On 12/13/2020 at 4:27 PM, Tim_Capps said:

Since I've gotten Active Sky into P3Dv5.1, every time I report to Luton it's foggy, or raining, or both. I'm beginning to think AS is buggy, or abandoning my plans to retire to sunny England.

Well one assumes you got AS for realistic weather... 😀

8 hours ago, Mace said:

I vaguely remember hearing about some corruption or another over there, but I try to stay away from the Crackle and Hush Puppy these days.    The glory of the internet -- here we have English folk, South Africans, etc. reading this.  They have no idea what we're talking about.

@Ray Proudfoot would be all-in for the Hush Puppy Saloon.  I'd have to pry him outta there.

@Mace, sorry but I have no idea what you're referring to.

@Tim_Capps, one final reason why I do not mind the unremitting gloom we're having here at the moment.

Take my latitude of 53.3 degrees north. Current temp is 13C (55F) and it dropped to 11C (52F) overnight. Now look at a station in Quebec at 52N. Current temp as the sun rises is -12.5C and with wind chill it feels like -18C.

https://www.wunderground.com/dashboard/pws/IBAIEJAM2/graph/2020-12-17/2020-12-17/daily

Yesterday it never rose above -15C and the minimum was -40C. And that's the same latitude as Northern England! I love sunshine but not at that price.

20 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

@Tim_Capps, one final reason why I do not mind the unremitting gloom we're having here at the moment.

Take my latitude of 53.3 degrees north. Current temp is 13C (55F) and it dropped to 11C (52F) overnight. Now look at a station in Quebec at 52N. Current temp as the sun rises is -12.5C and with wind chill it feels like -18C.

https://www.wunderground.com/dashboard/pws/IBAIEJAM2/graph/2020-12-17/2020-12-17/daily

Yesterday it never rose above -15C and the minimum was -40C. And that's the same latitude as Northern England! I love sunshine but not at that price.

 

 

We can thank the Gulfstream Ray, as I'm sure you know. The UK is artificially warm thanks to its proximity.

Although I believe there was a claim that suggested that we are artificially warm due the the Rocky Mountains of all places. They suggest its the south-westerly winds we experience, that wouldn't exist without to Rockies. 

But whatever the reason, we certainly are up to 20 degrees warmer than our latitude would suggest. In my new neck of the woods I see them swimming in the bay. I'm not kidding, in December. 12 degrees I believe the sea temp was the other day. 

Martin,

I'm not sure I would agree with the British Isles being artificiially warmed given the Gulf Stream is a naturally occuring feature. We're just lucky enough to be in the right posiiton to benefit from it.

What place on Earth could claim to receive no change in its weather either positive or negative? Islands in a large ocean have the least variable climate especially those in the tropics.

Is Newfoundland negatively affected by the Labrador Current that sweeps down from the Arctic? Certainly off that coast is where a lot of our weather is born as that cold air meets warm air coming up from the Gulf.

When the air and sea temperature are similar such as in the late autumn in the British Isles the shock of dipping your toe may not be that great. But I'll leave that to the hardy folk on the CIs. 😁

 

8 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Martin,

I'm not sure I would agree with the British Isles being artificiially warmed given the Gulf Stream is a naturally occuring feature. We're just lucky enough to be in the right posiiton to benefit from it.

 

When I say "artificially" I simply mean that without its path passing by our shores we would be cooler. Being lucky enough to be in the right position was my point. Lets hope it stays that way, if it switches off, don't think I'd be too fond of the resulting chilliness. I'm a warm weather person. 

Fair enough Martin. There was some talk a while back that the Gulf Stream could be weakening but that rumour seems to have stopped. The most important thing for weather is prevailing wind and as long as it’s from the west we’ll be fine. I dread to think what things would be like if it was from the East. Beastly! 🥶

9 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

@Mace, sorry but I have no idea what you're referring to.

I know you don't.  I was joking around, to that exact point -- that there is absolutely no way 99.9% of the people in this thread would know what that is.

There WAS an airstrip right behind it, modelled in FSX, but I don't think it's in P3D or MSFS.  It was called "East Cape Girardeau Airport" and used to have a few Ag aircraft / crop dusters there.  Way too much information but it does have minor relevance to flying in that regard.

On 12/17/2020 at 6:19 PM, Mace said:

but I try to stay away from the Crackle and Hush Puppy these days

The old Purple Grackle just across the river from you? (A kind of bird--more info would not be edifying. A reliable criminal case generator, though.) After the docket, sometimes the judge would call a "bar association meeting" and we would go to a bar a couple of blocks away--not sure it even had a name. There were a couple of other bars--The Stork Club if you were looking for a GSW--and another one I can't remember. I had one client who went into the latter looking for his wife and everyone put their hands up. "Put your hands down, Billy Ray! I like you!. I'm fixin' to shoot my wife!" And he did. As you can probably guess, the state had an airtight case. He demanded a jury trial, and after much hilarity (the Alexander County jury pool is pretty shallow) we finally got "twelve good and true" (plus one alternate) picked. After the first day of testimony (a harrowing experience for a young associate of mine in his first trial) he decided to plead guilty. He got forty years. (20 was for the mandatory "killing with a gun" penalty. I suppose because you're more dead from a GSW than if you only get stabbed 60 times.) "Forty years. Don't sound so long when you say it fast," was his comment on the sentence when it was pronounced.

There is a fairly decent little airport at Cairo (the city under discussion) KCIR. In the hanger there was a Cessna 337--the two engine push-pull model--that I coveted. It belonged to a dentist and had not been flown for years. It's probably sill there. (Slightly on topic fig leaf.) I remember defending a kid who destroyed some runway lights there. (Yes, my memory is filtered through my legal career, sorry.) My flight instructor did a mail run from KMDH (my home airport) to Cape, in all sorts of weather.

Cairo is where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers meet. It was going to be the Big Thing, possibly the nation's new capital. Charles Dickens bought shares in a development scheme, and was bitter about the bad investment to his dying day. Grant used it to launch his invasion of the CSA on the western front. It has two nice antebellum mansions. Shemwell's was still open last time I cruised through, although under new management, My wife and I got some of their great barbecue. She partly grew up in Cairo, since her family was originally from there and owned rental property. She still remembers how Black people would have to come to the back door to get barbecue--they weren't allowed inside. It's really a sad monument to the Old South, the best and the worst. And on a personal note that looms larger as I advance in years, her family Victorville boneyard is there when my time comes to be scrapped. I hope the Irish immigrants don't mind a Saxon joining them.

Yes, Southern Illinois is very much the South in both climate and history. (Another fig leaf,) It is further south than Richmond and Louisville. It was "Copperhead Country" during the war, and could have gone either way, but did end up forming a Union regiment under John A. Logan, who proved to be one of the few political generals who could actually fight. The highlight of  his career was the burning of Atlanta. He commissioned a "cyclotron" of the event--a 360 degree painting--for use during the 1884 Blaine-Logan presidential campaign. That Republican ticket would have won except a friendly preacher decided to ad some last-minute help by making the "rum, Romanism, and rebellion" speech, which was widely publicized. New York Irish Catholics didn't care for that sort of Know-Nothingism, and the Blaine-Logan ticket narrowly lost that state, and the election. (If you think contentious campaigns are a recent development, Grover Cleveland, who became president, had fathered a child with a woman not his wife, so was greeted with chants of "Ma, ma, where's my pa?" everywhere he went.) Logan tried to unload the cyclotron on Atlanta, but, understandably, they were not excited about paying for a monument about the destruction of their city.

So, now the 99.9 percent are familiar with my stomping grounds. When I read about the different places in England, I know I would love to hear a little bit about them. We are Yorkie people, after all, whose canine ancestors were bred to kill rats in the mines and textile mills. (We have one who is an obsessively diligent mouser.) I notice AVSIM is far from their fundraising goal. I'll go kick in a little more to cover the bandwidth for this. 'Tis the season, after all, and it's hard to imagine flight simulation without AVSIM. I guess I'm like John Mortimer's Rumpole of the Bailey now, always ready to recount the story when "alone and without a leader," he tried the Penge Bungalow Case. I think my social skills (assuming I ever had any) have deteriorated this year.

 

 

Edited December 19, 20205 yr by Tim_Capps