apollosmith

Congrats AvSim on bringing the baton around the world! An incredibly clean and well-flown race by all involved. It's always a privilege to compete against you. And kudos to Eamonn for his hard work on the excellent race web site.

We didn't find our route until Friday. We had it calculated as just a bit longer than your planned route and figured it would have less optimal winds (which it did), but not having the distraction of flying right next to other teams and allowing you guys to "scout" out the path for us from Greenland to New Zealand tipped us to using it. I'm glad we did or we very likely would have made the same Australia routing mistake.The SoH route was... interesting. We didn't see or even consider it, though we looked at polar options. We did our planning if FS9, so didn't even have that airport (which brings up an interesting race dilemma - perhaps FS9 can't win this race anymore?). We did a bunch of testing yesterday and found that it's certainly possible to land there (probably adjacent to the runway with some creative ways of getting the plane stopped). With some practice, it is no more difficult than other dangerous landings. It is what it is and certainly paid off big for them.

Welcome back Team AvSim. As one that does much of our flight planning, 'glitches' like you experienced are my worst nightmare. I actually had that airport in our flight plan and very likely would have flown the exact same route as you if you hadn't been so far ahead of us. Great job finishing things out and fantastic flying!

Oh no!!! We would have given you the heads up earlier, but didn't notice the routing issue ourselves until just now. We were just chatting about this on TS and are unanimously heartbroken to see this impact what was shaping up to be an epic race. With SoH's creativity, this is certainly going to be interesting.

My list of RTW experiences is much too long to list here. There's no doubt that the race has made me a much better sim pilot. And I've learned much about geography, politics, history, aircraft, navigation, avionics, and generally have always had a blast with great pilots in a friendly, yet competetive environment.My first race was 2004, I think. I was looking for people to fly online with and happened to join a server (I think we used MSN Game something-or-the-other back then) with FlightSim.com's pilots about 1/2 way through the race. I was flying the baton an hour or two later because there was nobody else around to take it (yeah, things were a bit different back then). It was a trial by fire. Over the years I've had some incredible experiences - like flying alone across the Atlantic and landing on a dark runway (the other team members parked along the runway to give some basic markers) with only 5 gallons of fuel left, flying Concorde across the Pacific and having my nose wheel collapse on landing in Chile but not crashing, etc., etc.The RTW race is the pinnacle of sim aviation and anyone who wants a fun experience and wants to master their flying skills and ability should participate.

Yes, much more so than knowing the alternate flaps procedures. There is a much higher likelihood of needing to make a zero flaps landing then there is that you'll need alternate flaps (or at least that you'd be in a situation severe enough that alternate flaps would be needed).

Alternate flaps will (or at least should) only be utilized if there is a full Hydraulic System A & B failure. In other words, if hydraulics are working fine and the flaps won't go down, alternate flaps won't (or at least shouldn't) do anything to help the situation. So your situation is a bit abnormal.Alternate Flaps will fully extend leading edge flaps/slats. They are all or nothing and there's no retracting them. Holding Alternate Flaps switch will VERY SLOWLY extend the trailing edge flaps. T/E flaps can be VERY SLOWLY (duty cycle is ~25 minutes) retracted by the same method. I'm not sure if this is correctly modeled in the PMDG - as you note, it might just send everything to flaps 40.Of course getting to the point of needing Alternate Flaps would require an A & B hydraulic failure. As was the case in your instance, there would certainly be a lot going on. Due to the systems loss, you would be flying manually, lowering the gear manually, and dealing with other issues. You'd want to be VERY careful of any flap asymmetry - if you went to alternate flaps and one side didn't respond, you'd be in big trouble quickly. Because of the inability to retract L/E slats, inability to retract flaps very quickly, and stuck with a down landing gear, you'd be operating in a relatively small performance window and had better get your first landing right because you would be unable to execute a proper missed approach.Considering that an A/B failure would probably be caused by or would result in significant damage, you might be just as well doing a flaps up landing. I don't have a Non-normal Checklist to know what is actually recommended.But in the sim, with this seemingly isolated failure of just flaps, I guess you'd just get to about flaps 15 speed, extend fully with alternate flaps, and then land normally.Jared Smith

Congrats! You guys did awesome this year. In fact, all the teams did amazingly well. This was the cleanest and most enjoyable race I've seen in 6 years of doing this. While it stings a bit to see my team fall short by such a small margin (Just 39 minutes! And fs-mp just 9 minutes behind us!!!), it's hard not to feel successful with the results of such a hard-fought, yet clean, well-flown, and well-planned race. You better be prepared to defend the trophy next year, but for now, a huge congratulations is in order.

I've updated your bonus on the tracker site. There is a mistake in your calculations - variety bonuses are worth 30 minutes each, giving you 4.5 hours in variety bonus and a total of 25.5 hours of bonus.If this is incorrect, let me know. I'll monitor and will update as bonuses change.

I have updated your team bonus on the tracker site. It's still not entirely clear what your total bonus is. My math gives me 13 hours (3 burger run, 6 team flight, 3 diversity bonus, and 1 for VHHX which you didn't record). If you could provide a total each time you update, it will make things a bit easier.Keep up the excellent flying!

The "Baton-carrier or wingman?" option only shows if you have "Send real-time position to server?" selected in the settings. Also, be sure to create a user (if you already exist, it won't create a duplicate).

A few things to note:- Once you download the new Duenna, go to Settings and select Default for Server+URL. Then create a user. Be sure to select your team name.- In order for the tracker to track your flight, "Send real-time position to server?" must be checked.- If you are a baton holder or wingman, you MUST check the "Baton-carrier or wingman?" option on the main screen. DO NOT select this option during the race unless you have the baton or are flying a wingman leg, otherwise the Baton Tracker will add your flight. Also, YOU MUST select this option for the Baton Tracker to record your baton flight.- With the "Baton-carrier or wingman?" deselected, your flight information will still be tracked at http://www.fsrtwrace.com/track/ListFlights.php- The Duenna will automatically upload your Duenna graphic and text file to the server after your flight. If all goes as planned (and the race committee allows it), you should not need to post these files to the forums unless this process fails for some reason.- We'll be working out bugs (we're aware of several) and making improvements up to and probably even after the race begins, but if you have feedback, recommendations, or bug reports, let us know. In the mean-time, please use it.Jared "Smitty" Smith

This is certainly a useful tool. However, this puts load on my server (I own the smithplanet.com server) and a little bit of load on each multiplayer server. It's not a big deal, I just ask that if you aren't monitoring what's happening that you hide the servers in Google Earth. Just uncheck the checkbox next to the server name in My Places in Google Earth.I also will be updating the following graphic every few hours throughout the race. You can get full details and compare bonuses, speeds, and other race elements at http://smithplanet.com/rtw/If someone from Team AvSim would like to help update your legs as they happen, that would be great. Just log in at the link above.Cheers and good luck!http://smithplanet.com/rtw/rtw.jpg

I can't really help, but I too am quite interested in moving this P-38 to FSX, so if/when you get this problem solved, if you could post your gauge or code, I'd very much appreciate it.

I'm not sure what you mean by "when altitude alert is triggered", but you'll want something like this...(A:PLANE ALT ABOVE GROUND, feet) 1000 < This will display the warning light when your altitude is less than 1000 feet AGL.This same logic will work for your previous questions as well. I'd recommend that you also search the forums here for help and read the basic tutorials at http://fs2x.com/Jared