Tropical Cyclone Gombe

Me and @CuzDawg3 like to get drunk and fly in bad weather using inappropriate planes. We hit the jackpot on that last night as it happened that a short-lived tropical cyclone named Gombe, classified as a Moderate Tropical Storm, was just then coming ashore on the east coast of Madagascar. So naturally, this was a job for the CTLS (or is it really a CTSL?), an LSA without even an attitude indicator :slight_smile: We flew from FMNH south towards FMMS, our route taking us through the north eyewall over the Masoala Peninsula, then across the eye over the mouth of Helodrano Antongila Bay, then through the south eyewall over the northern part of ĂŽle Sainte-Marie.

It was nice enough at FMNH as this wasn’t a particularly big storm and there were fewer rain bands on the north side.

Soon, we started entering the various rain bands but, before we did, we got a look at the massive Masoala National Park which covers most of the peninsula. This is supposed to all be virgin jungle yet it appears the natives have been doing a lot of slash-and-burn agriculture here.

And then we had to penetrate several INTENSE rainbands, which largely obscured the hilltops. An attitude indicator would have been nice :slight_smile:

As we proceeded south, the winds picked up and the rain bands thicker and more intense, with the sky no longer really clear between them. But there were some pretty sights.

Finally, we got to the northern eyewall and I got just a hair too high and lost all visual references, and also got upset by the strong winds. I tried using @CuzDawg3 's nameplate as an attitude indicator but that didn’t last long as I started spinning and lost sight of him.

I managed to stop the spin by watching the magenta line on the map spinning around but had by then lost too much altitude and hit a hill. Somehow, @CuzDawg3 managed to stay alive. Kudos to him :wink:

So, I restarted at FMMS and headed north to meet him. The battle through the south eye wall was intense but, as the island is pretty low and flat, I could stay at treetop level just off the beach. FMMS is at the south end of the island and just as I broke out into the eye near the north end, I spotted FMAD airstrip, which I noted as a potential diversion location. It was then in the clear.

Pretty soon I met the indomitable @CuzDawg3 still heading south. Somehow he’d made through that monstrous pile of obscured mountains in the background.

But the storm had been moving west all this time, so going back across the eye had its rough moments.

We decided FMAD would be the better part of valor so headed towards it. As it happened, @CuzDawg3 got there just before me and was able to land no problem. But as you can see, the SW part of the eyewall was RIGHT AT the edge of the field.

By the time I’d swung base to final, the eyewall was over the field and I couldn’t see ANYTHING. It was amazing how fast conditions changed.

I made 4 attempts to land at FMAD but couldn’t see the runway at all until too late to line up with it. So I just followed the west coast of the island down to FMMS. @CuzDawg3 was able to take off and join me.

This was largely a repeat of my previous trip north up the east side of the island. We flew at treetop level just far enough off the beach to navigate by the trees on shore.

This was a long, rather intense leg but eventually we reached FMMS and the weather there was quite good at that moment, so we wasted no time getting down.

Anyway, that was quite a lot of fun. I found it interesting that this Southern Hemisphere storm spun the opposite direction from the storms I’m used to on the US Gulf Coast, and the game depicted that. Anyway, I’ve been hunting hurricanes in MSFS since the alpha and I think their realism has improved over time. Gombe here I think was the most realistic I’ve flown in yet.

After this misadventure, we tried private races at Reno in all classes, in which @CuzDawg3 beat me consistently. He was obviously cheating by not drinking enough during our whole evening. But hey, that new private race system works quite well and is a lot of fun. Highly recommended!

Anyway, thanks to @CuzDawg3 for a good time last night!

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I had that same question! I actually checked with the team on this one several months ago because I thought it was a bug. It actually is the CT Supralight, so CTSL. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Yeah, I reported this as a bug back in the Dreamtime, too. It’s just a typo in the display name which has never been fixed. The panel label says “Supralight”, the ASI is in kmph, the warning labels are in French, and the max gross weight is correct for the SL, which is under the Euro “ultralight” rules. The LS (“Light Sport”) is slightly heavier to go with the US “LSA” rules, has an ASI in knots, etc. So it’s really a CTSL. But, as the game continues to call it a CTLS, that’s what I still call it, with a bit of irony :). And I refer to it as an LSA instead of an “ultralight” because, in the US, “ultralight” means a single-seater with a max of 5 gallons of fuel, top speed of 55 knots, and no license required. IOW, a Blériot made of modern materials.

Regardless of the name, it’s a fun little plane. Good visibility, good handling, accelerates fast enough to do a Cuban 8 immediately after takeoff, and has my favorite flaps in the game (stolen from the Ju-52, it seems). But that Rotax chainsaw engine screaming at 4-5K RPM gets on the nerves after a bit. And sadly, the main production line is in Ukraine, so we’ll not likely be seeing many more of them :frowning:

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Oh wait, maybe CTLS is correct. I may be confused. The only thing I remember is that they said it was done deliberately and not a bug. I will see if I can find the conversation tomorrow (that may be challenging).

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This made me laugh so hard!

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CTLS is a valid model of the plane, perhaps the most common actually, but the version in the game is a CTSL in all respects EXCEPT its display name of “CTLS” :slight_smile:

What?!?!?!? Seriously?!?!?!?!? I thought I was stating a pretty common thing. You don’t do the same? I mean, what’s the point of having all this fancy streaming Live Weather that actually works sometimes if you don’t go out and play around in it? And what’s the point of playing around in tropical cyclones, severe thunderstorms, severe turbulence, severe icing, mountain obscuration, or whatever bad weather you can name, preferably in some combination thereof, if you’re in a plane designed specifically to minimize these problems in the interests of getting pax through regardless? And what’s the point of doing all this on a real-world scheduled basis with another living human in a different time zone if you don’t make it convivial with copious alcohol consumption, vox comms, and drunken jokes trying to make obscene phrases out of airport codes? Use your imagination on FMNH, for example :smiley:

And I must say, me and @CuzDawg3 usually mind our own drunken business out in the boonies somewhere. You’ll note the complete absence of other nameplates in the background in the above pics, which is actually a pity. It seems nobody cares much about anything but hurricanes heading for the US and its surroundings. Their loss.

But I must confess, sometimes we feel the urge to go harass folks trying to conduct serious business. Long ago we learned to avoid the airports of the landing challenges because they’re just full of other drunks doing even stupider things than us. Nope, when the urge for evil enters us, we go to major airports and try to disrupt the serious folks who, for reasons known only to them, are on “All Players” instead of “Live Players”. But at least we don’t go to “Live Players” to do airforceproud95-type stuff ).

And sometimes we find other players there either trying to defend the airfield or also out to harass the serious, and naturally we’re drawn into impromptu dogfights with them. If anybody at KLAX last month saw furious dogfights between nosegear X-Cubs and F35s right over the runways while serious folks were trying to fly tubeliners through it all… I can neither confirm nor deny :slight_smile:

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I may not be quite lit whilst simflying. . .

but I totally will have a beer or so in honor of those JAL, or Delta, or even good ole Northwest pilots who were brave enough to do it in real life. And after flying serioulsy enough in the real world, it is awfully fun to go out on those adventures I logged away when really PIC and though to myself “huh, I wonder what that would be like. . .” ala fly into a hurricane (and not in a proper P-3) into a T-cell because “it looks so pretty from here!” :joy: I must admit, it is really fun though finding these adventures with @OrigBullethead and searching for laughter along the way.

“I somehow survived! Thank the altitude. And I see ya out there buddy! Making my way to you post-haste!”

RIP Double Rainbow guy.

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[quote=“CuzDawg3, post:7, topic:503807”]
I may not be quite lit whilst simflying. . .but I totally will have a beer or so in honor of those JAL, or Delta, or even good ole Northwest pilots who were brave enough to do it in real life.[/quote]

LOL! When I clicked on the 1st of those links, I was expecting epic tales of derring do, not a series of old-school pilots whom some new-school wimps obviously snitched on. Geez, I HATE the new-school! They took away the Navy’s grog, they took away the standard ration of 2 beers/day for both Marines and firemen, and they wonder why things have gone to Hell lately. FYI, folks, the world was getting along just fine since WAY before civilization, and civilization itself was built and reached its peak when everybody was drunk or at least buzzed on the job, along with smoking 2 packs a day. The it all fell apart thanks to the stupid teetotalers and anti-smoking lobby. Humans require booze just as much as oxygen. We have evolved to be that way since monkeys. Read this book if you don’t believe me :stuck_out_tongue:

Amen, bro! Remember that time we flew float PC-6s on the North Slope of Alaska in the perpetual winter darkness, in driving snow, fighting massive winds, taking wads of ice all over everything, and couldn’t make out the coastal runway when we finally managed to get there, so decided to land in the water nearby and taxi ashore. And we couldn’t tell the surface was ice until we found ourselves unable to taxi? (sea ice being an iffy thing back then) I still get a chuckle from that.

Or that time we flew max gross Caravans into Paro VFR direct in zero visibility and had to approach, land, and taxi using only synthetic vision? Or running Viri up the beach from Biloxi to Mobile just as a decent hurricane was coming ashore? Or flying from Cheyenne to Laramie during a record-setting flash flood that was ice not far above the terrain? Geez, so much fun together in so much bad weather. But my inspiration for such things are not the drunks of today who got snitched on, but the old airmail pilots in WW1 surplus planes, before there were navaids beyond railroad tracks and flares around airfields, guys who had to be chiseled out of their iced-up open cockpits between flights. I doubt any of them lacked a flask of “anti-freeze” in a convenient pocket :slight_smile:

Yeah, you weren’t quite as high as me when we hit the north eyewall :slight_smile:

And wow, thanks for that pic of what I just flew through to meet you in the eye. That makes me feel a bit better about not making it through from the north :slight_smile:

Anyway, that was a good storm! I’m sure we’ll find more :slight_smile:

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Just to keep it real. . .here’s what I followed @OrigBullethead into while we were flying south to FMMV (or whatever the “dirty” ICAO was!) :rofl:!
PS sorry/notsorry about the VR views. . .that’s the only way to fly!

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