Where did you get the 747 from? Is it a port from XP11?
My symptoms could best be described as - I was fighting an altitude hold that wouldn’t disengage.
It’s the Sparky 744, so yeah it’s a port. Problem was exactly like you say, it was like an altitude hold, but the autopilot wasn’t on.
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Leg 4: The final Leg- FMNM-FMSD
This was a fun one. I loaded up at FMNM in the Zibo 737 and got the box programmed.
No pushback service available here, but not to worry, I just threw the engines in reverse for a moment and problem solved.
Here I am climbing out. Just a beautiful day in Madagascar.
TOC and cruise were pretty uneventful… until I hit some weather with what delta might call “moderate chop”.
I wasn’t in the clouds 2 minutes and my autopilot kicked off and refused to reengage. I got myself a little more hand flying experience than I thought I would. In fact, I was busy enough that the rest of the screen shots on the way down were flight deck shots.
I flew the descent and found this little valley that set me up for a long right base
Then hooked that right hand turn and found my runway
Approach was normal but I failed to get a shot of the landing. I taxied to the end of the runway, backtaxied, and just dropped her in front of the FBO.
And with that, my Christmas Journey is complete. If you need me, I’ll be on the beach with the Lemurs. Apparently they like to move it move it!
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This must have been pretty tense experience. Congrats for getting the 747 on the tarmac without too much grass destroyed 
Btw the weather depiction is simply stunning.
Once X Plane implements streamed satellite imagery together with plausible autogen, MSFS will have a serious contender in the mass market.
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Not much grass, but a $25M jet for sure 
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Congrats ! WTG ! 
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Congrats! Great reports, @Stormy801 !
I’m still at the shores of the Red Sea and try to make a short hop from Port Sudan to Massawa, another coastal town further down south.
Nothing unsual to report on take-off.
The familiar desert landscape on my right.
The sea to my left.
Might have been wise to bring in a few hundred liters more of fuel, just in case, but the landing spot is already visible in front of me.
Touchdown on the water once more.
And getting towed towards the coast to our dock.
Next stop is Djibouti, and then acrosss the horn of Africa towards the Indian Ocean, a large stretch of land neeeds to be crossed.
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Next leg will will take me to Ghardabiya. Infamous fact: this is the place the Su-22’s took off from that led them to getting shot down by a pair of tomcats in the first Gulf of Sidra event.
Ready to go
Wheels up… oh wait.
Leaving beautiful Zarzis behind
Just barely made it to cruising alt. I fueled her up quite heavy and she was practically on MTOW at take-off.
With these conditions all the anti-icing on. From carb to windshield.
Did re-allign my gyro a bit, resulting in a few degrees of correction.
There’s absolutely nothing published about HLGD in the GNS 530… I couldn’t find any programmable approach. Might be user error.
I decided to continue my descent away from the airport and plan approaching it using the omni-bearing selector to create a desired inbound bearing… Something I learned from my youtube video last night.
It got me this far. Very pleased. Taking over from here.
They could call her wind dancer.
Not much here but Tarmac and parked planes. No Su-22’s to be seen, though! Now I really need to find a plane with the range to cross the Sahara.
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The last landing left me on one parking lot with the amphibian Dornier Seastar helplessly being stranded half in water and half in sand. If I am to make it by Christmas, I better get to the airport.
Who else is getting GTA Vice City vibes? @Victork2 ?
Fortunately the airport was a short drive away.
So I ran through the terminal…
…to catch my flight. You know, I am the captain.
Anyway, Madagascar is still far away so let’s get moving.
This time I did not forget cargo.
And when I was starting to relax during an uneventful climb, buzz sound took me abruptly back to reality at about 14000 ft.
And I remember my instructor telling me that any red light in the cockpit should be attended NOW!
If you look closely, it is the cabin altitude light on the annunciator panel.
I was faced with two tasks:
- locate the cabin pressurisation panel
- set it up and get it working.
The first one was not so difficult to accomplish.
But for the life of me, I was not able to get the cabin pressurised and the red warning light was starting to get annoying.
Surely I was missing some additional switchology located somewhere else on the overhead panel.
So I decided to ignore the red light (the buzz was already switched off by this time) and stay around 14000 ft for the rest of the flight.
Later I found out that I needed to switch on also ventilation in the cabin. A day is not wasted if one learns something new.
I think I must have hundreds of hours logged in MSFS 2020 / 2024. Though I did not see many thunderstorms let alone lightnings even though I fly almost always with real life weather.
That was until now.
Btw you would not believe how difficult it is to catch a lightning on a screenshot.
The plan was to fly ILS for rwy 11. Easy plan, in theory. In practice, I tuned a wrong NDB (no moving map or GPS this time) and turned in to intercept the ILS too early…
…so when I noticed that my distance to the ILS is increasing 
I knew I was in a wrong place.
Few flipped switches and one right turn later I was on downwind for rwy 11.
Followed by landing (I do not log many at night).
Who would expect a Canadian Caribou on the apron in Ivato airport 
And this is my LittleNavMap track.
One more leg to the destination!
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Wow, some great reports guys! Congrats, @Stormy801!
Keep the bar open for us. 
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Bar open and penguin staffed! So far i’ve had to teach them how to make “Dirty Dr. Pepper” so I could use company soon!
@Troll Does this mean I get my completion badge?
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… and a gold medal for being the first man at the bar 
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It does and is hereby awarded!
Congratulations!
Everybody who reaches the bar gets a gold medal. Incidentally it is also valid currency in that bar as well.
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I’ll hurry up to get to the island as well. Ah, I’m in a Latecoere 631, not exactly the vehicle for a hasty trip to the other end of the world. Oh well, we make do with what we have. Today we’re flying from Massawa, or rather south of Massawa to Djibouti.
A bit of shame on me, I never realized that Djibouti is more than a city. It’s a country of it’s own, gaining independence from France in 1977…
So we start from somewhere in the Red Sea:
An unusual perspective, but doesn’t it look fascinating from below!
This time our route takes us mostly over land, but we have some sea in front of us.
There we are, the sea stretches out an arm in front of us!
Oopsie, watch the rpm needles - we’re out of fuel. First the right engines quit, then the ones on the left.
I set her down on the water a few km away from Djibouti. Let’s wait for a tender with fuel…
Or we get tugged to the harbour, oh well…
Glad we made this one, I had taken out too much fuel for the indirect approach I’ve been flying it seems…
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Oh god it‘s a barbie chest burster. My biggest nightmare!
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How cool is this! 
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