Official 5th Annual Mudspike Christmas Flight - discussion thread

I was wondering- there was Google Earth Flight Sim… and I thought I could actually aprticipate with that but…
Could it be there’s nothing anymore? Was it removed?

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@Fridge, well there is Anchorage of course, and from there I pushed all the way down to Dutch Harbor (interesting airport and of course home the Deadliest Catch fleet), but there are several possible stopping points between the two. My next stop will be Adak Island, then Shemya Island before the final short hop to Attu. For me the main points of interest in the Aleutian chain are the volcanoes, and there are plenty of them!

I should be able to finish the trek by the end of the week, and then my focus will shift to practicing arrivals and approaches into Queenstown NZ :grin: .

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@Fridge, my favorite airfield along the Alaskan coast is PAKT. The runway is atop a hill with the apron down hill via two steep taxiways.

@PaulRix In FSX with the ORBX scenery I flew a couple published Queensland approaches in a DC-8…a lot of fun!

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It’s a stunning area, but you have to be on your toes going in there. I have a HD terrain mesh, ortho and custom airport scenery for the area which is pretty good. If OrbX ever port their Queenstown scenery to XP11 I would buy it in a heartbeat though.

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There is one particular approach where you arrive from the east, mark on top of the VOR, and then turn left and swing around the high ground to the SE, eventually coming up the bay from heading north to land. In a Cessna it is a pleasant sight-seeing approach; in a DC-8 it is rather more white knuckled. :grin:

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It is still part of Google Earth Pro ( desktop version ) at least

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Brilliant! Thanks!
I was just checking the browser version…

This is the only VOR approach coming in from the East. I’m guessing this is the one you flew?

Indeed, it would be quite sporty.

Warthog seems to be resurrected, and since I’m taking tomorrow off with this terrible head cold, I may be able to do some flying in a Dayquil- induced haze.

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That’s one of those ones where ya’ don’t want much green needle deflection…

:dizzy_face:

I don’t really know what category this fits, so I guess I’ll just post it here.

By the 10th report, I finally stopped manually cropping the black bars from the sides of my X-Plane VR screenshots (those who fly X-Plane in VR will know what I mean).
That was so annoying that I almost went back to 2D.

I made a quick and dirty Python script to do the cropping automatically instead.
For any .png it finds in the specified directory, it checks if the topleft 200 x 200 pixels are completely black, and the total image size is 1920x1080.
If those conditions are both true, it saves a cropped version of the image, which is cropped horizontally from ‘rightlim’ to ‘leftlim’, and it appends _cropped to its name.
The name of the directory is still hard-coded so you’ll have to edit the text.

It uses Pathlib so I think you need Python 3.4 or higher. I use 3.7, and am fairly sure it should also work with 3.6. It also uses pillow and numpy, which are both part of the standard Anaconda install.
The forum doesn’t allow me to upload it with its original extension (.py) so I put .txt behind the filename. Remove that part so it ends in .py and you can use it.

I know it’s dirty, but I still want to share, since it took me a bit longer than expected to get it to work. This should save you some time if you want to do something similar.

autocrop_vr_shots.py.txt (945 Bytes)

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…and theDoc says I can take off the neck brace! I’m pretty excited about that. Now I need to finish the repairs to my Man Cave / Flightsim area and I’ll be back in this event.

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Glad to hear you are well on the road to recovery Will. :sunglasses:

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Good to hear that! It reminds me that I am also lost somewhere between Australia and Japan.

Wondering if I will finish this year… maybe using this particular rule I can make it eventually :smile:

“…or just do the takeoff and landing – there really are no rules – just have fun!”

But as a side note. I have one particular idea for some recurring ‘event’.
One thing resonates on this ‘half globe’ Annual Flights - we are not enjoying too much the particular places and airports we are flying over. We just arrive, stay ‘over night’ and continue until we reach our final destination…

…how about something like " Fly with me from ‘insert your airport here " !?

It could be along the lines of Dangerous Airports but not sorely focused on the ‘dangerous’ or ‘approach’ ( not excluding it oc ) but more on the airport and the surrounding area. If there is an airport / area you know or like and you want to share it with others that would be it.

Something similar was already here but with more focus on the ‘approach’ part :

This new recurring event could be more laid back, with longer periods between each new airport focus ( 1 month ? / 2 months ? ), without any direct challenges. So people will have time to download ( freeware/payware ) what is available for that particular airport / area and enjoy flying there for some time with their actual favourite aircraft, sharing pics etc.

Pls let me know your concerns :slight_smile:

PS: oc cross platform, even DCS only pilots can have favourite airport which can be cool to check in eg. XP or P3D ( not that much vice versa :wink: )

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This sounds like a good idea @NEVO, and I would certainly participate in that.

I kind of like the long trek events too though. They give a long term goal and take you over areas and into airports that you would most likely never go to otherwise.

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I really like this idea. I dont tend to have time to plan and participate in the longer events so this could be perfect for me @NEVO

Another fun thing to do, especially for out British friends, might be a series of flights throughout the year where you fly from London to “North America”, simulating Prince Harry and Meghan’s flights…back and forth…across the Atlantic! :open_mouth:

…too soon? :grimacing:

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The only people who care what the royals get up to are firmly not on this island.
Honestly nobody here gives a toss what they do . Being completely truthful if you hadn’t mentioned it in your post i would of had to google Megan’s name lol :rofl::rofl:

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