Florida Sky Meeting

If you come from my last blog you already know that I'm gonna write something about constellation. This time it is not about a star constellation but about the famous constellation L-749 (which was the first aircraft in the Lockheed Constellation aircraft line able to cross the Atlantic Ocean non-stop*). As with the last experiment on Hawaii together with mv47 we decided on another attempt for squadron flight. So he changed to the L-749 and started a regular flight in Miami (KMIA) with heading north following the mainland. When he was around West Palm beach I started my intercept flight with a faster Boeing 737 - with the nice Swiss painting. Looking at the map I decided that Fort Pierce - Saint Lucie County Intl. airport suited the best and took off. Right after taking off I had mv47's L-749 on my screen which made it even easier to follow and change to the same course. Of great help was the live map on fsxtools.de even though the altitude and speed values were not fully correct. 
Finally after some minutes, right above KMCO I finally had the same altitude, speed and heading on my instruments and could slowly approach mv47. Everything was done by Autopilot and quite stable, but still it is not an easy thing. By doing that you learn very much about the dimensions in the air and the ratio between the three mentioned parameters. 
The best thing to do is to lock 2 out of 3 parameters on autopilot and change the third variable manually. Still then it keeps being a very complex job. Especially the fact that pressing "v" for a screenshot causes a 1/10's of a second simulation stop which causes the plane that is being chased to jump a few feet away. 
However, here's the results of a very interesting experiment that we will for sure repeat soon:


* source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_L-749_Constellation

View from a passenger seat - breathtaking!

Distance 0.1nm = 150m, vertical distance - almost same!