EchoKilo

After finding and reading this Mudspike article, I got an inspiration to finally try to put the X-Plane 11's default X-15A through its paces. Slung under the wing of a B-52 launch aircraft, flying at 45000 ft over Tonopah, Nevada. All set and ready to go. Target for today: to get high. Preferably up to 50 miles or more. Edwards AFB is somewhere there in front of us, about 180 nautical miles away. Off we go! After drop, light up that XLR-11 rocket engine in the back and start our climb. Pulling up to about 50 degrees pitch up attitude while the engine is quickly burning through its limited fuel supply. After engine is out, we continue coasting up towards the peak of the of the ballistic trajectory, leaving much of the atmosphere somewhere below us. View towards Pacific Ocean while still heading upwards. Over the top! What goes up, must come down. In case of the X-15, both happen quite fast, too. Hitting Mach 4 on our way down, before starting to pull out of the dive. Leveled out, decelerating, and arriving over Edwards AFB, California. Circling to land at runway 35. Looks like we'll make it! Lining up... Last few feet to go... And we're back on terra firma! Coasting to stop on the dry lakebed runway. Time to see how we did. Using Little Navmap to record our flight and saving the flight path in GPX format, we can display and analyze it in Google Earth Pro. On this flight, we got up to 287175 feet, or an altitude of 54.39 miles. Back in the day when X-15 operations were going on in the mid to late 1960's, 50 miles was the limit above which the pilot would qualify for his astronaut wings. Total distance of our free flight was 270 miles, which took 11 minutes and 28 seconds.

The "Silver Spitfire" is safely back in U.K, after a four month adventure around the world!

Thank you! Yes, they have a support crew with a Pilatus PC-12 traveling alongside. They still have a long way to go, hope they will make it through without major issues.

Starting from UK, the Silver Spitfire G-IRTY has progressed to Japan on her around the world flight. 76 years old and still going strong! Arrived from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Russia to New Chitose, Japan on late Saturday afternoon, September 21. Continuing the journey this morning. Thumbs up and ready to go! Below is a link to the project website, including live tracking. Go see it, if you get a chance! The official Silver Spitfire website

Looks very smart, especially with a proper P-8A model. One suggestion, in case you are planning to fine tune it further: you could try lowering the NAVY title and insignia on the fuselage a bit. The bottom of the word "NAVY" should be on level with that "bend" line on the fuselage. It's a cool looking bird in real life and your rendition does it justice . Here's one I saw in an airshow few years ago.

Only ones I am aware of are by Matt Wynn, downloadable from his website. http://mattwyn2.wixsite.com/tigermousedesign

I would assume the offer will be valid until midnight September 30 (I believe Steam uses PST, but not sure on that).

Well, definitely not all of them. I reside in Japan and therefore I tend to fly around there in the sim from time to time and pay closer attention to that region. In there, at least, the airport data seems to be no different from FSX. For example, Haneda airport is missing the new international terminal and fourth runway, both of which have been operational since 2010. Also missing are Kobe airport along with the island it's been built on, and at Kansai airport the second runway and LCC terminal are missing. New Kitakyushu airport is not included either. None of these are of course major things unless you have a special interest in flying around Japan, but it would be nice to have those brought up to date in the future. What ever updates have been done to the airports within FSW, they are likely limited to Europe/US, not so much elsewhere on the globe. Nevertheless, I find FSW to be quite enjoyable, will be interesting to see how it evolves over the coming months.

I have similar GTX750 Ti, but I am looking at going for GTX1070 for my new rig which I am planning to get before the end of the year. My brother has a GTX1070 with 8GB, and based on what he told me, FSW was occasionally taking up as much as 4.7GB of video memory. So it might, especially with future updates in mind, be better to go for more than 4GB if possible.

Having some fun with the DA42 Twin Star.

Just as Heimi posted above (Thank You, Heimi!). Just make sure you have the paths correct (Local=). If you are not familiar with this type of editing, make sure to take a backup of the original file before making any changes, and try adding just one scenery area first. Once you get that working, it'll be easier to add more as/if needed.

I have only edited the one in the main FSW folder, and it seems to have done the trick in my case when I installed the Free Mesh X to improve the scenery a bit (I of course took a backup of the original scenery.cfg file, just in case).

I suppose it could depend on where in the world you're flying in. For what it's worth, at least in the area where I actually live and which I am familiar with, the FSW representation of rivers, lakes and coastlines is a lot more accurate than what was the case with stock FSX. Sure, you could improve FSX with add-on packages, but it's clear that as far as stock, out-of-the-box product goes, FSW has definitely got some improvements in the scenery department. The landclass could use more work (esp. city areas etc.), but I hope that will be resolved in the future, perhaps via Orbx landclass products or something similar.

Thanks for the photos, Mallard! Brings back some memories. I went to the Bray Air Show back in 2008, when I was living in Dublin. Seems like the event has gotten bigger, with all the jets and warbirds. Would have loved to see the Viggen and Catalina myself. Looks like a great event! I have a few photos from the 2008 show over here: Bray Air Show 2008

Yes, the 777-300 is still used a lot on the Japanese domestic routes, as is the 777-200. JAL has already retired three of their domestic 777-300's, with 4 remaining in service. ANA still has all (7) of theirs, I think. As far as the 747 goes, ANA retired their last 747-400D in March 2014. JAL had retired all of theirs a few years earlier. Even the 777-300ER can sometimes be seen on domestic routes, but its not common. Sometimes they fly a domestic hop in continuation of an international flight (i.e. JFK - NRT - CTS/ITM etc. (arriving in late evening), and then flying the opposite way next morning (the international destination may change).

Even if it is the weather thing, it may not end up looking exactly like what people are perhaps expecting or hoping for. After all, we haven't seen any teasers or such to base our expectations on. I've seen the TrueSky's Youtube video, of course, but I guess there's no telling that its FSW implementation would look similar (assuming that that's what they have chosen as the new weather engine, which is something we don't know yet for sure either).

I only had a chance to try a short test flight late last night after the update was released, but even from that one short flight it was evident that, at least for me, the immersion factor took a quantum leap forward with the C&D and implementation of checklists. Very nicely done!

Thank you Scott, that sounds very good indeed. Can't wait to try this feature out once the update becomes available.

At least the "VS canceling HDG/NAV" part applies to the DA42 autopilot as well, as I found out yesterday. Not sure about DA40, I've not flown that one on autopilot so much, but I think it's likely as the autopilot does look similar. In the DA42 the VS also defaults to 1500 fpm, which is bit too optimistic for a sustained climb. Sorry for the slight off-topic...

I wasn't able to follow the stream for it taking place around 2 a.m. over here (and I am at work now so can't watch a replay), but after reading the above comments, I was left wondering about one thing. Was anything mentioned about if this update will also allow one to start the aircraft from a parking spot, or is the default location still on the runway only? Still, a nice feature to have for sure.

This bug might have been there all along. I found similar issue already with DTG Flight School when flying at dusk around downtown Chicago. Sent some screenshots and description over to DTG via their Kayako support desk at the time. Never got around to see if it got fixed. If I remember right, all of the affected buildings in Chicago were landmarks, i.e. not generic autogen buildings. The problem looked exactly the same as in the pics above.