Vietnam - Hokkaido

Instead of hopping at night around Kambodia, Vietnam, and also China this time I headed straight out to Japan. As I had enough time available I managed to directly fly to Hokkaido, Japans North rim where my next destination on the schedule should be Asahikawa (RJEC). The flight was very long indeed, but quite interesting leaving "Asia Mainland", crossing over China north of Shanghai and then almost over Soul/South Korea and finally touching ground again in a different looking scenery on another countries soil. Flight was perfect, landing too (because of bot letting me land on an ILS rwy - which is quite nice after such a long trip).



Konnichiwa,
PT

Gooooooooood Morniiiiiiiing Vietnam

As you can assume from the headline of this blog, yes I left Indonesia and travelled to Vietnam. After the last very long leg, I decided to copy that and add another even longer leg. 
This time the route took me to Vietnam, where I landed in the beautiful area of Hanoi (VVNB) Vietnams Capital City. Unfortunately in the middle of the leg, the HHG multiplayer server lost my VL-job and therefore the maximum points I could also not reach. Still I made quite a few points by just being online and flying and of course for the second half of the leg.
Approach and landing was again wonderful, this time especially since I landed morning local time and the sun was just set. A few clouds scattered around the area of Hanoi made the experience even more interesting. 
Enough said - just enjoy the pictures:


PT

Off Australia

After a while and hopping short legs around Australia and South East Asia I decided to slightly accellerate my trip around the world. So in a day where I had a lot of time available I shortcircuited some of the destinations and flew directly from Whitsunday Coast (YBPN) to Indonesia again (WABB). The flight, around 1380 nm was quite long and the landing a little bit shaky. There is an interesting small hill directly in the final of the approach, so you want to fly slightly higher and choose a more steep glideslope :-)
Finally I made it and touched ground in Indonesia. All in all a very nice leg, quite long though, but the sceneries over the islands north of Australia are once more breathtaking.


Happy Landings, 
PT

LSGG MOLUS BERSU GIPOL LSZH

Today I reached another level in FSX!


After going through the manual of the brand new PMDG-737NGX I tried to do a flight by myself on a route defined on my own. As I have the beautiful Switzerland scenerery add-on for FSX I chose a short hop from LSGG to LSZH. Flightsimaviation.com calculated a nice route between these destinations and provided the necessary input for the FMC. During setup of the route I struggled quite a bit since the connection between the last waypoint on the airway (in that case BERSU) and the ILS approach (I used rwy 14) has to be defined, finding the proper transition. After a few trials I still managed and afterwards was also able to setup the rest of the cockpit accordingly.
Basically I knew that this is quite a short leg and things need to be done quite quickly one after the other. To overcome that I had to pause the simulation about three times (what nice feature compared to the real life ;-). So I took of and managed to engage the autopilot as needed.  Everything was according plan, eventhough at some point I had to adjust the cruising altitude and during decent I had to engage the spoilers a little bit to reduce speed. 
At the end I somehow made it to Zurich, even using the NGX-autoland function. You cannot believe how great this feeling is. Of course the effect in this special case is multiplied since I did the same landing quite often as a passenger on board of a real aircraft so the scenery looked really familiar. Finally the autoland was perfect of course and I could stop the airplane and leave the rwy via regular taxiway.
Really fantastic!


I'm looking forward to the next experience with the 737 NGX, especially in conjunction with the use of HHG or even IVAO network.


Big smile from Zurich, 
Philipp

DC-10 is back

After installing a brand new PC and reloading FSX I was recently able to re-install my previous FSX fleet including the Swissair-branded DC-10. Finally I could take my good old extended range super machine and do another leg on my trip around the world.
That one was quite short and lead from Rockhampton (YBRK) to Whitsunday Coast (YPBN) a little closer to the north. After about 30mins of time I could already intercept the localizer from Rwy 19 and with the guidance of ATC (finally working again ;-) touch ground.
All in all a nice flight into another wonderful morning at Australias East coast.


With that I'm looking forward to the next few legs in Australia before the trip leaves this continent towards Asia again.


Happy intercepting!
PT

Easter Holiday in East Australia

I hope you had nice Easter Holiday!


In all these days I had shortly time to fly two legs. First route went from Tamworth (YSTW) to Brisbane (YBBN) using for the first time my new powerful machine. It was great flying everything with the virtual cockpit, again in the standard Boeing 737 from pacific airlines. Nevertheless it was fun and a good lesson to get familiar with the 3D cockpit and the arrangements of the buttons and displays. Flight went well and without incidents, again in the complete dark, but with a nice scenery in Sidney and of course Brisbane as well.


The second trip I did on Easter Monday. Unfortunately the automatic flight planner gave me again truly weird flight times, so after filing the schedule I got already -4 minutes delay! All trying out did not work so finally I flew "manually" without the help of ATC and/or bot and of course as a consequence without gaining any points for that. Anyway the flight was interesting because it lead from one Thunderstorm to another. The lightning effects and airplane shaking is quite realistic and at the end I was glad to touch ground again in Rockport (YBRK).


Best regards, 
PT

FSX reborn

or: ...how do you bring your FSX eperience to the next level
or: ...solution to the math term: FSX + i7 * 16 * 4096 + 27" + LT/3Dpro + CHX + 737NGX


Yesterday my birthday series continued (see also recent blog); I decided to buy a new PC with the latest hardware but within a reasonable budget. For the past almost 15 years I was evaluating new pc hardware and about all 4-5 years I buy a new pc. This time again it was fantastic to see what you actually get for the money. My first PC I bought was one of the compaq 386 series and it cost me around 4500 CHF. Yesterday I bought a system for about a third of that price, but including a 27" screen, the latest i7-processor, AMD Radeon graphic card HD7700 incl. 1024GB Mem, 128GB SSD HD, 2TB HDD, and 16GB RAM from Acer - G3 Predator series. I installed the power pack right away and loaded all important programs and addons including Scenery Switzerland and PMDG 737-NGX onto the SSD memory (which offers incredible fast access and amazing nice startup time). To interact with the FSX I recently changed my joystick to Logitech 3D pro version. 


I can tell you playing FSX on a 27" screen with such speedy machine, fantastic frame rates, no jerking at all and all parameters on 100% gives you a feeling of reality which is almost unbeatable. Just breathtaking.
I don't want to advertise for the hardware industry, but if you really want to go on a next level with flight simulation it is really well worth to invest a couple of hundred bucks in a new system. I can only recommend it.


My first experience by the way was the tutorial flight with the PMDG 737 NGX from London Gatwick EGKK to Amsterdam Shipol EHAM. Using FMC this nice plane allows you to almost automatically fly from A to B including the fantastic autoland function. So after take off you really tend to lean back and enjoy your trip (which is of course not the case as there's still a lot of buttons to change during a flight). Of course the next step will then be using radio and following ATC rules and guidelines. Also not speaking about emergency situations or e.g. bad weather conditions :-) But again - the challenge continues - you agree?  :-))


Have fun and enjoy your real and virtual life!
Phil