A post was merged into an existing topic: Pilot’s lounge - What did you do in MSFS today?
Bath Alum (9VA0) to Williamsport Regional (KIPT) in the flight fx Cessna citation X
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Here I was yesterday, in Paris, at a remote stand, with red hot glowing brakes, having just narrowly avoided crashing after a flight shy under 17 hours. But how did that happen?
Let’s rewind a bit, shall we?
This flight began two days ago in Perth, Australia of all places. I wanted to see if my Series X could push an ultra-longhaul flight with the inibuilds A350. YPPH-LFPG, planned block time 17:25, planned flight time 16:57. Fresh Xbox restart, fresh cache - let’s do this.
The flight itself was beautiful. I missed the view of the Maldives because I entered crew rest (i.e.: went to sleep, it was late late) an hour after takeoff. But I got back just in time to see the Zagros mountain range in Iran, the Turkish coast of the Black Sea and even Lake Constance drowning in mist, as you can see in the screenshot.
16 hours in, it was time for the descent. I couldn’t believe how well the Xbox and the A350 were handling this flight - it’s been the longest I’ve ever flown so far.
If only I haven’t thought that - because while the descent between the cloud layers was a sight to behold, this was the last screenshot I took before disaster struck.
On base leg, shortly before turning into final, came the dreaded message - “Memory running out, avionics disabled to conserve memory”. The flight deck turned into a low-poly Gouraud-shaded heap of Nintendo 64 graphics, and when it came back - poof went all the avionics AND the engines, too. So here I was, entering a shower of rain, in a cold and dark 250t glider at 220kts. Luckily, this still pretty high approach speed would be my saving grace, as it allowed me to somehow restart the engines while scanning for a suitable emergency landing field.
This is where I cheated a little bit - thanks to the map on the OFP and the player nametags, I managed to find LFPG. Circling around and going purely by the indications on the ISIS backup instrument and a bit of highly illegal VFR flying in IFR conditions…
…I managed to find the runway and miraculously land the plane buttery smooth, braking within 700-800 meters because the complete avionics reset also activated the parking brakes. I kinda didn’t notice in the heat of the battle, whoops…
By then, I wasn’t the only one sweating blood. The Xbox and Sim were absolutely buckling under the load, with the flight deck reverting to chunkier LODs from time to time and the console fans blowing like a thrust reverser. Kinda safe to say that this was a herculean task for the engine on console and it almost pulled through with the current optimisations found in SU4.
Remote parking reached, stairs attached, rapid disembarkation initiated. For what it’s worth, for all intents and purposes, in spite of the memory crash, I pulled off a 16h50’ ultra-longhaul flight on console. Bit of a bummer that the logbook would only count the first 16hrs right up until the memory leak and display a vicinity of the airport as destination.
But man, I did it. Whew. Now if only SU5 brings some additional memory optimisation to consoles, I might just tackle a 20h rotation on the ULR next…
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Took a night flight in the Turbine Duke from KRNO to KSAC as part of a medevac operation (via SayIntentions).
Night flights just hit different…
Oh, and my nav lights failed during the flight (as part of the random failures system in the Duke), so we had some fun figuring that out.
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2020, Had a major disaster with the California update, had to uninstall and reinstall the sim - first time since I bought 2020 in October of that year. At any rate, while re-linking mods and apps that I’ve accumulated over five years, I noticed I had two king air mods that evaded my memory and may have been making the issues I was having with the Black Square #2 engine cutting out. The next two posts did not end well as the likely conflicts were still in place. I’m posting them, anyway, as I still found the flights very scenic in northern Western Australia. I’m also posting the last two flights while I clean up the digital wreckage from the update SNAFU…
That said, this series of images were the flight from Meekathara to Port Hedland. It was short enough that there was no engine mishap until I parked the plane and the engine conked out before I could cut them…
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Williamsport Regional (KIPT) to Washington Dulles (KIAD) in the default Cessna Caravan, because Williamsport regional only has one airlines (Southern Airways Express) and destination, surprised that they don’t have at least Avelo or Contour Airlines service out of that small airport
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Washington Dulles (KIAD) to Rochester (KROC) in the Aerosoft CRJ 550 V2
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A nice night flight from Dallas to Atlanta in Vjet..FSLTL had the Airport jumping with traffic.This is a good flying personal Jet..with great landing character..
Time flies
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After a long time i had the best experience in 2024 so far!
Seems like my computer finally likes the sim.
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Rochester (KROC) to Raleigh County Memorial (KBKW) in the shorts 330
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Went and explored Burundi today in the Cessna 152. It’s a country I know nothing about, just under Rwanda and east of D.R. Congo, two countries I have explored a bit already. One of my favourite MSFS activities is to explore countries like this while listening to their local music, so I loaded up a playlist of Burundi oldies and took off from Bujumbura airport (HBBA). Apparently I forgot to take photos of the airport and city itself but I was quite impressed with the autogen in this area, Lake Tanganyika looks beautiful from up here just beyond the city limits;
After flying south east for awhile, I turned out of the rainier conditions towards a patch of clear sky and headed out over Monge National Reserve into the Bujumbura rural district. I was very impressed with the satellite quality in this area, and the flora looks fantastic with Bijans tree mods.
I took what I thought was a nice opportunity to land in this valley, and got myself into a sticky situation trying to take off again next to the Mubarazi river below. I managed to get off the ground with slightly wet tires, and will not be repeating that mistake in the 152 in Central African river vallies without a bit more clearance😅 While stuck on the ground, I did some research on the local province of Murumvya, which has been proposed as a UNESCO natural heritage site and looks like a generally fascinating place, with a history of Burundi royalty in the area and some pretty well developed and quaint villages that are lacking much information on the internet.
After exploring these valleys for a couple hours, I turned back towards Bujumbura for a much tidier field landing on the outskirts of the city. Overall, a fantastic region of the world for GA flying and one of my better discoveries in Africa thus far.
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Well, growing up in Arizona I have to tell you the meteor crater is not West of Sedona. It is however West of Winslow so if you ever go there to see the Eagles statue of “Standing on the Corner in Winslow, Arizona” it’s just a short drive away to the crater.
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Flying the Tui Airways PMDG 737-800 into Innsbruck. A beautiful and at times, a very challenging mountain valley approach.
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