Hey Mate, I live in Brisbane. I like your map, cant guarantee meeting up but will be following somewhere in the general area
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Spectacular! I feign outrage a lot, but it’s mostly theater. 
I love those hair raising flights. Makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something.
Speaking of which, is there a good source for MSFS approach plates? With Skyvector having limited coverage and with MSFS no longer displaying ILS frequencies on the map, it seems that we are going to increasingly be hoping for VFR as we have no approach plates for many of these fields.
I sounds like there’s a story there…
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Part has been told on here before. You can always come to Colchester UK to hear my talk in March '22. It’s become a transatlantic Mudspike meeting met by hosts/guides as required. Lots of worthwhile aviation stuff to see. Or get me to speak near you!
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Well the wife and I have been trying to figure out when to make it back to the UK, I don’t think our schedule will work out for March of 2022 though. If you ever find yourself in Texas, let me know and I’ll gladly by you a drink or two !
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Catching up on my record keeping a little bit…
From Nagasaki (RJFU), I continued across the island of Kyūshū with another MSFS plane I hadn’t tried before, the SR22.
I picked Oita Prefectural Airfield as my destination - east from Nagasaki, overflying the Aso-Kuju National Park. The morning wasn’t bad for a GA flight with light winds and a high overcast.
Flying over Japanese airports, the Douglas Adams quote came to mind:
“It is said that despite its many glaring (and occasionally fatal) inaccuracies, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy itself has outsold the Encyclopedia Galactica because it is slightly cheaper, and because it has the words ‘DON’T PANIC’ in large, friendly letters on the cover.”
It is very nice that they have the name of the airport written in large, friendly letters by the runway! I imagine that’s been very helpful to many poor to average GA navigators…
From Oita, I continued on meandering north-ish, following the coast and taking in the sights.
The Kanmon Bridge, a long-spanning, prominent suspension bridge connecting Kyūshū and Honshū islands.
Shortly after this detour things got a little bit interesting as I continued north over Honshū. The doorbell rang and I went to get a courier package…I’m pretty sure I left the sim on the main menu pause rather than active pause…but anyway. I sat back down and continued my flight, when I suddenly started losing airspeed and the stall warning came on, along with another warning tone. I checked the engine gauges and saw the ITT temperature drop sharply until it was at 11C, same as OAT, and the propeller RPM plummeted also. Uh oh.
It was my first time flying the TBM, so although I had pulled the throttle back from takeoff power, I assume I somehow broke the engine…either that or it had something to do with the pause. Either way, I was now a glider pilot at stall speed at 7000 ft, over water. The stall was caused by the AP trying to maintain altitude while the engine was no longer producing thrust.
I disengaged the AP, pointed the nose down to get rid of the stall and obtained my best guess of a glide speed. I had fuel, so that wasn’t the problem…I assumed I’d blown the engine, so didn’t even try working out how an airstart might work.
I tried to work with the G1000’s nearest airfield option, but the trim seemed to have stopped working together with the engine (somewhat oddly) and dividing my attention between the stick and the GPS wasn’t doing good things so I decided that I was better off flying the airplane and trying to visually find a good spot to land. I was at 7000 feet when the engine quit so I had some altitude to work with, the coast was near and the weather was good.
I don’t have photos of the descent, as I was a bit preoccupied, but my plan to look for a place to land visually paid off - I spotted an airfield near the coast and seemingly well within my gliding distance.
It wasn’t until here that I thought about feathering the propeller…the prop RPM slowed down straight away though, so maybe it auto-feathered and it made no difference?
Either way, I actually had plenty of excess energy whilst coming in, which was comforting…I did a straight-in approach with flaps up, keeping excess speed until almost over the runway and then lowering the flaps for landing.
So that was a bit exciting.
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Amazing report! And nice job on the HAPL. 
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My next leg was a bit shorter, from Fernando de Noronha (SBFN) to Santa Maria airport, Aracuja (SBAR).
As always live weather, real time.
Oh dear, fuel truck guy is back. But this time he just stood still.
I have a feeling that my jet is a tiny bit too large for this airport. But I managed to squeeze through. Barely. Sometimes I had less than three feet of clearance.
Bye, island! The mojitos were so good that I had to stay for a week…
Here’s the first glimpse at mainland Brasil. The area around Natal and Joao Pessoa.
Recife. This was an important place in the 1500s and 1600s, the Dutch and Portugese fought each other over it.
And more aviation-related: In 1930 the airship Graf Zeppelin flew here non-stop from Germany, and the flights continued until 1938. The anchor mast for the airships still exists.
Oil wells. Ever since I flew around in South Dakota I recognize them from the air. This is west of Maceió.
Views like this make me really appreciate the weather system in this sim.
Descending further, near the mouth of the Rio Sao Francisco.
Some bad weather ahead.
ATC made me descend to 4000ft, flying with the speed bug near the barber pole at this altitude (300-something knots) makes you feel fast. Ahead is my destination, on the other side of the Sergipe river.
A bit of weirdness with the approach, but it gave me the opportunity to fly around and look at the area.
Those pools near the river bend are shrimp farms.
Fully configured, on a long final.
There was a little bit of crosswind due to the thunderstorm, but I managed to land relatively smoothly.
Again I didn’t really need the thrust reversers, but I guess I’ll have less tire wear that way.
And that’s it!
Next up: Fly to Rio. Can’t wait to see the difference to when I last flew there in FSX (remember the Mudspike flight to the Rio Olympics? That was five years ago!)
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You guys are killing it. Is there a penalty for arriving before the turkey is out of the oven? (Thanksgiving joke…and not a good one…)
I’m still preflighting my airplane in Gastonia, NC…
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Another leg in the books: Santos Dumont (SBRJ) in Rio de Janeiro to Congonhas (SBSP) in Sao Paulo, both in Brazil.
This was a short leg and since the Electra got an update, I wanted to test how the ADF works.
Spoiler:
It works well as long as you tune in a correct frequency 
Preface:
The Electra is overall a better plane after the recent update. Following loud moaning from the community, we can now open the pilot-side window and the rivets look better (yippieee…?), however there are still some outstanding issues like:
- mixtures not working (in fact, the engines.cfg configures the Electra as having an automixture; why? dunno)
- the engines are normally aspirated even though they should be supercharged (can also be corrected in engines.cfg including proper settings for max MP)
Anyway… let’s give AH some more time to polish the Electra a bit more.
The plan:
A simple plan was in order - follow the coast down to SAT NDB (375 kHz) and RDE high-alt VOR (116.7 MHz) and then CGO VOR (116.9 MHz) to assist the landing (presumably in VMC conditions anyway).
It was supposed to be a pleasure flight in the improved Electra.
The flight:
It was not, actually. I was troubleshooting something almost the whole flight.
First I was not sure what all the levers did and how to move them in the right sequence in order to get the engines running. (I succeeded in the end) The weather was great.
I was cleared to taxi and take off from Rwy 02R; the wind was 180/22. Makes sense…? In quartering headwind, an aircraft has a tendency to weathercock. I let you figure out what it does with quartering tailwind of this magnitude.
Anyway, the take off was uneventful due to (i) me being good, or (ii) me being lucky, or (iii) not a proper behavior modelling. I let you chose 
Salve! You can’t see it in the screenshot obviously, but the Jesus statue did quite a nice jump up due to terrain morphing. Not bad for a 90-years old statute.
This was exactly my idea - follow the beaches and have a great time! It worked for a little while.
Then the weather did this to me.
Moreover, I could not tune in any of the two VORs. One was supposed to be a long-range one well within my range. The NDB was out of range at this point in time. I started to suspect that the new update broke the VOR (but hey, we can still open the window!) Why didn’t I just follow the heading to my destination? Well, simply because I just had a glance on the map without paying much attention 
The weather improved in the end so I resumed in following the coast.
An unimportant intermezzo
…
Around here I hear my dispatch manager saying: Honey, the washing machine has just finished! Well… ehm… yeah…
Let’s discuss one day the most immersion breaking factors.
…
I arrived over Santos. There I discovered that the SAT NDB (375 kHz) is not modelled in MSFS even though it is depicted in LittleNavMap. Weird. Anyway, there were still the two VORs which, by this time, I was receiving. Apparently, even the long-range one had rather a short range.
A nice little field of Base Aerea de Santos. I should have probably made it my destination just for fun.
Then I turned inland towards the RAD VOR (or so I thought) with the plan to fly towards the field located CGO VOR. The Electra has two NAV radios but just one VOR gauge which can be switched to show NAV 1 or NAV 2 signal with a little switch.
It looked to me that I was slightly off and was not really tracking the VORs. Then I discovered that while all was tuned in properly, I have not switched to the CGO VOR and… was flying… just away 
I had no idea where the field was. Not easy to locate it with all those houses around.
Well, easy fix - just switch to the CGO VOR (double check!) and centre the needle with TO indication. Here I am on downwind.
Approach and landing.
On the apron. Next time I need to study the map a little more!
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Accelerate right to left. Deccelorate left to right. So long since I have flown a twin piston. I think that is right.
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230 miles a day if you want to finish before Christmas.
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Formal end date is 31/12 so that’s gives me 200NM/day 
I don’t fly every day, though, so need to fly some decent legs to stay on schedule…falling behind at the moment. It’s okay though, easy enough to hop on a jet and catch up a bit if need be.
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Yes. But doesn’t it feel a pitty to skip all the possible destinations on the way?
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This is very true! I’m mixing it up by doing short legs trying out the smaller default planes a bit and then catching up on distance with the Citation Longitude, as I haven’t had time to learn a new full fidelity aircraft right now.
I had to make a call to leave Japan towards Kamchatka from Hiroshima at night, so I didn’t get to see any of the northern half of Japan…a shame, but I do want to finish the trek if at all possible.
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I think I’m still in Florida, so there’s that?
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Lima, Peru (SPJC) to Cusco, Peru (SPZO).
For this leg I flew the Fiat G91 by Sim Skunkworks.
Departing Lima.
I was soon over the Andes again. The view of the mountains shrouded in cloud was quite stunning.
In the descent. I allowed myself to be distracted taking screenshots…
I was supersonic, in a dive, over some pretty big mountains… 
Fortunately I was able to ease out of the dive without over stressing anything…
Shortly after my supersonic dive, Cusco came into view…
The airport has a nice long runway and sits in a valley. I was about to learn a lesson about flying jets into high altitude airports…
All went well up until the point when I turned base, dropped the gear and added some flaps…
She started getting squirrely and I began to sink…
I frantically pushed the throttle forward, took out some flap and pulled up the gear…I almost hit the side of the mountain.
I cleared the ridge and dropped down the other side, back towards the airport, where I managed to get the airplane down in one piece… The airport is at 10859 ft AMSL.
My next leg involves a bit of a tourist excursion.
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