Back into the bush - Part 3

This is a story about planning, and how that planning sometimes doesn’t work out.

I managed to find a nice job in Papua New Guinea, flying from Gobe to Telofomin, about 160NM in a Cessna 152 Aerobat, the same type as the previous flight only then a different callsign.

So, what would any sane person do when flying without navaids in mountainous terrain and no local knowledge? Look up information! I found a snazy chart from the US from the 1980’ and I figured it would be good enough.

Unfortunately the airport in FSX is not quite where it is in the real world, it’s down near the river in FSX where a NDB is located, where the real thing is more up the mountain.

Finding the destination airport was a bit trickier since it simple doesn’t exist on the maps. Together with the FSX Map, FS Commander, and the USAF map above I managed to find it, plotted the final leg in skyvector and checked the weather.

At this point it’ s probably important to note that I am using the Holgermesh found in the freeware section of ORBX, it’s really pretty as you will discover during this flight!

Soon enough I find myself airborne after seeing the weather is smashingly calm. Checked the fuel levels and off I went. Now, at this point something went wrong that had grave consequences later on. FS Economy does a bit of fuel and weight management and that is what confused me slightly in the webinterface.

climbing out over the river I see the vulcano that is destined to be my first waypoint. It’ s nice to see it from this far, navigating should be a breeze!

Off north there is a little lake that is another nice visual waypoint, at the western end there is a airport located. Slowly climbing up to 10 000ft in this picture.

At this point a cursory look at the fuel told me I only had an hour left at best, 4 gallons each tank, and at 90kts this bugger uses about 8 gallons of fuel. There was no way I was going to make my destination 20 minutes into the flight. No worries, I’ll pay an extra hours worth of rent and I should be good.

Atleast, that’s what I thought.

Short final for bugger-off airstrip. I already found out that this airport indeed does sell me fuel, what could go wrong?

At this point FSE Closed my flight, I had my engine shut down and was landed, which is fine. I opted for a refuel via the web panel(turns out the text “cancel refuel” were actually 2 seperate URL’ s…) and voila she is good to go!

Now then, for some reason I got a warning that I could not operate this aircraft commercially without having it fixed, which is rather strange since there was no indication that anything was broken or required maintenance. I tried taking off, but alas no passenger was loaded. I turned around, landed and called it a day. At this point the aircraft became ‘viable’ again for money making things but I lost all confidence.

Sometimes, despite the best intentions a flight just does not go in accordance with the plan.

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quicky in good ol dutchland.

freeware NL2000 package which is totally awesome! Free photoreal scenery!!!