31 minutes ago, flightwusel said:

There is no base mesh but Ortho4XP works fine to create scenery if you have elevation data.

I've flown Svalbard-Anchorage once Svalbard-Anchorage and didn't have navigational problems in a ToLiss A32N.

I'm using AutoOrtho only and am a bit afraid trying Ortho4XP... It takes some time to build, has many tricks I don't know about, etc...

But maybe one day, one never knows 🙂

 

I use HSimulators-Antarctica12 and fly to Wilkins (YWKS) annually.

Other large airports whether not have procedure or not have scenery at correct location (it's highly likely have few miles different I guess due to the distortion to WGS?

Toliss narrowbody doesn't support true heading switch, so not very nice one, but Toliss 339 and 346 is quite nice one for the job.

The ice runway is quite good on landing brake, but taxi is too slippery, kinda playful with throttle/reveser control, not realistic though.

Edited January 15, 20251 yr by C2615

Interesting flightwusel - heres a link to an Airbus A320 teaching site discussing the issue with reference to flying the A320.

Passes the time.

Seriously, this navigation problem of convergence and magnetic compass deviation in polar regions is not taught or expected in PPL and CPL training but mandatory for ATPL. Not so easy but thanks to GPS life is a lot easier. INS is another ball game again!

@C2615,

regarding the Antartica12 scenery when you mean it's slippery during taxi, do you mean due to a bug with ground friction in the sim?

29 minutes ago, jcomm said:

@C2615,

regarding the Antartica12 scenery when you mean it's slippery during taxi, do you mean due to a bug with ground friction in the sim?

IMO it's unrealistic but I never taxied on ice IRL.

It seems in videos about jetliners in Antarctic they taxi fine on compact snow though.

No JComm I would say that is correct. ice is an almost friction free surface. There is a reason Antartic ground vehicles have tracks!. You need twice the runway length and your going to rely on thrust management to stop! May not swing but momentum on ice hard to manage! Having reverse props like the C130 or similar makes life on ice easier but Hercs bob about at the best of times. Turbines not really set up for ground use of reverse thrusters. Every aircraft in the sim I have tried at McMurdo has been slippery. 

Hey C2615. You know your aircraft! I wondered about the compass switch not tried the A319 down there yet. Should do got one in the colours of the operator from Hobart to Wilkes. 

1 hour ago, coastaldriver said:

No JComm I would say that is correct. ice is an almost friction free surface. There is a reason Antartic ground vehicles have tracks!. You need twice the runway length and your going to rely on thrust management to stop! May not swing but momentum on ice hard to manage! Having reverse props like the C130 or similar makes life on ice easier but Hercs bob about at the best of times. Turbines not really set up for ground use of reverse thrusters. Every aircraft in the sim I have tried at McMurdo has been slippery. 

I know Captain Mirpuri since we were youngters, he already enrolling in PPL lessons with Portugal Air Club and me "rambling" around the headquarters of the Air Club, in downtown Lisbon by that time (late seventies of the XX th Century).

Captain Mirpuri was a TAP captain, responsible for the acquisition of the first line of Airbus full flight simulators for the company, then founder and CEO of Air Luxor, and now CEO of HiFly, the first and only Portuguese airline which operated an A380 with BOP@LPBJ.

 

Edited January 15, 20251 yr by jcomm

4 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

Seriously, this navigation problem of convergence and magnetic compass deviation in polar regions is not taught or expected in PPL and CPL training

It is absolutely part of PPL-knowledge to understand this and even knowing how to calculate the differences…

3 hours ago, Franz007 said:

It is absolutely part of PPL-knowledge to understand this and even knowing how to calculate the differences…

But you were never given a polar stereographic chart for any of the PPL-exams  to solve the problem(s) @coastaldriver is actually mentioning. PPL charts are managing equatorial and mid latitude navigation problems (Mercator+Lambert charts).
Polar /GRID North navigation is strictly ATPL syllabus.

23 hours ago, Daube said:

In FS9 the Earth was still depicted as a cylinder, if I remember correctly. It was not possible to go over the arctic circles or something like that.

With FS9 it is possible to fly over the North Pole, but strange things happen, the instruments indicate that the plane proceeds perfectly straight with the nose forward (white arrow), instead if observed in external view you see the plane proceeding constantly to the left in a slide (red arrow) as if there was a very strong wind component that pushes it forcefully to the side (in the test flight there was 0 knots of wind).
I also noticed that whatever compass or heading I insert on the autopilot.... 15°... 45°... 180°... 235°... North... South... East... West... any compass!.... I will always see the plane flying sideways to the left.
A really curious behavior. 🙂

2 hours ago, SAS443 said:

But you were never given a polar stereographic chart for any of the PPL-exams  to solve the problem(s) @coastaldriver is actually mentioning. PPL charts are managing equatorial and mid latitude navigation problems (Mercator+Lambert charts).
Polar /GRID North navigation is strictly ATPL syllabus.

Yeah I was talking about knowing that in diverges the more to the north we are flying and understanding the problematic at north pole, not navigating using the GRID-system.

2 hours ago, SAS443 said:

But you were never given a polar stereographic chart for any of the PPL-exams  to solve the problem(s) @coastaldriver is actually mentioning. PPL charts are managing equatorial and mid latitude navigation problems (Mercator+Lambert charts).
Polar /GRID North navigation is strictly ATPL syllabus.

Correct in PPL and CPL syllabi and training your looking at the differences in how charts represent a sphere - Mercator (a cylinder) and Lambert Conformal (a cone) the navigation issue is track and magnetic variation. If you draw a track on a Mercator chart you get a straight line but the reality is that if you attempt to fly that track you get changing angular relationships with meridians of longitude. The Lamberts Conformal is the basis of all WAC Charts but it covers only a small area the benefit is that a track drawn on that chart represents better a great circle with less angular displacement. The secondary problem is that of the earths magnetic field and it varies significantly at the poles, so we are talking about how to resolve an imperfect mechanism the magnetic compass to steer and maintain a heading along with a gyroscopic compass. In high latiitudes before GPS or Ground based navaids - you needed to take a celestial shot to nail a position accurately, that is a skill most pilots today would no longer have or understand. There is a video about on the net of the US Nautilus traversing or getting to the North Pole submerged in the 1950s - it gives a very good picture and description of these navigation problems - answer they relied on very expensive gyroscopic compass systems and dead reckoning between sun shots to do it!

How that translates into the simulator is a whole different ball game - not sure what they do about magnetic variation to represent this issue or convergence at the poles. That is also a reason why high quality avionics and instrument setups had the ability to control or slew the compass or to slave it. For example a King Air has it but never seen it in any aeroplane as standard that was not using high quality electro-gyro systems (Such as an RMI) hence how to use that switch and what it does is not well understood either. So it is in the sim as well - it is a limitation that frankly is of no bother to most as we are  sim flying in mid or equatorial latitudes. Only gets peculiar when you go to high latitudes. 

I like to do a bit of Polar sim flying but have had to live with the scenery limitations of XPlane So at the moment only some of Antartica and the Artic North as well. The proposed upgrade and release of the polar scenery will finally fill those gaps for me and I can resume doing some strange sim flights in those parts. 

OFF topic but worth relating - in the mid 1980s Qantas decided to do some Antartic scenic flights using the 707. I had a colleague who was a navigator on the first flight. They were using INS as the primary navigation tracking system. They got down to Antartica  and turned around for reasons unknown a jumpseat occupant who was there for the advice on the landscape took it upon themselves to adjust the radios on the overhead - turned off the INS. Bingo no INS as it has to be aligned on the ground, they flew all the way back using dead reckoning and celestial shots and sweated it the whole way. Put a dampner on Artic flights for awhile. 

13 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

Correct in PPL and CPL syllabi and training your looking at the differences in how charts represent a sphere - Mercator (a cylinder) and Lambert Conformal (a cone) the navigation issue is track and magnetic variation. If you draw a track on a Mercator chart you get a straight line but the reality is that if you attempt to fly that track you get changing angular relationships with meridians of longitude. The Lamberts Conformal is the basis of all WAC Charts but it covers only a small area the benefit is that a track drawn on that chart represents better a great circle with less angular displacement. The secondary problem is that of the earths magnetic field and it varies significantly at the poles, so we are talking about how to resolve an imperfect mechanism the magnetic compass to steer and maintain a heading along with a gyroscopic compass. In high latiitudes before GPS or Ground based navaids - you needed to take a celestial shot to nail a position accurately, that is a skill most pilots today would no longer have or understand. There is a video about on the net of the US Nautilus traversing or getting to the North Pole submerged in the 1950s - it gives a very good picture and description of these navigation problems - answer they relied on very expensive gyroscopic compass systems and dead reckoning between sun shots to do it!

How that translates into the simulator is a whole different ball game - not sure what they do about magnetic variation to represent this issue or convergence at the poles. That is also a reason why high quality avionics and instrument setups had the ability to control or slew the compass or to slave it. For example a King Air has it but never seen it in any aeroplane as standard that was not using high quality electro-gyro systems (Such as an RMI) hence how to use that switch and what it does is not well understood either. So it is in the sim as well - it is a limitation that frankly is of no bother to most as we are  sim flying in mid or equatorial latitudes. Only gets peculiar when you go to high latitudes. 

I like to do a bit of Polar sim flying but have had to live with the scenery limitations of XPlane So at the moment only some of Antartica and the Artic North as well. The proposed upgrade and release of the polar scenery will finally fill those gaps for me and I can resume doing some strange sim flights in those parts. 

Excellent!!!