MY FIRST GROUP EVENT FLIGHT - Cabri G2 in Australia
What a great time I had flying “Friday Night Flights - 9pm EDT - Helicopters to LUNA PARK”
Since recently switching to MSFS 2020 from X-Plane, I had only flown the MSFS Cabri G2 a couple times for maybe a total of 30 minutes in the cockpit, so this event was a great “on the job” opportunity to gain experience with takeoffs, cruising, altitude and speed management, formation flying, AND LANDINGS.
I “discovered” this event only a day before and set out to prepare as much as possible. I accepted the Discord invite, and then loaded up the provided pln file to discover it had a runway start, and the Wallacia YWLX grass strip airport did not have any starts that allow cold and dark, non-runway start up. I quickly built some PARKING-GA-SMALL starts for the existing airport using the SDK, and was pleasantly surprised how well they worked.
Next I pre-flighted the first leg of the plan in the G2 - out to Warragamba Dam. Wow! What an impressive sight. (BTW, I was flying 2D on a 24" 4k monitor).
Since I had been just starting to investigate VR flying with my Quest 2 head-mounted-display, I thought I might try flying the event in VR. I fired up about 10 minutes before the event and after 15 minutes of not getting the Quest 2 Link past the “three dots”, I had missed the group takeoff.
I threw off the Quest 2 and restarted MSFS 2020 (which seemed even slower when the group is chattering about the flying). While that was starting I switched my Discord settings from the Quest to a Plantronics Voyager Legend Bluetooth headset. Since I was late, I chose the pln file with the runway start, and rushed to takeoff.
I knew the heading to the dam, (and confirmed by looking down at the Garmin 430), pulled the collective up hard, pushed the cyclic full forward and quickly was zooming at 100 KIAS to catch the group.
When I arrived at the dam, folks were already showing off by landing on top of the dam:
LazyK0alas had already landed his “non-CabriG2-heli” which MSFS displayed to me as a fixed-wing jet.
Another non-CabriG2 pilot was displayed as a fixed-wing B222 twin with the landing gear down the whole flight.
There was one point in the flight where I was doing clockwise circuits around a point of interest and all of a sudden my attention was grabbed by a fixed wing coming right at me - since it actually was a heli doing counter-clockwise circuits it was moving slow enough that I could deconflict, but boy did my heart stop for a second (after which I actually remembered to grab a screenshot…)
Leader LazerBolt suggested we change the time to nearing sunset as we approached Sydney Harbor, and announced he was “setting down on Shark Island for a 10 minute group break”. I didn’t know what was Shark Island, but the place he was heading looked to be about 2 pixels big and I need a runway to land the G2 on at my heli skill level. I circled around and around looking for a spot to land and spotted a ship with what looked to be a bunch of helipads on top. I’ve never been very successful at helipad landing attempts (in X-Plane), but since I had turned off damage detection for the flight, I decided “now was a good time to practice a helipad landing” (right, at night - in a group flight - with no prior attempts in the MSFS heli). I almost did it, but slipped off the edge at the last minute and ended up on a dirt road next to the ship (alive? How does that happen?):
After the break we viewed the Sydney Opera House, and then headed to the Luna Amusement Park (and of course LazerBolt flew under the bridge to get there).
The group hovered near the park marveling about the modeled detail ( the rollercoaster, ship swing, tower fall all have amazing animations going on ), while I (who didn’t know that hovering in the CabriG2 in MSFS is a million times easier than in X-Plane) did circuits above the group again.
Eventually the folks started setting down in tiny corners of the park, so I looked around for the nearest runway to set down on. Bradfield Highway was all lit up and basically deserted looking just the thing for this noob heli pilot. I put her down more gently than expected and waited for a car or truck to drive into/through me, but they all seemed to be driving in the other lane, so I lived to shut down without incident.
The flight lasted an hour and a quarter (1h 17m) and was the most fun I have had in forty years of flight simming.
