Thanks for a great post.
I lived in Tenerife (La Laguna) for three years and this brings some fond memories…
In fact my flight-simming hobby started there. It was too much fun watching airplanes landing and departing at/from Los Rodeos and Reina Sofia not to get addicted to FS98 (besides, in those days aircraft variety was amazing at both airports, even Tupolev airliners at Reina Sofia, not to mention everything from DC8s to A340s and anything in between… maybe the best times to be an aircraft spotter…).
In your first screenshot if it wasn´t for the fog and you used Erzo´s La Laguna photogrammetry, the house where I lived and the faculty where I studied, would be shown. Man… I´m so old now… (who would have thought back then, that the sim would achieve this level of realism…).
I agree with you, the Headwind in its last version (0.4.1 I think) is the first I´m happy with. I used it before because it was the only option I had for one of my favourite flights (Madrid to Santiago de Chile, because of emotional reasons in real life -like the Canary Islands, Chile is heaven-on-earth for astronomers…-). Until now, I just had to ignore that fuel calculation telling me I would land with -120 tons for fuel and other quirks… The last version has been a massive improvement.
Just like you, I had one of my best flights ever with this aircraft, with the same livery, more or less at the time as you.
(If you don´t mind, I will elaborate in this post, If you do, let me know and I will edit this out).
I simulated Iberia´s Flight 6833 from Madrid to Santiago.
Since we don´t have and will not have an A350 anytime soon, I had to forget realism, feel dirty and use the Headwind A330 (I know, I know, unforgivable…).
At least I did the flight in real time. I don´t mean 1x simulation rate, I mean I also prepared my flight to take off at the scheduled time: 23:59 local Madrid time. I took off less than five minutes late.
For some reason, in real life, when checking in FlightRadar24, both Latam LAN705 and Iberia IB6833 were late by about half an hour, and just by chance, I happened to take off a couple minutes appart from LAN705, and half an hour before my namesake flight, the actual IB6833.
We didn´t do the same route (neither did the actual IB6833, always puzzles me how / why those flights from / to the same airports and flying within half an hour one from the other, diverge in their routes by 1000 miles, only to converge again -LAN705 flew close to the Azores, IB6833 overflew Gran Canaria-).
13 hours later, with an almost full moon iluminating the Andes and mount Aconcagua in an amazing visual show, I was descending toward Pudahuel´s ILS17L-Y.
Just out of curiosity, I opened again FlightRadar24 to check both LAN705 and IB6833 in real life, and to my disbelief, LAN705 was ALMOST EXACTLY in the same position and same altitude as I was. IB6833 was a bit behind, on the same track. I took a screen shot:
I couldn´t believe how cool it was. We took off almost at the same time, and converged to land with the same STAR, same runway, same moment, same point, even same altitude within 100 feet, in real time, 12h48m later (12h46m for LAN705). It´s just out of this world.
I landed, and went to my gate.
For some reason, FSLTL did not inject LAN705 in the sim. But as I was shutting down my engines, I heard the traffic controller clearing the real IB6833 to land on 17L. And sure enough, with the first dark orange lights of the morning, that magnificent A350 appeared, landed and parked just in front of my A330-Neo.
This sim is just amazing.
I can´t believe some users spend their time complaining about three misplaced pixels in the ground textures instead of enjoying it…
Best regards.
