Over the last two days, I’ve operated Scandinavian Airlines SK4785 and SK4786 on the Olso to Keflavik return service in hopes of spotting the Northern Lights in the simulator with Parrallel42’s SimFX package set to real time aurora.
However I didn’t account for the fact that a westbound flight at this time of year at sunset would mean almost the entire outbound 2 hour 45 minute sector would result in a perpetual sunset! This meant that I failed to spot the aurora on the first sector, but the sim lighting conditions, combined with my own nVidia game filter resulted in some specular scenes all the same.
On the return flight back to Norway, I delayed the departure for ‘operational reasons’, and departed close to midnight local time. The //42 Live Aurora page showed the Northern Lights abeam my eastbound flightpath, so I was more hopeful of spotting the lights this time.
As soon as I got airborne however, the ‘blue supermoon’ that’s shining so bright in the sky in the real world was doing the exact same thing in the sim, creating rather good night flying conditions visibility wise over Iceland on the climb up to FL350. I kept my eyes peeled, but didn’t spot any aurora this time either- although did see quite a few shooting stars which was neat.
Strong jetstream winds and the associated weather pattern made for a rough descent into Oslo, breaking visual around 1500 feet on the ILS for a 0200 UTC auto landing.
