Desert Southwest US Out of Provo Utah

[John_Cillis 2,406]

Enjoying the VSkylabs Eurofox out of Spanish Fork airport near Provo, Utah.  I flew out of Spanish Fork in the Eurofox's cousin, the Kitfox.  Highest flight (in terms of a runway takeoff) I have ever flown as a pilot, although I flew a Rans S6 ES homebuilt out of Hemet California to 9000 feet MSL on a warm desert day in California's Inland Empire.  I wish they had a quality Rans S6ES for Xplane11 or P3D, maybe VSkylabs will see this post and put the Rans on a wishlist, it is a great experimental, especially when powered with a 100 hp Rotax 912 with a slipper clutch. 

I do not recommend purchase of an experimental with a two stroke, my friend and CFI Jim Blumer invited me up for a free lesson on his Challenger, but he later suffered an engine out with his passenger and had to land on Lake Pleasant highway near Peoria Arizona, in the Phoenix metro area.  He and his pax survived without injury but his Challenger was a total loss when one of his wings hit a roadsign, fortunately his dope and fabric aircraft did what it was supposed to do and absorbed the impact.  I used to run into Jim often at air shows around Phoenix, he is the one who signed off on my student pilot's license.  Nice, humble pilot who was older but not bolder....

My final sim cruising altitude in these pics is just shy of 9000 MSL, about as high as I can get with the fuel needed for the sim flight I will now continue to Ely Nevada.  As I burn off fuel I may have to climb higher to avoid some of the Basin and Range peaks...

John

 

[John F 2,420]

Nice area for flying.

John

[John_Cillis 2,406]

3 hours ago, John F said:

Nice area for flying.

John

I agree, especially over my Xplane11 Ortho scenery, which looks just like the real thing and has great color depth and color realism.  A great route fly is Provo to Ogden as well, along the Wasatch range.  I did business systems training and installed a Windows NT Wan in Ogden, and the hotel owner gave me and my colleague tickets to see Weber state annihilate there opponent, only one of two college games I ever saw, with the home team winning both games, the other was Concordia Lutheran University in Portland Oregon, the next day we went tubing on Mt. Hood, Portland was a beautiful city, I worked near there as well doing business training in Oregon's wine country, McMinville.  Only thing I did not like about the trip, when I tried to return my rental conveniently there were no gas stations near the airport to fill up. 

The rental agency was going to charge me a small fortune for gas when I complained to them that they should have warned me about the lack of stations near the airport.  They kindly waived the fee since I was a good Enterprise customer and had been for years.  I hated renting cars on my business trips and only did so if my clients could not offer courtesy pick up and a courtesy vehicle for me when I and my colleagues were on site working.  In Big Sky Montana I had to laugh when the hotel gave me their "courtesy vehicle" so I could go out to eat, it was a Chevy Suburban, ancient vehicle, a tank to drive on the icy roads, biggest monolith I ever drove but I managed, it just did not have a lot of get up and go at the high altitude way above Bozeman where I flew into.

I had a great Easter Sunday today, started my day off with a call to my daughter attending Northern AZ Uni in Flagstaff, a rare talk since she is so busy on an academic scholarship, she must maintain straight A's to keep it.  But she does, like her father (me) she is diligent in studies, just like I kept up with continuing education so I could stay current on systems programming skills, systems instruction, and WAN support.  In my career I've supported Unix systems, Novell Systems, IBM Mainframe systems, and of course Windows NT and their later networking platforms and O/S's before I had to quit working four years ago.  I feel it is my love of computers which led me to simming, my oldest brother Mickey (RIP) and my father both encouraged me to take up computing as a second vocation in addition to my customer service career (I was not an IT major, I was a Social Science major and Math/History/English minor).  My brother motivated me by taking me to buy my C64 and my first software title (drumroll---Sublogic's FS2).  My IT career took off a few years later and I never looked back.  I owe that to aviation and my sim interest, as well as my learning systems programming and SQL programming along the way.

John