11/08/2020 Flight Simulators - what do I do?

Back in the early days of Flight simming there was a real need to stretch the imagination to get a sensation of flight.  Imagining the wire frame hills representing some geographical construct was tough, but as the sims developed this became steadily easier.

In the early days, sims consisted of representations of small patches of the real world that were not connected.  A sim pilot would have to end a flight in one region, then restart in another.  Subsequent versions enabled the addition of "scenery packs" to improve the experience.

But like the mountains, this got better over time and suddenly we had a representation of the whole world.

This enabled us to simulate trips between countries, across oceans and to neighboring continents.  FS2004 was the first Microsoft Sim where I started my "Aroind the World" flights.  It was the first sim where I was able to use real weather which added a more challenging aspect to my hobby.

Simming to me needed to involve a purpose.  I couldn't be bothered to simply take off, do a couple of circuits or a short hop and then land.  I really wanted to see how the sim represented the world, and to do that in a challenging weather environment.

Since FS2004, with every new sim that I bought, I would start the use of that sim by familiarizing myself with its new features by flying around my local area.  Living in the South West of Western Australia, I always set my home airport as YPJT or Jandakot airport.  I would fly short flights for a few weeks to places in the SW region like YNUB (Bunbury), YBLN (Bussleton), YMGT (Margaret River), YCUN (Cunderdin) or YGEL (Geraldton).

Once I was happy with my knowledge of the various aircraft and its systems, I would on a pre planned day, head off on my next ATW (Around The World) flight.

Another limitation I placed on myself was the class of aircraft that I flew on the ATW flight. Seeing that my simming had a couple of objectives, those being firstly simulate flying, and secondly sight seeing, I very much preferred the low and slow flight mode.

To this end, I restrict myself to flying single engined props and GA (general aviation) light twins.  This limitation often requires me to carefully plan my flights, especially with the introduction of real weather.  Real weather added another level of realism to flight simming, however this at times was not implemented well and introduced difficulties that wasn't representive of the real world.

Anyhow, the ATW flight generally starts in one of two directions, either northerly along the Western Australian coast via Geraldton and Carnarvon or via the south coast to Albany, Esperance and then on to the Western Australian border.

The flights then either head along the Indonesian archipelago through South Asia and into the Middle East and Europe, or Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, China, Korea, Japan, Russia and then across to Alaska.  In my previous flights, I did not spend a lot of time in either South America or Africa.  The default scenery in those continents have not been great and hi fidelity add on scenery packs not been readily available.  Roll on FS2020 with its wonderful highly detailed rendition of the whole earth.

Anyhow, back to my flight.  Given that I am still working I don't have a huge amount of free time for my flights.  Mostly I can put aside about 3 or 4, one to one and a half hour flights a week.  This means at the most, I get about six hours of flight time which is around 1200 kms of distance in a week.  This makes for a long journey, but with this latest sim, one of discovery and great interest.

I hope to document each leg of my latest ATW flight in this blog, with some flight details and hopefully a few screen shots.  Stop by often for a look at my progress.  Comments are welcome.

Only 7 days to go now