"Nothing but the rain"
I was doing a thing in X-Plane when the beauty of it struck me. Look at the water, look at the reflections in the glass, and look at the countryside. Just beautiful.
The text boxes in the air just off the nose are other aircraft inputted to the simulator by an add-in I use. It makes flying around less lonely.
I try and have a play in my flight sim a few times a week. It’s nice and calming, I get to see the countryside and it makes me happy. My initial plan for today’s flight was to take off from Biggin Hill and then head to the coast, go low level over the Channel and then land somewhere in France. However, after take off I thought I’d do some sight seeing over London. I turned west. I could then see Canary Wharf, the City and beyond, but there was a little target right in the middle. A small square on the screen. So, it just had to be done. I was flying the L29 and it’s a lovely little plane, not much fuel capacity but flies well. I pointed the nose at the square and off we went.
I’ve called this communication Doing A Pollock in honour of the actual RAF pilot who flew his Hunter through the bridge. I love how his unit was posted to Africa after his stunt!
I recently realised that I have some reward points in my X-Plane shop account. It looks like I’ve spent enough money to get some “free” extras. So I purchased the L29 for X-Plane. I’ve been flying around in it and it’s nice and smooth. It doesn’t react to anything as fast as the other military planes I have but it’s nice.
The picture is me flying from Hildesheim to Hannover checking out my new scenery files. Now, it turns out that the title of this communication is a reference to a Monty Python sketch that is about an albatross. The problem is that the L29 is really called the Delfín and it’s the L39 that is the Albatross. Oh well, maybe I’ll get the plane correct next time!
It’s worth playing computer games just to look at the views.
I finally managed to upload a video to YouTube after about a month of trying now and then. I don’t know why things didn’t work well for that time. But, I’ve managed to upload two videos recently. I’d been trying for ages to upload my V22 flying video. It’s now done.
There’s a company who design aircraft for flight simulators called AOA Simulations and I have to say they have the perfect mix of aircraft I really want to fly and excellent quality so I have, over the years, spent some money getting their aircraft. The most recent addition to my collection is the CV-22 Osprey. I owned this aircraft before on a previous version of X-Plane and so decided to get it again. The company do have an F35 but I have other fast jets and I’m not fussed about that.
Look at how ridiculously pretty this aircraft simulation is. I’m not sure the actual aircraft is pretty, I will need to reflect on that.
I’m slowly learning how to take off and also control the direction of the prop-rotors. I needed to assign extra buttons on my set-up to make sure that everything was within easy reach.
Today I managed to transition to vertical flight mode from standard flight and I will say it is not an easy conversion, you spend some time in a stall actually!
I’m looking forward to spending more time with this aircraft.
I had a flight in X-Plane recently and saw a plane nearby so I thought I would check it out. It was and MD80 faffing around over Essex and Suffolk.
I had a fun time chasing this bird through the sky and trying to stay in formation.
I’ve been testing the new PC set up by flying around places I’ve recently visited. It’s nice to see how these places are recreated in X-Plane. I think it looks pretty good, it’s good fun also.
I’ll soon write about a visit to this castle and some other places in Hampshire and Dorset. I flew over Hurst castle to see how it was created within the flight simulator.
I haven’t been to Portsmouth for quite a while but I am planning to head back there soon. It looks good in this early morning flight. Note the aircraft carrier.
Having stayed in the New Forest recently it was nice to fly over it. There’s quite a bit of air activity in the New Forest as it’s within the ILS of Bournemouth International. There are a few 737s, the odd Airbus A340 and some Draken Air Dassault Falcon 20s.
In testing for video output and uploads on the PC I decided I would try flying a floatplane in X-Plane. I chose to take off from Rochester, UK and land on the river Medway. This is not as silly as it seems because eighty years ago the Shorts Brothers made seaplanes in Rochester and they slid down a gangway to the river Medway for their first flight. The whole area is now residential but you can still see the gangway which is a historical object. It would have been nice to still have seaplanes and floatplanes taking off from there.
Managed a flight this morning, I flew from Oban to Cardiff. These are some pictures I took, my it looks lovely.
