I took C-FBJO up for a joy-ride today. To add realism to FlightGear, I think that we should simulate arriving at the airport, finding the stabilator covered with hard-crusted ice, and having to wait an hour while the plane thaws out in someone's heated hangar. We could call it an ADM -- Annoyance Dynamics Model.
Once that was out of the way, things got a lot better. In the past, all of my flights have been either training exercises or carefully-planned cross-country trips. This time, I just flew for fun, with a chart on my lap and a timer running to keep track of fuel remaining and tank changes. I stayed relatively low (2000 ft MSL, or about 1600 ft AGL) so that I was underneath terminal airspace quickly; I departed to the east, followed the Ottawa River past a series of small towns, came partway back on the Quebec (north) shore, and decided to see how far I could follow the (very narrow) South Nation River from the air. I followed every twist and turn, counting off the towns and villages on the map: it was an old-fashioned way to navigate, and showed connections I wouldn't normally notice (there's no road or railway paralleling that river, so you don't think of the towns as connected to each other). Eventually, the river shrank to not much larger than a drainage ditch and I couldn't pick out which branch to follow from the VNC, so I turned south to the St. Lawrence River and did an aerial tour of Prescott, where my mother's family comes from. At that point I'd been flying for about an hour and a half, so I flew to the 416 (a freeway) and followed it north towards Ottawa until the bridge over the Rideau River, then reported in to terminal (I was almost back in their airspace, even at 2000 ft) and flew the last part under ATC back home. That air was also getting bumpy with the low moving in. Total time: 2.1 hours; air time: 1.8 hours. I do enjoy all of the sophistication of dead reckoning, radio navigation, etc., but sometimes simple pilotage is the best way to fly. I had my GPS on but used it only as a cross-check on my altimeter (there was a low pressure system coming in, so I wanted to make sure I didn't get caught lower than I thought I was). With roads, rivers, and railroads, this kind of flying works in FlightGear as well, or almost as well as it does in real life. I strongly encourage everyone to try it: grab a map (even just a road map or atlas), and fly around following roads, rivers, coastlines, and so on. Try following a small river all the way from one end to the other, and see if you can identify all of the towns and cities you fly over. All the best, David -- David Megginson, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.megginson.com/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
