So I took about 250K worth of expenses the past six months on idle plane insurance and stuff. I went ahead and cancelled the insurance on the planes and temporarily deactivated two bases. That should save a bit of money. But with $32M still in the bank we aren’t exactly in trouble… 
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That $32 MIL is burning a hole in my pocket. I splurged on myself and spend a massive $16.47 on an aircraft that I’ve been lusting over for months and for some silly reason didn’t want to spend the price of a fast food meal on. You all know I love me some VSkyLabs…and this Maule M-7-235B is just my kind of aircraft (definitely on my dream plane list…)
Well…you remember the MAX Factory at Pullman Field right? I think I opened that in…gosh…June of 2020. Wow. Five years ago. Well…we went ahead and built an M7 there in shoved it out the door…
I believe the VSkyLabs M-7 might be the first native X-Plane 12 aircraft released…
I love a simple cockpit. About the only thing I’d change…I would love a standard HSI instead of the old DG. Other than that…I’m good with the Garmin 430s or whatever they are called. Just point me in the right direction…
A little bit of room for cargo. Not a PC-6 or Caravan…but we can get some moonshine into the hills…
Of course, once you buy an aircraft for Air Hauler, you have to take a type-rating test in it. Very easy stuff…fly altitudes and headings assigned…and land without tearing anything up.
A wonderful little airplane…well spent $16.47…(tariff free!)…
Plunked her down…good rating on the type(ish) rating. Now…to get her to Papua… 
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XP12 looks amazeballs! Both Scenery and aircraft.
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Well…to be fair that is some add-on scenery and ortho for Pullman Field. I think I originally bought it for XP10…
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Dang it Chris, you’re gonna make me jump back into this too.
I think I’m done doing most of the dance of updating XP12 and planes, though now I’m working through installing Ortho4XP 1.40.
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Just flying from point A to point B has a bit of a calming effect…I have to admit.
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I used to tow gliders with one of those. I loved that plane!
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Yeah…that’s one of my dream planes…low and slow, tooling around…visiting Idaho with a fly-rod and a tent.
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Sounds like it is time to join smokinhole at one of those floatplane courses! 
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Time to get the new Maule over to Papua. What could be more efficient than using our Mudspike Air Cargo owned C-17 to do the job? Just gotta take the wings off the Maule…probably just need a crescent wrench right?
Beware the jet blast…
No…we never got the C-17 painted. 
Carrying a light load of fuel so we can get airborne. Stopping off at our Mudspike Air Cargo base at KPDX to fill up…
The Virtavia C-17 is a pretty old model (maybe X-Plane 10?) that works reasonably well in X-Plane 12. There are some glitches and stuff…but whatever. I would NOT recommend buying it if you are looking to jam it into X-Plane 12.
Settling in at FL300 and Mach .74 for the cruise…by my calculations it is about a 14 hours flight to Papua, burning around 233,200 lbs. of fuel or roughly 34,809 gallons…equating to roughly $208,000 ($6 / gallon) worth of fuel. I think that is about what I paid for the Maule…
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Meanwhile over in Papua - bounced the PC-6 over to Wagheti Tigi (WABG) to pick up 1200 lbs. of shrimp (that’s 10.7 Dutch Casks for all you people that like to use those crazy units of measure like that dumb Metric system ) Big party up in the mountains apparently. Always wonder why I never see a contract for cocktail sauce.
Murky day out in Papua…lots of rain showers…low clouds…and poor visibility…
Air Hauler recognized the repositioning flight…so I put the PC-6 on the GPU while I figured out where I was going next (WW41 way up in the mountains…Ogam)…
Firing up and heading out…
This is what I came to Papua for. VFR flying in hostile terrain with kind of terrible weather. Very few instrument approaches. Definitely gives you the “hebbie-jeebies”…
I flew this leg in 2D instead of VR because I was expecting a phone call and didn’t want to risk crashing the sim. I will admit that it is nice to be able to pop-up 2D panels to manipulate things like the autopilot and flight director. I was worried about terrain enroute so used the autopilot and climbed up to around 12,500 on my way across the high mountains…
Once on the other side…the airfield was buried in a valley…well…more like on the side of a valley. The poor weather was interesting and I felt nervous descending without having the field in sight. Finally I spied it off my right side and I was much too high. I did a 360 losing altitude and was still high but tried to jam it in there.
Mistakes were made. I used full flaps instead of half flaps. I didn’t anticipate the slope would be so enormous and the clouds and haze kind of obscured the true nature of the slope. Had I known, I would have come in with half flaps and way more speed so that I could use the natural slope and match the “ascent rate”. Anyway…I guess I landed hard…which Air Hauler determined I pretty much wrecked the aircraft. Oddly enough though…some Easter Egg in the Thranda PC-6 manifested itself and some rap music and shades and a spliff were shown on my aircraft…(seriously)… Strangest thing…
Repair costs are substantial…and I didn’t have insurance on the plane… I might have to reconsider that given the environment I’m flying in…
Link to a great ONC Chart of the area…
Trying to figure out where these strips on some of these very old ONC maps is tough. This was my route today…
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Another little (well…big) incident with the PC-6 last night. Took it into one of the mining strips in Papua…and once again did major damage to it ($80,000)…so definitely time to get insurance on it. I might also try updating to the XP-12 versions of the aircraft…it looks like it is on sale now for $23. The new XP-12 flight dynamics might be messing with my results…yeah…certainly…
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Yeah, I’m planning on picking up the PC-6 and -12 in the Labor Day sale. Once I have Air Hauler running and the relevant orthos installed I’m looking forward to hopping in.
At least until the MiG-29 drops for DCS, anyway.
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Yeah…the scenery around Pullman field is from that Aerosoft scenery package…the rest of the area I built ortho with Ortho4XP. Looks great and I’m still using it in X-Plane 12…
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Well the Maule made it to Nabire (Papua/Indonesia)…
Took it on a short VR flight to Wapoga…
(Sorry…VR captures aren’t as good as 2D ones…)
Love this plane in VR. The brightness of the Garmin is too dim though…I don’t know that that is a VSkyLabs issue or just a general X-Plane issue. Cockpit dimness seems to be a recurring theme…
Nice to not have to struggle to find an airfield for once…! This one was clearly carved out of the forest…
Goods delivered…and no damage this time!
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Alright. Call me a flip-flopper. After spending a week in Papua (Indonesia), I’m closing that base (and the idle base in the Seychelles) and consolidating back to Pullman field and the fun of flying the Idaho backcountry. Mostly because while the terrain and weather in Papua are really nice…the scenery just isn’t there for Papua. User made packs are OK…but they often don’t follow the proper terrain contours and it just makes actually operating from those fields a problem. Not to mention I have unbelievably good self-made and ORBX ortho for much of the Pacific Northwest and surrounding areas.
So, I closed the Nabire base and sent my contract pilots to go fetch my planes. Both the M-7 Maule and PC-6 are being ferried across the Pacific. Yes…it cost me a lot of (virtual) money to experiment in Papua…but I feel like Mudspike Air Cargo’s roots are in the Pacific Northwest.
In keeping with the theme of bringing all the birds home to roost…I’m also hopping in the ERJ-135 that has been sitting idle at Portland and bringing it back…picking up a commodity run to bring 18,000 lbs. of magazines to Pullman (It’s Idaho…I’m assuming they are comic books)…
Absolutely love the simplicity and user-friendliness of the X-Craft’s ERJ. From what I understand they are working on a Version 2 of the ERJs for X-Plane 12. The XP-11 one works fine…although it does have an issue with the first engine start…so you have to use a keybind to get it running.
I made a mistake in picking a weight for the commodities and in order to put just enough fuel on to make it to Pullman I had to overload the plane a bit…
Heading out of Portland…
ORBX scenery looks great in X-Plane 12…
I didn’t bother with the FMC…just green-needled it to an intermediate VOR then picked up a radial outbound to intercept the ILS.
Watching the company planes converge on Pullman. They fly in somewhat real-time I guess in Air Hauler…it takes a couple days to do a long repositioning by the AI…
Home again…
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You should really invest a bit in that Tarmac beach, that is just a ingestion hazard!
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I’m planning on flying in 20,000 rolls of Flex Seal…
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That’s nice but why are you putting more FOD with the FOD? That is not how it works
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