Flight Sim Blog ala Paul (P-12C)

I thought I would post a couple more videos of my exploits collecting aircraft data. On the same trip to Fantasy of Flight in Polk County Florida where we collected data on the Fokker D-VIII that I posted about awhile ago, we also collected audio and photos of the Fieseler Fi-156 Storch.

As a bonus, Kermit Weeks took me along for a ride in his Storch while he was demonstrating it's flying qualities to the museum guests.

The video below was shot while we were recording audio of the Storch.

Here is the video I shot from the backseat while Kermit flew a demo flight. This aircraft has amazing slow flight characteristics and short-field capabilities. Since I was filming and just enjoying the flight, I didn't get a chance to pretend to be the gunner, but the gun was there to pretend with had I wanted to.

I'll post some other videos I have kicking around sometime soon.

As you may already know by now, there are three new free race courses to try out in FSX Acceleration. If you enjoy any of the screenshots below, you would probably enjoy it live on you PC. If you don't want to fly with other people, just start a LAN session (whether you are connected to a LAN or not) and fly it by yourself. No competition, no pressure, just a new challenge to test your skills and make you a better pilot! Don't forget to turn on the race map and mission pointer though so you don't get completely lost on the course.

When the office was relatively quiet during the holidays at the end of last year, Brandon and I decided to build some new courses for download later. So we built them and tested them over time and they are now available for you to fly. You can find them here at FSinsider.

I thought it would be fun to show some of the various racing shots we took during testing.

The four images here were taken when we first tried out the T6 course. The sequence shows me trying to catch Brandon after I went a little wide on the previous turn. I managed to catch-up and almost passed on the outside, but as you can see by the finish results, he beat me by a hair. We are flying the Alphasim T6 (before they updated it for FSX so if you pick it up, look for the update). There are some freeware T6's out there as well, but I don't know if they are FSX compliant or not.

The following shots we took a month or so ago and shot most of them from the various pylon cameras mounted around the course.

The shots below are from the Sport class course using the Glassair III from Australian Simulations. I can find a link for them anymore, and the version we were flying was for FS2004 and had opaque windows (which we fixed for us). There are other Sport Class options out there in the world of freeware and payware.

The alpine sailplane hoop course is a lot of fun. It helps to learn the course so that you can anticipate the turns and find the thermals, but the low level sailplane flying and strategic elements of deciding when to stay in a thermal and when to go to the next hoop are very cool. The second shot shows a near mid-air collision while circling in a thermal.

Just for a little interest, here are some shots from other races in FSX Acceleration that we took during development. When Brandon and I see these we remember the details about each race and talk about them like some kind of famous dogfight or something.

The row above shows the Greek cross country race, a night race at the UK Red Bull location in Longleat and then a shot of an early test over Istanbull. The night race tests were quite interesting and challenging (you can do it too by changing the time in the flight file)!

Below are some shots of the Minden sailplane course. This is another very cool real-world sailplane course, but it does take awhile to finish (about 30 minutes if you don't land out), especially if you fly conservatively.

  The shots below show some of the other racing that can be found in FSX Acceleration. Of course racing P-51 Mustangs at Reno is well known, but how about racing the Mustang at the Secret Island used in the FSX mission Tokyo Executive? Or how about racing F-18s down Black Canyon in Colorado. We used special high-res dem for that one so you should at least check that out. Then there is the Hawaiian Hoop course where I made a special point to showcase just how "gamey" a race could get. I did it primarily because of the commentary some users were expressing before Acceleration was released out of fear we were ruining FS by making it into a game. Although most of the courses are rooted in reality, the Hawaiian hoop course definitely isn't! Sorry I don't have higher-res shots of those courses.

Lastly, I thought you might like to see a blooper shot of animals flying over Longleat. There is a drive-through safari park at Longleat and this is the result of a bug we had with simulated objects...