For a nice relaxing 45 minute sight seeing trip, grab a single engine piston like the JustFlight Arrow III, load up at Dillingham Airfield (PDHD), and set sim time to early morning. Take off, climb to around 3 or 4000 feet and follow the coastline in a clockwise direction around the island of O‘ahu.
There’s some great water masking and terrain DEM to be seen, although you’ll also notice a few areas with no photographic ground textures due to cloud coverage on the Bing Maps satellite imagery.
.PLN file for this hot lap is available to download from worldtour.flights
FS9 had a very nice trip around Hawaii. It even had a bit of back story behind it, and told you a lot of the things you’ll see along the way. One of the thing it mentioned was that for a little bit of realism you can follow Hawaii’s special VFR rules when flying below 3000ft: When flying eastbound, fly at 500, 1500, 2500ft MSL, and when flying westbound fly at 1000, 2000, 3000ft MSL.
Note that i don’t know if these rules still exist in real life, and I think they were probably simplified to begin with.
You’ve got a good memory from FS9! In New Zealand where I live, we have similar real world cruising level rules. As the country is long and thin and orientated north to south, our rules are northbound IFR flights are at odd intervals eg 5000, 7000, 9000 etc and southbounds are at even intervals eg 6000, 8000, 1000 etc. VFR flights are slotted in between with a +500 margin, so northbound go 5500, 7500, 9500 and southbound go 6500, 8500, 10500. The easy was to remember this is “NOSE +500” for North Odd South Even
Well, i’d love to say i do have a good memory, but no. I recently dug up those flight to recreate them in FS2020. That FS9 Hawaii trip was probably the best experience i’ve ever had in a flight simulator, and still remains for me the golden standard for trips. I just wish FS2020 bush trips could provide the same level of immersion and information.
I was in Hawaii 2019, hired a C172 and did a 3/4 lap…ie headed east out of Honolulu, and returned via the centre valley…as I am an Aussie PPL holder, obviously had to have an American safety pilot…he was a local instructor…so gave me a running dialogue of Hawaii’s geographical history…very interesting…Great fun departing and arriving at PHNL…busy, busy…had to be on my toes with the “machine gun” chatter from ATC…thank goodness for the safety pilot…I’d be still requesting…“please repeat”…
Other than spotting the usual Tube liners… I had some fantastic views of F22’s and C17’s doing their thing. After seeing your photos I’ll have to give it a go in the sim.
