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 In cold war times, the old Interflug, as all east bloc carriers was forced to operate outdated russian equipment, that guzzled fuel by the shiploads.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