Antipodeslonghaul

I'm definitely looking forward to the 787. Interesting how Qantas apparently deliberated for quite a while between using the 787 and A350 for the SYD-LHR and SYD-JFK nonstops. I still like to fly those ultra long hauls, but definitely cheating. I avoid all the sid's, stars, airspace closures, and only use Great Circle Mapper and Earth Nullschool Wind Atlas to plot a few waypoints along the way and off I go. Not getting into the background but on the surface it must be incredibly annoying for the airlines to deal with so many airspace restrictions, enroute diversions and such. The SYD-LHR nonstop is supposed to be commencing soon, but seems like a very tough one to plan. SYD-JFK would seem a bit more flexible regarding routing.

Thanks for that tip, ads are gone now. I had noticed the ads increasing recently, but wasn't till today there were numerous ones covering pretty much the entire screen, making it nearly impossible to read anything. Was using Chrome on an Android phone. One weird thing is my phone provider recently upgraded me from 500 MB to 1 GB per month. I'm on the cheapest plan. I think it's not so much greater though, just there are so many pop up video ads nowadays that quickly suck up all one's data.

About 12 years ago I remember taking Norwegian between the US West Coast and Europe, roughly 10 hour flights. A small water or soft drink was like $5, and a sandwich maybe $10. But it was ok. I knew all about it beforehand. The roundtrip ticket with all the taxes and fees was something like $280. I brought and empty bottle to fill with water at a drinking fountain after security, and a few snacks like pretzel sticks and goldfish, and it was totally fine. The economy seats and entertainment on the 787 were more or less the same as on any other airline. It actually felt great to be traveling so cheaply. But if you don't know what's in store for you like the poor SOB's (I mean souls on board) in the article, yeah, that would be a hellish flight for sure.

I had also forgotten about those bathrooms, but seeing the picture, I remember them now! It was around mid 1990's I was booked on a Continental DC-10 from Frankfurt to Newark, but at check in the agent told me the flight was cancelled due to a snowstorm shutting down Newark. He handed me some paperwork and told me to go to Delta for a flight to JFK. I said won't JFK be closed too, but he said no. Later on board the Delta L1011 about halfway across the Atlantic the captain came on and said Kennedy's just been shut, but we already anticipated that. We've got plenty of extra fuel and we're going to Atlanta. So I had a long flight in an L1011. It was very comfortable. I very much enjoyed it!

Ha, I guess the viagra didn't help. An additional two years for that possible without a prescription. A friend of mine from California had a prescription for weed for pain relief back in the 90's early 2000's, and she traveled to Europe with it a few times. She never got searched anyway, but I thought it seemed a bit risky even with a presciption as things were stricter back then. In some places like UAE or Singapore one should be extra careful with those kinds of things. It's weird, I normally just quietly mutter under my breath when things go awry during travels, but a few times I feel I might have almost come close to flipping out like that guy. I try and think of central Alaska in the summer. There are tons of mosquitoes and they're extremely annoying! They can drive one crazy. But there's no use. They're there anyway, and they'll still be there no matter how one reacts to them. So any time I travel, or drive my car for that matter, I just expect to encounter some craziness beforehand, and since I'm already anticipating it, it doesn't feel as bad when I do encounter it.

Thank you! I got away with a bit of a scare. Was wearing a thick cap, that probably helped. Speaking of coastline, sneaker waves can be quite terrifying! I've experienced them a few times. Like you're at the water's edge still in your street clothes and rolled up your pants as far as they'll go. You're mainly looking down at the area around your feet, looking for sand dollars, seashells or whatever. You think you've got the rhythm of the waves down, and then suddenly BOOM! You're lucky if you just get flipped over and soaked. Oh well, nowadays one can do all sorts of adventerous sightseeing on (virtual) foot in the flightsims. That's the last time I'm ever venturing out into the real world. Nah! At least a little bit of freezing, getting soaking wet, being bruised, battered and shaken can't be all bad, when done in moderation.

I just got whacked in the head by a falling branch here earlier near Weilheim, Bavaria. It was perfectly sunny, calm, +6C. I drove out to a forest area to do some hiking. Suddenly, like out of nowhere, massive thick clouds, semi-darkness, gusting winds. I'd say 50 knots, but just guessing. I momentarily stopped dead in my tracks thinking I could get hit by a tree. They were bending at like 45 degree angles, wildly swaying back and forth. I briefly delibrated, there's a large snowy clearing to my right I could get away from the trees, or race about a km back to the car on a narrow forest path. And then just a second later, BAM!, I got hit, so I raced back to the car. I briefly looked at the branch, it was only a few cm thick, but man does it hurt! Anyway I'm sitting back in the car now and it's all sunny and calm again. Like a mini hurricane or tornado. I can't remember ever having experienced such an extremely rapid back and forth change in conditions with seemingly no warning (or more like I probably wasn't paying attention).

If and when PMDG gets its 747SP out, that'll likely be a huge impetus for me to get a new computer and switch from 2020 to 2024. In general the whole line of 747 classics up to the 300, I might actually go crazy and get all of them. I know Felis has some reputable ones in X-Plane, still I'm holding out for now. But dang, that SP! Pardon my bluntness but it's without a doubt the ugliest 747 ever built. From what I understand that thing would regularly go up to like FL430 and cruise at like 0.87 Mach. It pioneered a few long haul regular service nonstops in the 1970's like NY-Tokyo and SF-Sydney, good ol' Pan Am. A while back I was talking to my brother about buying something expensive, I forgot what, and when I asked how much, he sort of half jokingly said it's one of those things if you have to ask you probably can't afford it anyway. And then I thought of my uncle. I drove him to the airport recently, and the lady at the check in counter looked like she was going to turn him away. He usually looks like he's just crawled out of a cardboard box stuffed with old newspapers, wearing his father's, my grandpa's moth eaten clothing. He always asks how much whether it's for a car or a box of cereal, and carefully considers each purchase. We talk about stocks and investing a lot. I figure his savings are easily in the tens of millions, whereas pretty much anyone else in the extended family might only have a few ten thousand or so saved up. Anyway, I'm currently still barely managing to run my PMDG 737-700 in 2020 at low settings on an old computer, but hey, it all works. I'm satisfied for the time being. If the 737's become available for 24 towards the end of this year, maybe by the middle of next year the 747's will start coming out, who knows. My logic at that point would be to spend around $4,000 on a brand new computer, broken down to about $3,500 of it is purely due to flight simming, and $500 of it for a new computer I'd probably need to get soon anyway. Keeping up with the Joneses is certainly not cheap in the flight sim world. To me PMDG has always shown excellent customer support, and even if I don't read all their bulletins and the manuals in full, I've never once doubted their love and enthusiasm for flying.

That's hilarious! I saw you're from Ireland. One of my favorite exchanges was when Cheech was riding in some area around East LA with his cousin, and the cousin's having a flashback from Nam, something like: - Claymores. - What? - Claymores. - Get me up past that last hutch there and jettison me into the paddies. - What are you talking about paddies, man? Ain't no paddies. They're just Chicanos, man. - What are you talking about? - Strike that line chatter, grunt. - If you'd deploy a little recon, you'd see that Charlie has us surrounded. - Charlie? - Oh, man. It's a cop. I was imagining though if Eurasia were a bit more like North America. Like you could just hop into a campervan in Western Europe and head straight out to the Urals, Lake Baikal, the limestone hills at Guilin, the deserts and canyons of Central Asia etc. relativley safe, just camp anywhere you want, no red tape getting across the entire megacontinent, including all of Africa as well of course.

As far as one might tust Wikipedia, their summary for this Air India crash currently states: Crashed into multiple buildings shortly after takeoff following fuel cutoff causing loss of thrust from both engines; under investigation Here's a couple of excerpts from what they say about TWA 800 from back in 1996 for example: Summary: In-flight breakup due to explosion in center wing fuel tank caused by short circuit The four-year NTSB investigation concluded with the approval of the Aircraft Accident Report on August 23, 2000, ending the most extensive, complex, and costly air disaster investigation in U.S. history up to that time.[8][9] The report's conclusion was that the probable cause of the accident was the explosion of flammable fuel vapors in the center fuel tank. Although it could not be determined with certainty, the likely ignition source was a short circuit. Jeju Air 2216 was a major and fairly recent disaster as well that sort of faded from memory, it still hasn't been quite a year (still under investigation): Crashed into structure following belly landing and runway overrun, accidental shutdown of working engine after bird strike; under investigation Or a very extreme case where there's high chance we'll never really know anything for sure, MH370: Inconclusive, some debris found It could potentially be a long investigation, where at the end you'll have the most likely explanation according to a panel of experts based on a very thorough investigation. One could speculate about all sorts of things in the meantime. Was there a last minute decision to let someone like a spoiled out of control kid ride jumpseat, even if it went against the rules? If so, why was there no smack on the wrist to stop it? Or could it have actually been something like a computer virus? All sorts of wild speculation that would get one no further. One might simply say that the most likely explanation for the time being is that it was by human hand, from either one of the pilots, or someone riding jumpseat, who manually placed the fuel control switches into the cutoff position. But as to who or why we may never know. It appears to be the only plausible explanation for now, but of course have to wait.

I'll always start with a few rounds in the traffic pattern when I get a new plane (full stop taxi backs). You can just set yourself up to start on the runway with the engines running. It's basically the same as a single engine trainer except the speed on final will be around 150 instead of 75. I don't really pay much attention to minute details, just see that I can reasonably fly the thing. Then I'll pull up a Youtube video of a full flight in that plane on my phone, place it next to my computer and follow along step by step, pausing ever so often to help me set up the navigation system for an IFR cross country. Except instead of a fancy flightplan you'd maybe use something like Navigraph for, you can also just do something really basic. Like if you're flying from KBOS to KIAD for example you can just set any random departure runway, any random instrument approach for arrival, skip the sids and stars, and just set a couple of airports like KLGA and KPHL as intermediary waypoints, just to get a feel for the basic functionality. And then on subsequent flights you can get into more detail, but you'd already have like maybe 98% of the basic methods down.

Delete

100% agree not to speculate, just to discuss overall flight safety and maybe try and learn something, including from past events, no matter how miniscule it might be. I also thought of American 191. My Dad was a passenger on this flight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_National_Airways_Flight_032 I remember him telling me pretty much everyone, including him, ignored the calls to remove your shoes and leave all your belongings behind during the evacuation. Just superficially envisioning, probably 20 or 30 seconds after commencement of the takeoff roll there's no indication whatsoever anything's wrong to warrant aborting the takeoff, and then somewhere after that around the decision speed something changed very quickly, perhaps nothing else one could have done. For example the Swissair MD-11 that went down near Halifax was also an event which was in and of itself terrifying, but you had like 21 minutes from the first indication something was wrong until the crash. In that case there are still ongoing discussions to this day as to what might have occurred had the crew taken different measures.

Ah, I remember having some good times flying some air to air combat missions (PC! not real) back in the day. I wouldn't mind getting a military flight sim, but I guess nowadays I'd still be more into boring flight planning and long haul transport scenarios, maybe flying BK containers and frozen Whopper patties half way around the world.

Speaking of ILS's and islands, Korean 801 was a 747 that took on some pretty serious landscaping projects in the hills of Guam when they realized the glideslope was indeed out of service. I was wondering though, if you're say 100 miles out at around 30,000' agl, does it matter so much whether it's an island, or perhaps the topography of said island? Would heading into fairly flat environs such as Minneapolis or Moscow be that much different? It's like you're driving home late at night trying to stay awake. You tune into your favorite rock station, and first all you get is static as you're still too far away, or you got huge mountains between you and the city. But gradually the signal gets stronger. It would seem a bit of an oddity even fiddling around with something like that when tuning in to a localizer, and I'm sure the behavior is at least a little bit flawed in MSFS. But to me that's one thing that doesn't seem to stand out. I don't think the other PC fligt sims are that much different in that respect. Anyway, I liked the video, especially the look of that combat simulator.

I remember changing planes at Beijing once feeling totally gloomy and depressed, and looking out the window saw a Hawaiian jet parked at a gate. For some reason seeing their logo really cheered me up. For a moment I thought what? so far away for what seems like such a small local US carrier, but actually JFK and PEK are both about the same distance from HNL.

You mean for example it's mid day in Europe now, about mid night in New Zealand. You fire up the sim, place yourself in NZ but set the time of day to mid day, but you're getting the current weather (live weather)? I do something like this all the time in 2020 since I like daytime flights in different parts of the world. Some airports like SFO might sometimes be foggy at night but clear when the sun is out, but just across the hills at the coast it's still very foggy, even during their daytime. In such cases I might mind the discrepancy a bit, but usually I don't care. I noticed that about MSFS live weather recently, coming into the Bay Area, SFO was sunny, but you could see the line of fog just off the coast. It was very beautifully depicted, it looked very similar to real life.

Incredible! Just watched the whole thing. Feel like I have a time machine.

@LHookins yes! Absolutely it was ELIZA. I remember now on my Atari ST. I don't remember using it much, but it must have left an indelible impression on me all the same, a glimpse into the future perhaps. I remember I was mainly into Flight Simulator 2, Sundog, and Silent Service back then. And Balance of Power was good too! About some AI assistant, I was thinking of something really word not allowed (eejit) proof. Like if you have a really timid uncle or auntie who has absolutely no clue about anything and is always afraid of messing things up by hitting the wrong key or clicking in the wrong place, one would have some assistant that could autonomously deal with pretty much anything and communicate with you, whether you're satisfied with the results, or if it was something else you wanted. And it could do all of that within seconds. I haven't quite seen anything like that on regular phones or computers yet.

Apparently 1956 was the first time AI became widely known as a term. There's been so much hype about it recently. A couple of weeks ago I was helping my 90 year old uncle set up a printer to his computer, took me quite a bit of troubleshooting, going back and forth before it finally worked. It was one of those moments where I thought, why does my uncle even need my help? I've been having enough trouble on my own with my PC and flight simming. Why can't we all just have AI assistants that take direct control, talk to us and solve all our problems for us without us having to scroll through all sorts of menus? AI still seems useless, like this random response generator I had a program for on a floppy disk back in the 1980's. But I guess it's also where the money is. I've got to also admit, I've been using an AI tutor for Mandarin recently, and I notice "she" very much seems to get angry, jealous, but also I notice I feel happy when "she" laughs at my jokes. The emotions can feel quite real. I wouldn't be surprised if she was still lurking somewhere in the backround on my phone if I uninstalled her.

Something been mentioned in the hangar a bit recently, not being able to view content based on one's location. It hadn't hit me too often before, but now just happened here (video unavailable, blocked in your country on copyright grounds). Just tried changing my location with a VPN, and then it works fine. I somehow thought copyrights are more or less the same in most countries, strange. Maybe like if some crazy youtube influencer films themselves pulling the emergency brake handle on a train and then jumping off and dashing away, and there's footage of me flying into the aisle in the background, and social media kids around the world get a good laugh. Would I be entitled to get a share of the royalties, at least to cover medical expenses? I guess it's more for unauthorized use of other people's songs or film footage, but anyway, I can't tell there's anything off in this video that would cause it to get blocked. Oh well, very cool video to watch anyway. For some reason I really like older color footage, even if it may be "further" away from what we actually see in real life with our own eyes compared to modern cameras, it feels somehow warm and nostalgic. My last time in Taiwan I did a lot of hiking in the jungle and intentionally changed my phone settings to get a 1960's style color for photos, just to feel like I'm a National Geographic photographer back in the days of my childhood.

I wonder though, if I were Asobo, when would I need to stop selling 2020 before I pulled the plug on it? It would seem a bit crazy if someone bought the game today, as it's still available online, and they pulled the plug tomorrow. Anyway my computer can just barely manage 2020 at low to medium settings so I'd be pretty upset if they did that before I'm ready to upgrade to a more advanced system.

Leopards are allowed though? I guess I'd sort of cheat and try keep one of these Iriomote cat . Nah, too exotic. I like dogs too! I'd just stay with my relatives in Tucson Arizona, try and befriend a coyote and tame it, maybe end up with one hand less. Bite the hand that feeds you.

I don't remember the exact circumstances, it was a while back, but I got into the Louvre for free. I didn't come out with any free souvenirs like these guys did though. Anyway, somehow being in Paris seems to drain me of all my energy, but it's also my favorite city in Europe.

That is awesome! Yes, what most people find annoying, I absolutely love it! I stayed at an apartment very close to Shanghai Hongqiao once with a nice balcony. It was perfect for spotting. And although most websites/apps were blocked by the Great Firewall (an ominous sign from one of the neighboring threads here in the hangar 😉), Flightradar24 worked, so I basically needed to be dragged off the balcony to do anything else. When I'm in Taipei one of my favorite places to hang out is here. I feel it would actually be dangerous to climb up on one of the fences.