This is a long one. You won’t hurt my feelings if you skip it!
Having made my unexpected stop in Ascension last night, my plan for the day was altered slightly. “Knowing”™ that I can make it to the African coast, I decided to shoot a little further south, make landfall, and see if I can figure out how to cruise this thing, ya know, over land for a change.
So, a big, “…” in the destination block on this one.
Morning in Ascension! After last night, I’ll be happy never to see this place again.
Hey, who put that big freakin’ mountain there? That wasn’t there last night!
The FSX planning module offered to put me at the end of the runway and, like a dope, I let it. It also initialized me with the engines running…
Due to the comparatively short runway and my max weight, I opted for a standing start.
“Brakes hold. ADI on. Manifold Pressure to 61”. All indications normal. Aaaaand brakes release”!
Pressing my head into the headrest, I brace as a terrific sense of acceleration entirely fails to come over me.
I’ve seen warm fronts move faster than this. I’m pretty sure I was passed by a penguin.
Hmmm. What’s the problem? I’m not dragging a brake. All my indications are “normal”. Normal is in quotations for reasons that will eventually become apparent to me, but it looks much like it did on every previous leg.
Well something isn’t right, so I reject the takeoff. I hope I can stop in the runway remaining. I mean, I am only like 100 knots below my Reject Speed! 
After a couple of locked brake turns, I’m back in position.
“Brakes hold. ADI on. Manifold Pressure to 61”. All indications normal. Aaaaand brakes release”!
Again, I’m underwhelmed by my acceleration.
Ya know I begin thinking, which is generally not to my advantage, the aircraft IS picking up speed. Could this be normal? Maybe it’s just me?
As the end of the runway fast approaches, I find myself bending the throttles over the throttle quadrant.
It’s not just me.
I rotate early hoping to perform some sort of half-@##ed short-field takeoff.
I barely clear the trees. Whew! The hard part is over!
What’s my flight engineer crying about? Toffee-nosed git!
Oh…
The mnemonic “PAGPAF” floats vaguely through my mind. Wish I could remember what it stood for. How do you feather an engine in this plane? How do you even select an individual engine in this plane?
After a lot of cursing, a lot of nursing, and sinking as low as 200ft above the waves, I’ve finally got the prop feathered, the engine secured, and even managed to squirt the CO2 into the correct engine without blowing out the other three.
Fire’s out.
Hmmm, could I make it to Africa on three?
(Sigh)
“Dumps on”. At least the gigantic stinking mountain helps me keep the field in sight.
Hey folks. Welcome to Ascension!
OK, with three new engines, and a legendarily abuse resistant fourth, I begin Leg 5 of 2(Remember that? This was supposed to be a two-legger).
Apparently this trip is turning me into the poster child for what happens when you don’t plan. So much for the, “Manual Schmanual” theory of flight planning.
Turns out, FSX did indeed dump me on the end of the runway when I loaded the flight plan. The wrong end. The wrong end with the 15knot tailwind, which probably didn’t help my last attempt at takeoff much.
This time, my acceleration feels much more substantial. I honestly don’t know what the issue was last time, as all indications read exactly the same. It’s still a short runway and a heavy weight takeoff though, so I probably should have removed some gas. As it turned out I fully expect to be cleaning bird’s nests out of the flaps after landing.
There was another issue which I’m about to discover.
But still, I made it airborne without setting anything on fire. So I got that going for me.
It was here that I had my facepalm moment. Not my first.
The A2A Stratocruiser is an awesome recreation of a plane that properly really required 4 people to fly. A2A thoughtfully included an excellent AI flight engineer (I take back what I said about him) that has a great deal of authority to prevent you from killing everyone on board. Nice. The only downside is that, since you can’t ask him what he’s doing at any given moment, there’s a tendency to assume that anything the airplane seems to do automatically, is done on purpose.
Reference the Master Propeller Synchronizer.
Despite the takeoff checklist instructing the pilot to advance the levers to Max, as one might expect for takeoff and climbout, I found that the FE kept pulling the levers back shortly after I’d set them. Oh well, I’m sure he knows what he’s doing.
But, it troubled me that the RPM settings that even A2A’s documentation shows seemed to be impossible to set. It was only after flying fully a quarter of the way around the world that I finally discovered that the Prop RPM control binding had automatically been set by FSX to some unknown axis on my joystick.
An axis that had a center.
A center that would continually pull back the prop RPM to “50%”. Oh, never immediately in what might be considered a suspicious manner mind you. But all sneaky-like after a short delay or change in throttle that looked like “someone” had done it intentionally, and for a reason.
So, after deselecting the axis in my settings, I could now suddenly hold a full 2500RPM instead of a meager 2000. I could climb into the teens at Max Gross weight instead of barely limping to 10k. Now my endurance stretched into the 2500NM range.
Now, had I any takeoffs left, I would actually be receiving “normal” normal indications.
Apparently, I’d been flying with one prop tied behind my back the entire time.
At this point, things start happening. With better climb performance, I find myself up in the 20s with cruise speeds surpassing 300kts. Approaching the African coast, I still show 1700NM endurance. I decide to make the early turn for Cape Town since I can still make it into a few (short) diverts if gas becomes an issue.
Perhaps unsurprisingly at this point, gas is no longer a factor for me. I, gratefully, break out the African coast in the last hundred miles or so before the field.
Against all odds, I pull into Cape Town.
Well, this has been an adventure. I probably would have had a more successful run in something more contemporary (or at least more familiar) than the Stratocruiser. Come to think of it, I probably would have had a more successful run in an ACTUAL Stratocruiser.
But it wouldn’t have been nearly as memorable.
And so said old Santa as the Fed clicked his pen,
“Merry Christmas to all and RTFM”!
).
The approach charts of some of these places are quite interesting! You definitely don’t get the full suite of landing aids all the time.
) I booted up the jet at Douala for a short op to Jaoundé. But alas, somehow the plane became unresponsive (the program lost control focus) and I crashed before I could fix the problem. Not doing that flight again right away, so I may not make it to Cape Town in time 
Can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked out to one of my planes as the sun was coming up and thought the same thing… The first time I saw Charleston, West Virginia in the daylight I was like…“hol up…”
