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OzWookiee's Flight Adventure (Pic Heavy)


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I've always loved flying. Ever since I was a kid and was allowed into the cockpit of our flight from Townsville (YBCS) to Perth (YPPH), damn I'm going to have to fly that route now... anyway, always loved it and have dabbled with Flight Sims over the years but since we bought our home last October I finally got my self a decent SimPit and have hit the sims in a big way.

 

But I digress. after a passionate stay with Euro/American Truck Sim I finally got into Flight Sims and have been looking for something to really sink my teeth into as a good way to learn different aspect of flying and I stumbled upon the MEBAR after watching one of Froogle's YT vids. WOW, ok so cruising up the coast of Chile, yea that could be fun. Oh that's a really great looking plane for X-Plane, ok I'll fly that. Hmmm Ortho4XP.. yea I can do that!

 

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And so I found myself, ensconced in my Man Cave, with Wampa the Snow Dog (samoyed) beside me, a reef of airport sheets, the MEBAR run and weather sheets and a bunch of excitement to start. Leg 01 of my own personal Odessey had begun and what an amazing place to start!

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I honestly think I spent more time gawping at the amazing scenery and taking screenshot after screenshot than I did flying the damn plane (helps that the L410 is so nice to fly!). But I'm sure you can forgive me, especially when we passed one of our biggest waypoints of the trip.

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Leg 01 also lulled us into a false sense of security as all I can say about Leg 02 is thank goodness I was wearing my BROWN pants!

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Departure from SCNT was ok, a bit of water but otherwise fine. However what awaited us in the skies would leave us quaking in our jimmies for most of the flight!

 

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CLOUDS! And worse still... MOUTAINS IN THE CLOUDS!!

 

At one point I managed to find a break in the clouds and decided to descend under the cloud cover as it should be "easier" WRONG

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After rounding the horn to the right I then proceeded to fly by instruments alone for a good 10 mins before finally breaking through. All this at an altitude of 1500'

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And ahh.... I kinda called BS @ SCHR and did not even attempt my touch and go there...

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BECAUSE IT WAS COVERED IN CLOUD!! I citied safety of my craft and crew for my failure to Touch N Go and I'm sticking to that. (it's just over that rise apparently)

 

And then, when I'd FINALLY crested the last mountain.. the clouds parted and showed me nirvana, a clear run to SCCC.

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PHEW, made it. Many brews were drank that night!

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These two legs actually took me several days to fly due to Darth RealLife(tm) But I did manage to get a real good understanding of Ortho4XP and managed to find an EXCELLENT site for Freeware sceneries for Chile https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1DaqLfwaq0jnMxREy02Hh-MkiQCI&hl=en_US&ll=-32.961907060261204%2C-84.0956185&z=3

 

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I may have just thrown the brown pants in the bin rather than try wash them after the last leg. But thankfully the organisers eased up a bit on the weather for us over the next few legs.

 

Leg 03 called for an early departure, so after walking the dog (gets walked EVERY morning) I climbed back into the cockpit and started the plane from cold and dark rather than letting the sim do it for me. I was really digging my little plane and how it's been setup in X-Plane.

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After starting at 0730 we were finally airborne at 0752 and only a couple minutes later and the first rays of dawn are warming the horizon.

 

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Unfortunately it seems like it's impossible to perfectly capture the beauty of that sunrise across all three screens, and WOW I can see the curvature of the earth up here!

 

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Unfortunately I read my altimeter incorrectly and instead of the 3000' I thought I was at, instead I was at 13,000' and this was the first touch and go for the leg (SCAS). (facepalm)

 

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So that in itself was a lesson in 1) How to read my altimeter correctly and 2) To pay attention to my total climb!

 

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Buenos Dias Puyuhuapi (SCPH). It certainly was a good day.

 

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Another flyover waypoint for SCAP

 

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I did however come in a little HOT on SCFT... Wait, their sailing on the lake in front of the airstrip....

 

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Another Leg down. I think I actually was able to get this all done in two sittings this time!

 

Leg 04 was to provide another experience for me with my first night landing and a thankful late start.

 

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Time to taxi and get this show on the road.

 

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Always amazed me how quickly the L410 would rise in the air after a touch and go with full flaps.

 

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Who doesn't love a sunset over water.

 

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In to final for our night landing at SCIE.

 

Have to hand to to the organisers. A Sunrise followed by a Sunset. Magic!

Edited by OzWookiee
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OK. This is it. The final leg. What a journey. Along the way I've learnt many of the systems of the lovely L-410 (in particular the altimeter) and now we come to the home stretch and the thought of, what next...

 

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I had some company on the stands from an old (X-Plane 9 freeware) Transal.

 

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I was nice to not have to worry too much about mountains on either side, however there were some very tough challenges with this leg.

 

Whilst I was able to successfully find the confluence of the two rivers for our first waypoint, the second flumoxed me so I gave it up as a bad idea and went onto the others.

 

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Rolled into SCLN easy enough.

 

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HUH? Somethings not right at Constitución. Turns out that there were no high zoom level images for some of these later airfields, so I had to go back and redo the Orthos and kept the ZL at 16 (I'm using ZL16 as standard then ZL18 within 2Km of airports)

 

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Wait... so after I went and fixed the terrain you're telling me I DIDN'T have to do a TNG @ SCCT or SCIC? Meh, I did it anyway, I need the practice....'

 

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AGAIN with the ZL? Well stuff it, not fixing it, MUST FINISH MEBAR!

 

I think I managed to find a couple of Easter Eggs too. @wain did you see any of these?

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A beach side pool??? Why not just swim in the sea? Oh. Right. Sharks (with fricken laser beams).

 

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Whilst I wasn't about to pop any party pills like ol' PacMan here, I was starting to get hungry.

 

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And finally, there she was off to starboard. Radiant Santiago.

 

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TOUCHDOWN!

 

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I think I earned my frothies just from the length of that taxi from the main runway!

 

 

And that was it. My South American journey was over. I've flown for a couple of weeks (real time) around some incredible country I'll probably never have a chance to visit in real life. Here's some stats from my journey.

 

First Screenshot taken: 16/04/2017

Last Screenshot taken: 06/05/2017

Tools used: SkyVector.com, Plan-G, FlightPlanConverter

Aircraft Used: LET L-410 UVP-E http://x-plane.hu/L-410/

Sim: X-Plane 11

Total Size of Ortho Tiles generated: ~170Gb

Screenshots taken:Too many to count! I had so many that not even all of them made it to my photo storage. All the rest can be viewed here: https://beejay-n-ami.smugmug.com/Hobbies/Flight-Sim

 

 

Thanks again to the organisers and to your dear reader for trolling through my photos/screenshots. I'm very aware that this was probably not conducted with the strictest adherence to the Rally Rules but this for me was a chance to learn and have fun which I hope you all did!

 

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Nice flights, thks for sharing. :thum:

 

Having flown myself through most of South America in GA Planes ( Aeropostale 2015 - Recife down to Ushuaia and Buenos Aires to La Paz across the Andes - and Down the Amazona 2016 ) I totally agree there are incredibly beautiful places !

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Great synopsis of your MEBAR flights BeeJay and nice shots along the way. Glad to see you enjoying the rally and learning while you are at it. :thum: 

 

Although Andrew, our flightplan wizard, is probably not to happy about you missing those landings and waypoints :P I still give you two pats on the back for not only posting this fine PIREP but for sticking it out and finishing what you started.:hat:

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8 minutes ago, brett said:

Although Andrew, our flightplan wizard, is probably not to happy about you missing those landings and waypoints :P

HAHA Well he's most welcome to do that TnG in cloud himself then :P

 

Seriously though I had a LOT of fun and learned a bunch!

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On 5/18/2017 at 09:27, OzWookiee said:

Unfortunately I read my altimeter incorrectly and instead of the 3000' I thought I was at, instead I was at 13,000' and this was the first touch and go for the leg (SCAS). (facepalm)

There is a part of Robert Coram's book: "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War," where he writes about his time as a U.S. Air Force flight instructor.  Now, it's been a few years since I read it, so it's a little fuzzy, but your post brought this to mind:

During IFR training, the student (wearing foggles) is asked to call out his position, including altitude.  As part of the call out, the student reported that they were at 1,500 feet.  Boyd, sitting in the rear cockpit, makes a statement that basically gives the student a second chance to check the altitude because they were actually at 15,000 feet.  The student again calls out 1,500.  So, Boyd writes, he wanted to make a memorable lesson on getting the altitude right.  Boyd takes the aircraft, rolls inverted and pulls!  Can you imagine that!

He later goes on to say, that in retrospect, that it was a really dumb thing to do.  The student who was convinced they were at 1,500 might have decided to eject...

 

By the way, you've got some great screenshots up there!

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