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 In cold war times, the old Interflug, as all east bloc carriers was forced to operate outdated russian equipment, that guzzled fuel by the shiploads.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

Time Building - Lukenwolf Style

Now, as my Beech 1900 has reached cruising Altitude towards Magadan and basically Otto is flying the plane, with me being relegated to observer status, just checking the instruments frequently, I can whip out my little netbook to finally finish the post about me being in the middle of russias nowhere.

Recently, when I decided to start this blog, I created a new company and pilot profile for FSpassengers. This is nice on one hand because it won't be cluttered with with earlier flights or line flights of the virtual airline I fly for from time to time. But, that also puts me back to square one in terms of FSPax's career mode, meaning I'm a bloody beginner with zilch hours and only allowed to fly small single engined piston aircraft. Pretty much like in reality. Of course you now have to build up flying time to advance to bigger metal, but luckily you won't have to spend hundreds of hours to be able to fly bigger planes. From the top of my head, you need 22 hours to be allowed flying multi engined piston planes like the Cessna 402 or the oddball three-engined Britten-Norman Trislander. Another 13 hours added to that and you'll be allowed to advance to small turboprops.

So I thought about a way to build up those hours, without doing boring round trips between upper and lower backwood. At that time I read Aviatrix' posts about her new job in northern Canada, flying to places that usually start with Fort or end with either Lake or Inlet, a pretty good sign that they are as metropolitan as a dozen of Yurts in the Gobi desert. I became curious as I've never been to the US of Americaland or Canada for that matter and having read some interesting stuff like Clouddancers Alaskan Chronicles, Dave's (of FL390 fame) musings about flying his Fi-Fi jet to Anchorage made me want to visit some places, so I came up with the idea of circumnavigating the northern hemisphere.

Since I had to start with a small bird-whacker, I chose the Gippsland Airvan as a starting vehicle. It is reasonably priced in FSPax-land and it hauls up to 6 passengers. Now getting from northern Germanyland to Canada is not the easiest task, as there is a quite oversized puddle called the Atlantic in the way, so I had to jump from Island to Island to get there, which is a sort of lengthy task. In fact I was promoted to "second officer" status with the first landing on canadian soil in Iqaluit, Nunavut. That allowed me to upgrade to a twin piston.

For anyone crazy enougth to try it out. I started in Emden, Germany (EDWE) and did a short shakedown flight to the Island of Borkum (EDWR). From there I took off at 05:00 local time towards Bristol-Filton (EGTG) and after refuelling onwards to Stornoway (EGPO) on the Isle of Lewis. Next stop was Vagar (EKVG) on the Faroe Islands and from there to Egilsstadir (BIEG) in Iceland. That was followed by a cross-iceland flight to Reykjavik (BIRK) where I prepared for yet another long water crossing to Kulusuk (BGKK) in Greenland and on to Nuuk (BGGH) on the opposite end of the huge island. The final stint for the Airvan was the hideously long water crossing (4 hours) to Iqaluit, Nunavut (CYFB). At that time it was 23:50 local time, so I had crossed the atlantic in a single engined piston plane and it was technically still the same day I had taken off, timezones are an amazing invention.

Once in Iqaluit I chose PAD's amazing Cessna 414 as the steed to continue on. Be warned though, it certainly is no beginners plane. While the Airvan was as easy to fly as Microsofts C172, this plane is very twitchy especially concerning the pitch. There were three places, that I definitely wanted to see. Yellowknife and its famous "Ragged Ass Road", Anchorage and a place called Kotzebue in Alaska, not only because no German can say that name with a straight face (Kotze is german slang for "vommit") but also because it is the center of Clouddancers Adventures. He is now a Fi-Fi driver, but his time in Alaska makes an amusing and impressive read.
Since Yellowknife is too far from Iqaluit, even for the C414's impressive range, an intermediate stop in Rankin Inlet (CYRT) was needed to finally get to Yellowknife (CYZF). That marked also the first airport since Reykjavik, that had a control tower. And another thing (literally) dawned on me. While it was now almost 03:00 the day after I took of in Emden, it had never really gone dark. The sun dipped below the horizon shortly between Nuuk and Iqaluit, but it never went completely dark. That was the best sign of being as far north as you can get without being an Inuit.
Since I had just over 30 hours by the time I landed in Yellowknife I decided to make a beeline for Anchorage, putting to test the alleged 1.100 nm range of the C414. If anything would work out the way I planned, I would be allowed to drive turboprops by the time I hit the deck at PANC.
It worked out, sort of. The flight from Yellowknife to Anchorage was a mammoth 5 hour drive of 997 nautical miles. I made that one after coming home from an 8 hour day at work and once I slammed the wheels at the tarmac in PANC I was knackered beyond belief. Just to put some perspective to it, I was sitting in front of a computer screen, in no real danger of going west should I screw up and I was completely knackered. People like Aviatrix do that for real and if she screws up it may well endup with a totalled plane and a seriously dead pilot. Deep respect is not enougth to put it in words.

Anywho, once in Anchorage I had the 35 hours to upgrade to more capable hayturners. Now the fleet management of FSPax comes in. My plan is to resurrect an airline that should never have gone west (more about that in a later post) and my current long-term plan is to build up a regional fleet (7 Beech 1900, some ATR's or Dash-8's, one Dash-7 and a handfull of CRJ's). So I helped myself to 7 Beech 1900D, the type that I had my first ever real life f(r/l)ights in.

So on we went towards Kotzebue (PAOT). Having now visited all the places I wanted, I'm now on my way back home, crossing the vast russian nothingness. The first flight took me from Kotzebue to Bukhta Provedeniya (Providenya Bay, UHMD), a small gravel field, that amazingly, has a control tower. In fact I have yet to encounter a russian airfield without one. The next stop took me to Anadyr (UHMA) and onwards to Markovo (UHMO), a 7.000 feet dirt runway that even has a VASI, a really rare luxury in those regions. As I type, I'm still eating away at the 600 nm from Markovo to Magadan (UHMM) and since it is early morning on a bank holliday over here in Germanyland, I'm hoping to reach Yakutsk or even Irkutsk by the evening. Maybe I'll post some pictures of that tomorrow.

Ouch, that got sort of longish, so if I bored anybody to death - sorry mate, didn't mean it...

Cheers and always keep the takeoff-landing ratio at 1:1

How real can it get ?

In her excellent article pretending to fly Aviatrix describes her use of the flight simulator, which somewhat differs from the ways sim-only pilots do.
Having read that made me realize just how much time (and money for payware addons) I have spent on making the experience more realistic, not only for visual presentation, but for having realistic navaids and airfields that are more than just a lonely gras strip plastered into the landscape.

Probably the absolutely biggest thing for making the experience more realistic is a small addon called FSPassengers. It's an addon that adds the most important factor of aviation - passengers and cargo. If you fly around in FS2004 or any other sim, you're basically really just strolling about, but in reality you either transport some cargo from A to B (aka quadratic pax) or you haul people (aka self-loading cargo).
By flying with FSPax, you're now forced to not only fly, but to fly safely. Those virtual passengers of yours are very demanding and they love bitching. Wanna barrel-roll your 737? Well try it and get lambasted for it. Of course contrary to real life, you won't be losing your license, because you haven't done a checkride in the first place, but FSPax has a clever rating system and those huge deposits of penalty points will quickly enougth show wether you're a capable sim pilot or a maniac.

Another thing that people do to put more realism to their simming experience is online flying. There are people who do the ATC work via big networks like VATSIM and people can now fly with more realistic ATC and there are a lot of virtual Airlines, some of them are even recognized and supported by their real world counterparts.
I'm flying for a virtual airline myself and it is quite fun. I recently asked our management to add 2 Dash-7's to our fleet and they granted it. Damn, that's a fun plane. You can fly into airports with a 1.000 ft runway with 50 people in the back and it is not only legal but perfectly within the planes capabilities. A 50-seater with an approach speed of 85kn, that just boggles the mind.

The latest thing coming up are addons like TileProxy a program, that loads satellite images in real time and paints them on your landscape. If your machinery is up to it and the region you're flying is decently covered, you get a great scenery and you can now do some real VFR flying.

My post about why I'm in far east russia is still coming, I'm actually still writing it, so expect it sometimes soon.

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

Sim flying vs Real deal

Ever since I got my hand at a copy of FS2004 and started trawling the myriads of related forums, one of the most fiercely discussed questions is "Could a simulation flyer land an airplane?"
The answer boils down to a definitive "maybe". Many people who declare themselves experts insist on the NO option, which in my opinion is not correct. The reasons for that are

1. Flight simulators have become quite sophisticated these days. The first ever that I saw was a demo application on my SGI Indigo II. It is really just a couple moving OpenGL Vertices, but at the time of its creation it must have had several jaws drop to the floor. Now with FS2004 and google maps overlays, you can do VFR flying by dead reckoning if your machinery is up to it power and resource-wise.
   
2. The fact that pilots occasionally use FS2002, FS2004 or (maybe) even FSX to refamiliarize themselves with certain procedures means that flight simulators have reached a certain level of realism, else they wouldn't do that.
3. It has been proven by experiments. Last year or the year before a German TV magazine ran an experiment with the help of Lufthansa's flight simulators. Most simflyers hit the deck in a less than common fashion, but some actually managed it with the plane perfectly servicable afterwards.
   

So it boils down to the conclusion, that in fact simflying has a good relation to the real thing, but it is still far enougth away from it to prevent people from thinking of themselves as real pilots. Some of the things to consider are :

• There are several simplifications in flight dynamics, if nothing else, for the fact that computing power is limited and cannot provide a realtime simulation of each and every physical parameter. Real pilots, who had their hands at a real Cessna 172 will most certainly agree that there's not a cats chance in hell a real C172 would take as much abuse and still stay in the air than Microsofts rendition of it.
  
• You cannot hurt yourself or others in the simulator. In my hundreds of hours in FS2004 I've done things that I would never try for real, like shooting approaches that more likely resembled a dive bombing rather than a stabilized approach. Since I'm currently flying in the far eastern end of russia, where runways with PAPI's let alone ILS's are a nonexistant luxury, I've done such a thing painfully recently, because I'm notoriously useless at judging a good glide path without any help but my eyeballs. Well, I'll have enougth time to practice the next days on many more runways in the middle of the siberian nowhere.
  
• There is no authorities. You can violate any rule in the book without losing your license, that you haven't had to acquire in the first place.
  

So with all these things considered, I'm enjoying the fact that I can pretend to be flying an airplane, but I am aware that I am everything but a pilot, an educated layman perhaps but nothing more, so if this blog should ever have any readers, feel free to lambast me if I'm talking aviation BS at any point :-)

During the last days I've traversed Canada's north and Alaska towards russias far end. Why that is, I will explain later today.

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

Longest Intro... Ever

Most airline pilots, if they somehow were misdirected here will probably hurl some verbal abuse at their screen wanting to strangle that kid, who can't get something as easy as "pilot not flying" right. Well dear stranger, you'll have to work that out yourself and to assist you in that, I shall write this slightly oversized introduction post.

Some things about me. I'm from Germany and as a Freelance IT Consultant I have a job that for most people is so boring, that I'm not going to say much about it here for fear of my first reader becoming my first victim as well by boredom to death.

I've always been crazy about planes and air travel, until I flew the first time. I was working for Volkswagen at the time and I was destined to board a charter flight in a Beech 1900D. To say it was bad would be a gross understatement, it was terrible. I learned the hard way, that I

a) seem to be more than slightly claustrophobic, so the Beech 1900 isn't the best place to be in. I'd probably just stopped trying and died, had that been a Fairchild Metro.

b) seem not to react well to height changes, which an aircraft sort of does. It might explain why I never was too fond of Ferris Wheels as a kid.

Long story short - I was scared to death and had the nice prospect of the return flight the very same day.

That did scratch my aviation itch in a damn hurry, NOT. Although I knew at that point, that I made a lousy passenger, I continued to try to learn everything about aviation. Give or take a month, a year and 3 more roundtrips on the Beech 1900 later I could name all the metal that all the european carriers had in their fleet, I knew what NDB approaches were and whatnot. Upping the game by doling out obscene amounts of cash for Microsofts Flight Simulator 2004, bazillions of payware planes, yoke and rudder controls - the lot.

Hoping that this would get rid of my panic in the air I showed up at Berlin-Tegel airport for a flight to Moscow Domodedovo and from there on to Omsk in Siberia. Our steed was a trusty ol' 737-300 operated by a company called Dba, long since swallowed by Air Berlin. It was a little better than on the Beech, but the basic terror and gallons of ice cold sweat in my palms remained again with the nice outlook of yet another flight the same day. This time the vehicle of choice was a Tupolev TU-154M operated by Siberia Airlines (now S7 Airlines). That was in fact the least scary ride I ever had, although with least meaning, I only twice mentally wrote my last will. It is a great plane, the sound of those 3 Soloviev engines is a great synphony.

I had quite a few rides as a passengers, but never ever was I even the slightest bit comfortable within a pressurized metal tube. So I decided to live through the terror if I actually have to fly, but limit it to the absolute unavoidable minimum, if for nothing else, I don't want to scare or unsettle other passengers by having that "I'm gonna die"-Look on my face.

So I decided to get my aviation fix from Microsoft. Hundreds of hours spent in the virtual skies. That's what this blog is about and hopefully the title makes some sense now :-)

That was the opener, more to follow soon. Meanwhile you can check out the 4 Blogs on the right to see, who the people are that gave me the idea to start a blog. Especially Aviatrix' blog is an absolutely brilliant read.

Cheers, and keep the takeoff-landing ratio at 1:1