Beaver on ice

Community Content Hangar World Photographer & Screenshots
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In case you have ever wondered if an amphibian DHC-2 Beaver can land on what appears to be snow covered frozen ocean: I unintentionally found out that you can! But to start at the beginning:

I am hugely enjoying the Beaver in conjunction with the detailed seaplane bases by Return to Misty Moorings. Seeing as I live in BC, Canada, I really appreciate the number of BC bases. One of my favourites is Zeballos CAA5 on Vancouver Island. I flew in there a couple of times and wanted to check something out a couple days ago.

BUT

In the mean time, the weather in BC has turned really icy cold, so when I spawned on the (water) runway at Zeballos while using real time weather, I found myself sitting on a big white, frozen plain! Colour me surprised! The question then immediately arose in my mind: isn’t this like a hard surface? Would I be able to take off from it in the floatplane? And if I were to land on it, would I not get a “collided with an object” message?

Well, only one way to find out: try it I suppose! And try it I did. Turns out yes: you can take off and land on it with a float plane. And there is SOMETHING unusual modelled in the sim: you need a lot more power to taxi than is normal on water. And if you cut the power while taxiing, you STOP! No ifs, buts or maybes! No coasting, no floating, you just… stop.

Initially yesterday when I did the flight, conditions were awful: light blowing snow and low cloud ceiling. But I did want to try and get some video so I tried again this morning, and the weather was beautiful sunshine. With frozen seawater and snow on the ice, but still beautiful sunshine. Some pictures:

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I decided to do a video of the experience: used Sky Dolly to record a take off, flying out the inlet, turning around and coming back for a landing. I edited a short video: can be seen here:

I created and uploaded it in 4K so if you can view it in 4K that is obviously the best. YouTube is still processing the 4K video as I am typing this, but it should be up in 4K soon.

Overall: love the sim. Love the Beaver. Love RTMM scenery. Love Sky Dolly.

Can you tell I like the whole experience? :blush:

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Great vid, fun to see you landing on the “ice?” :slight_smile:
Doug/RTMM

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Thanks Doug. I really found it interesting as the surface and the aircraft behaved so differently. It did not quite feel the same as water but it DID “sink into” the snow. The best I can guess is that it tried to replicate snow on a hard surface.

Alwyn

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Love it! Since the Beaver came out and I found RTMM, that’s all the flying I do. Going back to a hard surface runway seems so constrictive now.

I wonder if the floats only work with water bodies that are frozen or if you could land on (or take off from) snow covered ground with them?