Flying the likes of the Top Rudder 103 Solo and BlueMesh’s Amphibious Ultralight recently in MSFS got me thinking back to happy memories of flying similar craft in FS2004. I have fond memories of flying the Quad City Challenger from Lynn & Bill Lyons that came with a flour bombing mission on a private airstrip, at a lake side in a forested mountain area. Back in the day, this was as immersive as it got for me and so I went down a bit of a rabbit hole to see if I could find the location of said lake and revisit in with better graphics in the new sim.
After a quite a bit of googling, I came across a site that still hosted the 8mb .zip file for the aircraft, so downloaded and extracted it to a dummey folder on my desktop, opened it up, found the included missions folder, and opened them one at a time in a text editor until I found what I was looking for.
The co-ordinates took me to O’Rouke Bay, Hayden Lake in Idaho, and upon closer inspection, it appears there is a grass strip at the south eastern corner that the scenery may have been loosely based off.
The closest airport is Coeur d’Alene Airport, but I picked Silverwood (2ID4) a little further north as my starting point, loaded up in the Amphib to fly the length of the lake from north to south, making a landing at the grass clearing around the same site as the flour bombing missions I used to fly 15 odd years ago, before continuing down to Regan Ranch (6ID1). Quite the trip down memory lane!
