Preflight

Today I continued flying my Canadian tour, flying three legs today (technically, I am still flying the last one as I write this). I flew the first leg from Toronto to Sault St. Marie on VATSIM. It was a nice, relaxing flight that I enjoyed quite a lot. Contrary to most of my flights recently, I paid a lot more attention to the flight instead of working on homework, browsing the internet, or reading during the flight. Toronto center was on for part of the flight and that made the flight even more entertaining. I must say that while I still get jitters about flying online occasionally, I find that flying online with ATC is much more awarding than flying offline or even online without ATC. This first leg took 2.7 hours and covered a distance of 276 nm. You can also check out the flight on vataware.

Sunset

My second and third flights were both night flights flown offline. I was a lot more distracted during these flights however, since I had to get some homework done during them. The first of these two flights took me to Wawa, ON and the second took me to Thunder Bay, ON. The flight to Wawa took about 1 hour and covered a distance of 91 nm. The flight to Thunder Bay is took 1.9 hours and covered a distance of 184 nm.

Parked

Having completed these three flights, I only have five legs of my tour left. Part of the reason why I made the extra push today and flew three legs was the fact that the mission for VPA must be completed by October 12. I am going to be a bit busy during the time leading up to the deadline, so I figured that I had best work extra hard on the tour tonight.

The pictures in this post came from my first flight today. For those in VPA, you can see a full set of 10 pictures that I have entered in the September series screenshot contest. You can also see them on my Photobucket.

Enroute

Sorry about not posting for a while. I haven’t had a whole lot of time for flight simulation recently.

I flew another flight for my Canadian tour on Tuesday earlier this week. It was a very short, 18-nm flight from Ottowa, ON to Carp, ON. I flew it offline. It took .4 hours and was flown completely in the dark.

Today, I flew the next leg of the tour, continuing on from Carp to Toronto. I flew this flight on VATSIM. It was a 178-nm flight and took 1.9 hours. I did have ATC for arrival into Toronto.

Toronto

I enjoyed the flight a lot and I am hoping that I will be able to get back into flying on a regular basis. Unfortunately, I frequently don’ t have time to fly on weekdays because of school and other activities.

I don’t want to let this blog die though, so keep checking back for new posts.

Today I flew two more legs of my Canadian tour. These legs took me across the border to the US for a few flights. They took me from Harvre St. Pierre, QC to Jackman, ME and then to Greenville, ME. Overall, these flights were not very eventful. I flew them on IVAO and they took me 4.3 and 0.5 hours respectively.

Before

I spent a good portion of the day yesterday and my evening Friday night trying out Airport Design Editor and improving my home airport in FSX. I was surprised by how easy it was and by how much work I was able to get done improving the airport. It already looks much better than the default version and I am very excited to continue working on it and to fly in and out of my newly improved airport.

I hope to keep working on the airport and to also work on improving the city around it as I get more experience designing scenery.

After

Climbing Out of Georgetown

Well, I have finally gotten my fresh install of flight sim up and running fine. I happened to have plenty of free time this evening, so I decided to go flying. Since the next leg of my Canadian tour was a bit too long for this evening and since I wanted a little change from the same old, same old, I decided to fly a short tour of Delaware for a series of VFR missions in the Virtual Pilot’s Association. This series of missions is a series of VFR tours of each of the 50 states. The Delaware tour is the first one in the series and consists of three short hops for a total of 187 nautical miles. I was able to fly the entire tour in one night and it took me just 2.4 hours.

The Garmin 1000

Part of my reason for flying this tour was to try out the default Cessna 172 with the Garmin 1000 (since the G1000 is only available in the deluxe edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator). I really enjoyed flying with the G1000. The full glass cockpit is quite a change from the traditional instruments I have been using in the Beaver.

I also utilized Real Environment Xtreme for these flights. I looks pretty nice. I especially like the 3D clouds. They are much more realistic than the default flight sim clouds or even the clouds from HiFi Simulation’s X Graphics package. I still need to fly some more flights though before I can really get a feel for what I think of REX.

The Sun Beginning to Set

One last new thing about this flight was flying on IVAO. I created an IVAO account a while back, but until today I hadn’t flown at all on IVAO. IVAO works a lot better with VPA’s new system than VATSIM does since both IVAO and VPA use ICAO style flight plans while VATSIM uses FAA style flight plans. The one major problem with IVAO is that there is a lot less traffic in the USA, which is where I fly primarily since I am American. I don’t mind the lack of traffic too much though since I like flying offline about as much as I do online. It just got a bit lonely up there after a while.

I ended up spending the entire evening working on getting Real Environment Xtreme up and running instead of flying as I had originally intended. I believe I do have everything set up the way I want it now, so I will try to get a flight in tomorrow if I don’t have a lot of homework. I’ll be happy to get back to flying once I’ve got it all taken care of.

Having received my new copy of Flight Simulator X Gold Edition in the mail yesterday, I have been working on performing a fresh install of flight simulator throughout the day. To make sure I would have as clean of an install as possible, I made sure to uninstall all addons and remove everything before beginning to install the new version of FSX. I do now have flight simulator up and running, but I still have a handful of addons left to install. Due to this ongoing process, I will likely not get to do any flying this weekend, but I’ll definitely try it all out as soon as it is ready.

Another Beautiful Sunset

Today, I flew another leg of my tour. This flight took me from Lourdes de Blanc Sablon, Quebec to Havre St. Pierre, Quebec. This flight took me a bit longer than expected because I failed to take the wind into consideration. Prevailing winds over the US are generally out of the west, so I have been making pretty good time heading east. This flight, however, started my turn back to the west so it went a lot slower because of the headwind.

Today, I flew into the sunset and got to make use of the night textures in the Aerosoft Beaver. My only complaint is that the instrument textures are useless during sunset. As the sun starts to go down, the panel gets too dark to easily read. The panel lights don’t help however, because they are also too dark to read unless it is really dark outside (after the sun has set). This meant that there was a period during the flight when it was nearly impossible to read any of the instruments.

Once again, it was not a very eventful flight, but that’ s all right. I took about 3.1 hours and covered a total of about 264 nm. This flight can be found on vataware.

On a side note, my copy of FSX Gold Edition arrived in the mail today, so I will be performing a fresh install of Flight Simulator tomorrow. Should be interesting.

Climbing Out of Goose Bay

I flew yet another flight for my ongoing Canadian tour today. Today’s flight took me from Goose Bay, Newfoundland to Lourdes de Blanc Sablon, Quebec. The weather here is much better than it was when I was up North. The sky was nearly clear the whole way. The only downside was a 10 knot crosswind on landing, but that wasn’t too hard to deal with.

Once again, this was a VATSIM flight and you can check it out on vataware.

This was the 20th leg out of a total of 35. The coming flights are for the most part a lot shorter than when I was up north (the shortest is 18 nm), so I am actually getting relatively close to being done once and for all. The only thing that will slow me down is that school will be resuming tomorrow, so I will have less time for flight simulation.

Today’s flight was approximately164 nm long and took about 1.5 hours.

Today I only flew one leg of my tour. Today’s flight took me from Kuujuaq, Quebec to Goose Bay, Newfoundland. The flight started out with some rain, and altogether typical weather for this tour, but, as I traveled south the weather cleared up. I definitely am getting back into some more heavily populated areas since my destination airport was actually a controlled airport.

I flew this leg on VATSIM as well. You can check out my flight on vataware. The flight was 3.4 hours long and covered a total of about 394 nm. Sorry for the short entry today, but it is late and the blog entry was a bit of an afterthought anyway. I really want to keep this blog going, though, so I forced myself to write a quick entry for this flight.