MSFS Cannonball Run Challenge RESULTS THREAD

@SeedyL3205 would it be possible for you to add a column to the results chart showing the aircraft type each competitor flew, it’d be cool to see how I did against the other Diamonds haha

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That’s a good idea – I wish I had thought of it when I created the Result submission form. Unfortunately, I can’t add that retroactively. Lesson learned for next time if I ever organize something like this again.

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Oh I figured you could pull them from the signup page, no problem if it’s too much of a hassle though!

I could pull that info from the sign-up page, but I know several people decided to switch planes (to another allowed aircraft) on the day of the event, so it wouldn’t necessarily be accurate.

Ahh I see, no problem then, guess I’ll just have to dig through everyone’s logbook :joy:

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It is a well known weather bug which was talked about in the main thread. There is a workaround and it was also discussed but it seems that some people either missed it or chose not to use it. I saw some streams on the day where people had 4kts wind while I and others were battling 28+ headwinds. For me it takes away from the challenge if I know its clear skies all the way to the destination. FYI here is the workaround again if you want to try it out.

I am now becoming aware there may have been some issues around weather cheating or similar and that maybe some in the lead group had “too favorable” conditions.

No one has said anything to me but only after reading forums after the flight did I realize I was in the lead group in the beginning of the day.

Apologies for not joining the discord but honestly I am not great at chatting and felt I had to keep my head in the flying for this - no autopilot, and low as I can fly for the headwinds.

Anyway - I streamed my flight, if one takes a look at my two streams ( first half, crash, then 2nd half stream after reboot ) one can find I am checking the in game weather CONSTANTLY, high head winds on the local AWOS/ASOS/ATIS are often reported in my stream. I am constantly adjusting my altimeter and constantly checking meteoblue winds for ideas on my flight path - that was on my laptop so not in stream, but I think it is obvious.

Note my sadness at headwinds which would cause me to fly as low as I could depending on how awake I was.

A good piece of evidence that I was not cheating weather - I encountered clouds forming over Arkansas - ish area, I wanted to fly a bit higher off the deck there as meteoblue indicated a small patch of tailwinds but I could get trapped on top of the cloud deck and pick up a fatal layer of ice. The satellite indicated only a small patch of local clouds and nothing past it, so one can find me in the stream deciding all this and flying above this for a bit and then diving down when the winds were not that great.

That was a fairly unique bit of weather that can be confirmed in the real weather of that day.

All of this is on stream, also one can see that I spend significant time flying under 200 feet and a few times I nearly crashed flying too low. ( A few times I fell asleep a moment and woke up flying too close to terrain but that is unrelated lol.)

I am personally fairly happy I was at some moment in the lead or lead group and that my flying was working well. In terms of fair play, for my flight I stand by it as 100% fair.

One final note though, there are enough technical issues, and not everyone is so weather aware, that I could see an oblivious person not noticing that the sim has perfectly fair weather. Still a disqualifier though haha.

Once I caught the sim load custom weather! It was very weird and I only caught it because it felt off, (Prescott Arizona, its in my logbook too, you see me load a flight, NOT fly it, and load a new flight. ) Given glitches, heck I think one has to try not to accidently cheat on top of everything.

To me the realistic challenge was the game. Cheating this seems like a waste and its sad we have potential issues. Why bother? May as well load up a dragon with afterburners and do whatever you want.

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Important note

Since this has come up a few times already, I’m going to post it here publicly. Do not send me private messages about people you suspect may have cheated. If you’re reviewing logs, post your findings publicly in this thread, allow other members of the community to verify your claim, and give the individual an opportunity to explain themselves as there may be a legitimate reason for what appears to be a discrepancy in their logs.

So far I have gone through two. One is my own and the other is @laminar77 both have a problem with starting legs at the wrong airport, In mine, I actually went backward so it probably cost me 30 minutes but laminar looks like he skipped forward quite a ways. With mine, I land at KPRC and start again at KP52. Laminar lands at K0M5 in Tennesse and starts again at 75AR in Arkansas. I will post up more if I find any.

The simair.io developer is probably going to add the display of Position (lat/long) to the EVENT logs for each sampled event , so it will become a lot more clear the LOCATION that each data point came from.

While not easy to see on the map, this will help identify anyone who CRASHED, and then re-spawned at a nearby airport to the crash site, rather than going back to the last airport they landed at, or did a T&G to save a reset position.

(yes , it is “upsetting” when one runs out of fuel and crashes a few miles inbound to KLAX, and “should” go back to your last airport, but instead spawn at one nearby, and take off from there to finish the race, Are are DEAD WRONG if you think you can get away with it )

Should also help identify those that did not wait the 10 minutes when refueling.

You can access the current wind velocity, vector, and outside air temperature via the simconnect API, LittleNavMap grabs it. If simair.io could log that data as well, we could at least identify people whose weather was inconsistent with everyone else in the group. Perhaps this could be enabled only for special events.

There were sections where I saw clouds out at the horizon indicating live weather was working, but winds were lower than expected (but still varying over time). Others on the discord reported similar conditions to me. I still think there may be some kind of altitude above ground level vs absolute altitude issue in how the meteoblue data is being consumed.

Great suggestion… hopefully for next time.

If the SIM weather is Inaccurate, but everyone gets the same weather, then that may not so be so bad. Sill undesirable, but at least it would make it a fair even playing field.

If simconnect can detect if the plane is not flying in real weather, maybe it could also display this detection to the player via a simconnect screen message. That would eliminate the excuse “I did not know” !!

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I completed the run at 20h:39m
I should be at #13 Rank
SimAir.io
@SeedyL3205 I wonder why that doesn’t reflect on the leaderboard ?

Ah sorry, I just submitted the form a few minutes back. I thought the leaderboard was automatically updated :slight_smile:

Loved the race. The ONLY problem I had was SimAir not working right after the moment I checked out the race leaderboard. I didn’t notice till later and couldn’t bothered by going back several hours. I streamed my whole flight on twitch either talking all the time or at least during landings and take off (I got tired a few hours in and didn’t know what to tell my handful of viewers). I had NO CTD (1080p, settings to high, streaming the entire thing) during the entire time the sim was running (little more than 25 hrs), flight time was funny enough 24:42 at the time I stopped on the runway.

Great fun! Thank you!

@DonD0nPanPan Mine skipped because Simair freaked out and stopped recording (potentially after my first CTD). However, if you look at the times between the end point of the leg going through Tennessee and the start at 75AR you’ll see that there’s about 2 hours in between.

when i noticed after departure kjfk that real weather wasn’t working
i fired up RX Weather Force
Had 20-30 headwinds from start to finish

As soon as I took off SimAir crashed on me too, hence my first leg wasn’t quite logged on the platform. I couldn’t be bothered returning and restarting so I just kept taking snapshots along the way, including right after I landed for validations reasons.
I got all the remaining legs however logged on SimAir.

Seedy, for next time, instead of trusting all competitors to have the correct settings…form a group and invite all participants to it. All pilots will then spawn with whatever weather settings the group leader (you) has.

I believe you could even spawn with clear skies and apply live weather (the weather fix as detailed 3 dozen times already) to really ensure everyone has live weather.

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N6722C, did you even read what I posted? I literally cannot do T&G’s and save/load flights. And I told you what I did straight up before anyone asked. I don’t see anyone else being up front about their own magic shows.

As for weather, it had live weather working the whole time. I flew low and fast and as you can see in the logs I would occasionally go up or down a few hundred feet to check the air. I don’t think a lot of people realize that the air moves a lot faster at 2000 feet in real life, too. Up at 2000-4000ft the headwinds were up to 40kts in some places. I had real weather functioning 100% of the flight and I had headwinds the entire time. Going over PA I iced up real bad and almost lost it. Once past Ohio most of the country was clear weather. I ended up going high over the rockies because of it, and to try to eliminate 1 fuel stop.

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REF

No I did NOT read what you said, and my post that you quoted, did not mention you at all ?
Maybe you replied to the wrong person ??