three A310, which fly in Luftwaffe colors till this day and left Lufthansa of all people with the task of selling off the assets of Interflug and word is that the result was a 100+ Million quid, not bad a loot really. Now if anybody thinks, that if the gouvernment runs off with all the cash and leaves McDonalds the task to sell off all of Burger Kings assets would be a strange idea, well welcome to Germanies post reunification economics.

Anywho, enougth of these bad vibes. In my little fantasy world, the good ol' Interflug is just making a comeback. 7 Beeches isn't exactly going to give Lufthansa sleepless nights, but you have to start somewhere.
My little tour has left me with over 20 city names, which come in handy as names for the ships I'm going to add to the fleet and once I run out of names, well there's still the southern hemisphere, that I have never been to :-)
Should there be anybody reading this, she or he might remember, that I left the Beech, that took us all across russia in Briansk. That's actually ship #7 (reg. D-CREY), christened "Reykjavik". She'll be based there. The other 6 are standing in Filton, waiting to be picked up after painting. I ferried ship #1 (Emden) to its base in Nuremberg, but decided it was a boring task and left the other ships to be delivered by my virtual fellow pilots.

I went for the life on the line, Making the first flights from Briansk to Kaluga and back. It's a rather shortish flight just over 100 miles, so I decided that 15.000ft cruise height is sufficient. A first sign that things wouldn't be as I expected, when tower gave me taxi instructions to runway 17. Now I've made many a flight from Briansk and never took off from 17, runway 35 is pretty much the norm. That was a hint at tailwind along the route.
True to that observation, I got a howling tailwind at 15.000. 290 kn ground speed in a Beech 1900 is as close as you get to warp 9 in that little thing, but it wasn't a very good sign for the return leg. Now the landing in Kaluga would be quite a task. My normal way of flying is to handfly up to 5.000 ft before handing the ship to the auto pilot and upon descent I usually put Otto to sleep at 5.000 AGL as well. Not long after having reclaimed manual control, I saw the F-square in FSPax's status window. That is the fear level of my virtual passengers. According to that display, the peeps in the back were excreting bricks at that point, which is a good sign of either bad turbulence or you having a go at aerobatics. Since my name isn't Wagstaff, it left only option number one and a turbulence was had. In fact I hurtled down the glide path like a drunken Yak at a crab angle that made it easier to watch the center line through the side window. Not caring for style marks I planted her firmly on terra firma.
As expected the return leg was less fun than drowning. Even at high speed cruise settings I didn't even come close to 190kn groundspeed, which made a monkey's breakfast of my block time, even on such a short stint. Thanks god I blocked out a couple mins earlier.

Today the fun continues, onwards to Belarus.

Cheers, and always keep your takeoff-landing ratio at 1:1

Connecting the dots

I did it! The dots are connected. 27 flights, 11.730 nm, 72 flying hours.



After leaving Omsk (UNOO), I took the Beech to Yekaterinburg (USSS, formerly Sverdlovsk) the city, where a certain Boris Yelzin was born, known throughout the world as the heavyweight binge drinking world champion. The next stop was Samara (UWWW) and from there to Bryansk (UUBP) just 50 nm from the belarussian border. Having the crossing of russia almost completed, I left the Beech 1900 behind, because Bryansk is, where she will be based for scheduled flights to Saransk, Kaluga, Homiel (Belarus) and Charkiv (Ukraine).

The trip continued on the C414 towards Kaunas (EYKA) in Lithuania. The next stop planned was Bornholm in Denmark, but seeing, that the remaining 650nm to Emden were well within the Cessna's range, I decided to just make a beeline for it. I didn't know that it is possible to get emotional about flying in the simulator, but when I got the following transmission :

Interflug 026, contact Berlin Control on 123 decimal 225

my eyes started to water. Now, mind you I technically never left German soil in the last 10 days, in fact I didn't even leave the boundaries of Ingolstadt, but all this simflying at the far end of the world gave me a feeling of coming home from an epic journey. Well maybe I'm just an idiot, but it somehow felt great :-)

And now for the promised pictures from the Novosibirsk-Omsk flight

view from a dark and cold office

Gate assignment, russian style (note the ultramodern airstair) ...

...while all the big stuff stands in the cheap spaces

Taking off just in time. An inbound S7 Tu-154 is already on final. Wouldn't wanna cramp their style, eh?

touchdown bang on time in excellent weather

after flying halfway across the globe I seem to have become useless at parking...

So,what purpose did that serve? Well, several :

• I have now 70+ flying hours and by FSPax rules I'm now legal to fly Jets up to 44K lbs (don't try this in reality)
• I've seen places (virtually), that I never was at before.
• I've done a lot of approaches without any gadgetry or navaids to turn for help to. And I've become a lot better at getting it right.
• I've managed to overfly the most eastern (big diomede island) and the most western (leaving Kaliningrad oblast for poland) of russia and I racked up 35 flying hours in between. That puts a perspective to the huge landmass, that is russia.

So now it's the life on the line ahead. Actually not quite. There are still 6 Beech 1900's standing in Filton, after getting their coat of paint, so the next days will be a flurry of flying birdwhackers from Great Englandland to Germania to their respective bases. Oh joy.

Cheers, and always keep your takeoff-landing ratio at 1:1

Blitz-Post

I just landed in Kaunas, Lithuania. Two 300nm flights tomorrow Bornholm (Denmark) and Emden (Germanyland) and the trip around the northern hemisphere is done. Damn, that'll be a good feeling :-)

Coming home, yet parting ways

Yesterday really was a mixed bag, if I ever saw one.
Flying was great and I made it as far as Omsk, just as planned. I also managed to grab some nice screenshots, which I'll post here, once I cut them to a size that doesn't over load your network traffic.

The real kicker came in the evening. A couple of days ago I raised my voice (probably too high) in our Virtual Airline's forum about an issue with scheduling flights for planes into places with way too short a runway. Even a slight drizzle and a mildly conterminated runway would make an attempt at landing an act of utter lunacy.
Now, what one has to realize is, that I'm the worlds most useless diplomat. I'm sporting a fat Berlin accent, which is by some perceived as plain rude, add to that my unfortunate tendency to revert to a rather ripe language, when I'm aggitated and you'll probably see where this is going to. Needless to say, people were very quick to point out my linguistic deficit without even bothering to make any remark towards the safety concerns I was raising.
Having found my composure, more or less, I appologized for my substandard linguistic presentation, but rephrased my initial concern, which prompted a return, that just broke the camels back. First of all my appology was rejected for it not being phrased in a style that pleased the "Leadership" followed by a musing, that "the Leaderships patience credit with me had run out". My initial thought was - "WTF is it? North Korea Simulator 2009?". Not even considering the fact, that aforementioned leadership, didn't even bother trying to contact me by PM or EMail, chosing to rather chew my backside publically right there. I may have a bad language, but I tend to think, that's still better than a bad attitude.
Realizing, that the "dear leaders" concern was putting more emphasis on what I say and how, rather than adressing my displeasure with people gloating about approaches to extremely short runways with a 70 seater plane and the appearance of such routes in our schedule, I chose to look, where the builders left the hole in the wall and left.

Thus endeth my involvement with the VA, I flew for. In a sudden change of fate though, I accidentally found out, that someone is founding a VA for the very airline, that I'm planning to resurrect. How's that for a twist in the story line :-)

PS: I'm disallowing comments for this post, as shortly before the fight broke out I left a link to this blog in my now ex-VA's forum. To avoid any fights being taken out I'm not naming the VA and I'm disallowing comments for just this one post. Hope you will understand.

Cheers, and always keep your takeoff-landing ratio at 1:1

Mother Russia

After 25 minutes of coercing, I've finally wrestled the Beech to FL240. She wasn't very fond of this climbing malarkey all the way since FL210. Not really a surprize, considering that she had to drag 13 pax and 4.000 lbs of fuel up there - we were as close to MTOW as you can get without (virtual) authorities kicking your head in.

Progress yesterday was excellent, despite fighting a nasty head wind all day. Never even once did we reach the planned cruising speed of 240, more like 228 was all she could muster with the wind firmly on the nose.
The first run was from Markovo (UHMO) to Magadan (UHMM), where I was at the right place at the right time to witness one of only 3 weekly departures of Domodedovo Airlines' IL-62 to Moscow - what a majestic bird, but that'll soon make way for yet another 767 probably. Leaving Magadan, I pointed her nose towards Yakutsk (UEEE) and off we went. Not wasting much time, I had her refuelled while refuelling myself with a bowl of Pasta, the size of which probably exceeds what my doc would advise.
Leaving Yakutsk behind, we made a run for the diamond mining town of Mirny (UERR). Another refuelling stop later we were off on the final leg of the day to Bratsk (UIBB), another completely meaningless town in the middle of nowhere. Almost 2.500 nm on a single day, not a bad progress.

Well, if that all sounds completely and mindnumbingly boring to you, welcome to the club. What a drag that was. Especially since all the airfields were the same. An asphalt runway of minimum 11.000ft with no visual aids whatsoever. But at least I finally have some gutfeeling for approaching runways without any gadget to help you with the glideslope. I'm normally completely useless at that, but by the time I gently settled her down in Bratsk, I sort of got the hang of it, which means I came in less than 500 ft too high.
This method of small airports having huge runways is not a result of russian lunacy, but more to the fact that these far eastern routes in the 70's were often served by TU-114's and those needed a whole lot of runway. And besides that Airports like Yakutsk, Bratsk and Mirny are dedicated ETOPS diversion airfields for the cross-polar routes, so they must easily handle an A33o or B777, which need some runway as well.

As I type, I've just been handed over to Krasnoyarsk Control and we're about 2.5 hours away from our destination, which is Novosibirsk's Tolmachevo Airport (UNNT). This is special for two reasons. Once there, we're only about 800nm from russias european part, so we're getting closer to home and the next flight will be to Omsk, my homebase when I was living in russia, so that'll be an airfield that I flew in and out from as a pax many a time. I will document that in pictures as well, because Tolmachevo is one of the best freeware sceneries for FS2004. Those russians are spectacular scenery designers.

With Omsk, Ekaterinburg,Kazan,Bryansk,Moscow,Kaliningrad,Sczeczin and finally Emden, we're just 8 flights and the rest of this away from home, so if everything works out, I'll have done my first trip around the world by Sunday :-)

cheers, and always keep your takeoff-landing ratio at 1:1