The steam gauge C172 the moment I landed it in Red Square.
Once upon a time in FSE, there was a monthly newsletter called “The FSE Reporter”. In an effort to drum up more contributions, the editor offered the prize of a C172 to anybody who 1) contributed to every issue for 6 months, and 2) those contributions were deemed the best. As it happened, I ALREADY had a column in the FSE Reporter and only 1 other person got involved, so we both ended up being given C172s.
Now, the C172 is NOT amongst my favorite planes. I have no nostalgic attachment to it from real life and it’s slow and unprofitable in FSE. I had flown it fairly often early in my FSE career because at that time, there weren’t many other options for broke FSE noobs using MSFS but, by the time I received this C172, I’d made enough money to buy a TBM and was blasting around in the flight levels in the lucrative VIP racket. I was done with low and slow in FSE. So honestly, I wasn’t thrilled to have a C172.
BUT, it was a nice gesture and I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, so I determined to do something special with this bird, publishing a PIREP about recreating an historic C172 flight in the FSE world. And naturally, to people my age, the most historic and famous C172 exploit was when this crazy German kid named Rust landed one in Red Square at the height of the Cold War.
Problem was, my C172 was in south Mississippi and Rust started in Hamburg, so my 1st challenge was getting to the start point. I had to fly the thing all the way up to Goose Bay, which is a long way in such a plane and came close to burning me out on it before I’d even started the actual recreating. At Goose Bay, I put the C172 in a crate and hired another FSE player with a DC-3 to freight it to Hamburg, where I had the plane reassembled. This provided a nice break in the monotony of grinding this plane along, which I needed.
And ONLY THEN could I begin recreating Rust’s itinerary. He flew out to Iceland via the Shetlands and Faroes, then back to Shetland, then across the Norway, then over to Helsinki. It was from there that he finally flew to Moscow. Nearly all of these hops were VERY long for such a slow plane (500-600nm) and mostly over unfriendly water. Rust had ferry tanks aboard but I didn’t. While the FSE gods WILL install ferry tanks in your ride for historical purposes, this is a 1-way conversion and I didn’t want to ruin the plane for normal FSE use. Thus, I flew all these long legs at about 80kn for maximum fuel economy. And, of course, the real flight was in 1989, before GPS, so it was all the occasional NDB or VOR and mostly DR. The final leg from Helsinki to Moscow was all DR after an NDB on the Baltic coast which no longer exists, so I used one in Finland instead. But my aim was good enough to hit Moscow from 600 miles away.
BUT, I had to do that last 600nm flight 3 times. Before attempting it, I did some practice hops in Moscow landing on the bridge Rust actually used. When starting in the air nearby, I was able to land on the bridge no problem and taxi into Red Square just like Rust did. So then I fired up FSE, started in Helsinki, and made it to Moscow. I landed on the bridge just like I’d practiced and the plane fell through it and crashed. So I cursed in Russian, took another drink and repeated the process. Same result, with much more violent Russian cursing (I know a lot of Russian curse words and NOTHING else of the language). On the 3rd attempt, I skipped the bridge and just landed in Red Square itself with no problems.
All that was IMHO way above and beyond the call of duty to show my appreciation for being given this plane. And I have NEVER, and WILL NEVER, have the envie to fly the steam gauge C172 ever again. Or any C172, for that matter. That said, I made many friends in the FSE community through discussion of my PIREP about this project, I got a lot of FSE street cred for doing this, and I got this story to tell out of it. Plus, it made me a better sim pilot from leveling up my radio navigation and DR skills. So, all in all, it was worth all the trouble and considerable expense in doing all these time-consuming, zero-profit hops while my TBM was languishing on tie-downs. Maybe someday I’ll do something similar, but NOT in a C172.
As to the C172 itself, I immediately transferred it to my group of white elephants, K&B’s Boneyard in FSE, in hopes somebody else would want to fly this now semi-famous plane (it’s not just any C172, it recreated Rust’s misadventures). Nobody did for about a year afterwards. But then I got a PM from somebody wanting to buy it because it was the 1st plane he ever flew in the FSE world many years ago. So I sold it to him at the same price as the cheapest C172 then on the market.
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