A few pics from a long flight across Africa. My Beech King Air was positioned at FBNG (Mombo Camp Airfield, Botswana) following a cargo flight from Angola, but with no cargo jobs nearby to FBNG, and wishing to get over to my newly-constructed cargo centre at HTDA (Dar-Es-Salam, Tanzania) so I could fly some more lucrative base-to-base jobs between Dar-es-Salam and FMMI (Ivato, Madagascar), this meant flying all the way across a large part of Africa with the cargo hold empty, taking in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania along the way.

The good point about this however, was that in flying direct, I realised I would be following the Zambezi River for quite some time, with its major dams and lakes, passing over a few good points of interest, including Livingstone, Victoria Falls and Lake Malawi, and since part of the reason for having a virtual cargo company operating in Africa, was so I could check these places out, this was pretty cool. Sadly the scenery for Victoria Falls in MSFS is not as majestic as it is in real life, but it was still fun to take it in and it is nevertheless reasonably geographically accurate and visually pleasing, as well as being one of the places which is fairly instrumental in some major incidents in history.

As per the title of this thread, this is the region where Henry Morton Stanley - his expedition being funded by the New York Herald's publisher, James Gordon Bennett Jr - discovered the whereabouts of the famous missionary explorer, David Livingstone, and greeted him with the well known 'I presume?' phrase. Although he was there ostensibly to preach, Livingstone's missionary efforts were in many ways a pretext for a campaign against the slave trade, he surmised that by making an explorer's name for himself, his anti-slavery efforts would carry more weight. Although he was forced on occasion to rely on such practices for survival, his intentions were for the time very honorable for the most part, having been inspired by Livingstone's own poverty-stricken upbringing in Scotland.

Perhaps more famously however, Gordon Bennett's name became the inspiration for the famous expression of surprise, after he allegedly turned up drunk to his engagement party at the family home of the socialite Caroline May, then proceeded to have a slash in the fireplace, much to the horror of all the posh people in attendance. It was as a result of this that the marriage was called off and he fled to Europe in disgrace. As you probably know however, Gordon Bennett did return to the 'States and established numerous well known races for cars, balloons and aeroplanes, some of which continue to this day...

 

 

 

 

9 hours ago, Chock said:

My Beech King Air was positioned at FBNG (Mombo Camp Airfield, Botswana) following a cargo flight from Angola

Risky, Al ! I don't see any active or passive defence kit on your plane! 

5 hours ago, HighBypass said:

Risky, Al ! I don't see any active or passive defence kit on your plane! 

I have a laptop on standby on the passenger seat, ready to lob it out of the window, the laptop has the browser on the Avsim Aerosoft CRJ thread. The amount of hot air in that topic will serve as a perfect decoy for any heat seekers fired at me. In lieu of not having a chaff dispenser, I periodically throw Kit Kat wrappers out of the window. And to decoy laser guided munitions, I have a mirror disco ball hanging from the string which the furry dice used to be on. No need to worry about small arms fire, anyone with small arms will not be able to hold an AK47, let alone shoot at me with it, because it'll be too big for them.

Sorted.

Edited January 4, 20215 yr by Chock

Great theme and story, and a really good-looking aircraft, here,...!!