Short 45 minute hop from Milwaukee (KMKE) over to Columbus, Ohio (KCMH). Good thing I took a look out the final approach path prior to pulling out onto runway 19R at MKE - the addition of GA traffic really does make the airspace more alive.
Company profits are looking good. Destiny is running up and down the west coast in her CASA 212 while I venture over to the East Coast. Might take a dip down into the Caribbean with the MD80 too…
I feel a sting of guilt, haha - I want to study that module more but the XP loading times have kept me away…I might need to check how big the installation is and see if I have SSD space for it so I get to practice a bit more before December.
The Potomac visual to 19 is one of my favorites. Even better than the Expressway into 31 at LGA. The Maddog is such a cool looking machine. Not “pretty”, just cool. Sad to see 'em go.
Yeah…after a 19 year hiatus on getting to fly the River Visual (9/11 rules prevent us from going into DCA essentially)…I finally got to fly it once again last year and loved every second of it. It was a special “trial run” trip…and we determined that the security requirements (pre-screening at a gateway airport, and having an armed security officer onboard) made it too unwieldy to do again. Prior to 9/11 we used to get up there a few times a month…now we go to IAD and the ambulance has an hour each way to the downtown hospitals.
The Expressway 31 sure is a pretty approach if it is clear out and you have those great views of the city out the left side. I like when we get the visual 4L at BOS too…which is pretty rare, but the hours we get there sometimes it happens. Great views of the city…
I really love flying the Maddog in the sim. It has great character and is always a bit challenging.
When you are 60 minutes into an X-Plane session and suddenly the sim freezes for 5 or 6 seconds as the sim is doing something in the background…but then resumes…
So @smokinhole inspired me with his comments about LaGuardia the other day. Since I was already in DCA, I loaded up with 50,000 pounds of cigarettes and did the LaGuardia Shuttle hop up to LGA…
Taxiing out at DCA. I remember from when I flew in there regularly - the DCA taxiway and runway setup can be pretty confusing (particularly from a low slung plane like the Citation), so you have to be pretty careful of the hold short and taxiways and runway crossings…
An odd and frustrating quirk of Air Hauler is that sometimes if there is a nearby helipad or airport, the tracking feature mistakenly thinks you are at the wrong airport. I’ve found an interesting solution to the problem that prevents having to restart the whole flight. The “wrong airport” box pops up usually when you takeoff and roll into the “zone” of the nearby heliport or airport…so you can sort of tell where the delineation is. The solution is to come back around, and do a touch in go in the proper airport zone…usually at one end of the runway or the other. This is the case at DCA where a nearby helipad infringes on the northern border of the airport. Kind of a PITA…but doing a touch-and-go in the MD80 was kind of fun too…
They were running the ILS 04 instead of the circle to land and I was worried about crossing traffic on the runways, so I obliged and did the straight in ILS 4…
Thats a fine looking chopper you got there. Imagine the fun you could have if you bolted a sensor ball on top of the rotor mast and strapped some ordnance to the sides!
After weeks of sending Destiny all over the West Coast…and me picking up a part here and there in my MD80 journey across the country, I finally acquired all the parts for my next build out of the MAX Factory. My stable of workhorse planes is nearly complete. I’m going to enjoy exploring Idaho with this beastie…
MAC is still going…! I’ve been stuck in my MD80 for a bit in LaGuardia…waiting for a bit of time to carve out to get hauling again. But otherwise the company is on solid financial ground. Destiny is plying the routes around Seattle, keeping our revenue at least slightly positive…
