Thanks Paul, it helps me to stay undecided 
Seeing as I have a reputation to maintain around here…I’d say get the Stearman too. It is priced quite reasonably I think. The product has been updated recently too, adding a version with engine and wheel fairings, along with air show smoke.
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OK, this was a bit different…
On my way to the Falklands, I wanted to make a stop over at the island of La Palma, a part of Canary Islands archipelago. No special reason, I just visited this island few years ago for work.
Since it is a relatively short hop (250nm) from Madeira and since I got an Electra from Aeroplane Heaven, the plan was quite clear
The Electra at its current state is not exactly finished. I am happy to close my eyes over some less important issues but there are other rather glaring ones like not functioning ADF and DME which, for old school navigation, are quite important instruments. Anyway, as I am not flying from Lae to Howland Island it should not be a big deal.
The idea was to use the Electra the way it was meant to be used: flying low and rather slow with classic navigation. I opted for 5000ft altitude, intercept and follow 198 radial from the “Madeira” VOR which should bring me a good way towards the island of La Palma. Along the way I should be able to figure out the wind correction angle important for the stretch when not being in the range of any VOR. There is no VOR on La Palma (just DME and NDB - see above the non-functioning instruments) but there is one on a neighboring island of La Gomera some 45nm away. Once picked up, I would correct my heading and soon-ish spot the archipelago on the horizon.
Time of the day: very early morning.
Let’s go!
Getting the Electra ready. The cockpit night lighting is really nice and is a treat in VR.
Departing Madeira.
Ready for celestial navigation?
Sun slowly coming out.
La Palma on the horizon.
(By this time the signal of the Madeira VOR was lost and I was unable to tune in the La Gomera VOR. Strange but since I was already visual with the island - no problem.)
Tenerife to the east.
Approaching the volcano of La Palma…
…with a number of observatories on its northern ridge (I visited one of them few years back; quite an experience).
Commencing a visual approach to the airport.
Late downwind rwy 36.
Approach and landing rwy 36.
On the apron.
Visually, in the early morning lighting, the Electra grew on me. The cockpit was great at night and even more beautiful in the morning. Definitely a big step-up from the P3D version. As for the functionality… well… I do hope Aeroplane Heaven will finish this aircraft because I can see myself spending many more hours with it and am already reading some information about Amelia Earhart’s second around the world trip 
And a last note regarding the navigation: The reason why I was not able to tune in the La Gomera VOR is that it is a terminal VOR with a range of around 40nm 
The next leg will take me to Sao Felipe (GVSP) in Cape Verde. With its length of some 900nm I will probably leave the Electra on La Palma and get back to the Cessna Longitude 
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Nice AAR, and I agree about the Electra. It has a lot of potential if AH see fit to polish it up a bit more. I have heard that there is an update planned for the near future.
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Great report! Those pics are jaw dropping.
I have my Electra warming up in the bullpen. Inop ADF is going to put a crimp in my old timey flight plan. Maybe they’ll fix it before I get down to the southern latitudes.
That is a beautiful plane though isn’t it?
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Superb screens…! Great leg you flew there…
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This is like a Rocky and Bullwinkle episode…
Leg 4: NAS Wildwood/Cape May - MCAF Quantico OR “Hey, Wanna See My Vacation Pics?”
And so it was time for the crossing. Nervously, I tightened my harness, checked my raft, and blew up my water wings.
I’m going to start captioning my pics from below. Even I get confused the other way around!
Off from Cape May heading west. They never made aircraft prettier than in the '30s. I would do some morally questionable things to fly one of these babies in real life.
Feet Wet over the Jersey coast. I feel cold and alone.
[Five minutes later…] Feet Dry over Delaware. Huh, maybe I overreacted a little.
That’s Dover AFB off in the distance. I looked on the map (no tracking, I didn’t cheat 
). As far as I can tell I’ve come ashore somewhere between the Murderkill River and Slaughter Beach.
Hey, guess where I’m not setting down if I blow a seal?
Extra points if you can name the joke.
On what is clearly the less murdery side of the state, I approach the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Difficult to see but on the near end, just south of the bridge, is Bay Bridge airport (W29). I’m not sure if they still do this here, but this is where they used to give young Naval Academy Midshipmen (Midshippersons?) inclined to be Nasal Radiators a few familiarization flights to see if that had the right stuff…or if they spent the entire flight shouting at the attitude gyro (not necessarily disqualifying curiously enough).
Took a left turn at Annapolis. That’s the Academy all squared off where the sea meets the shore.
I used to live here for awhile. That near bridge is the aptly named Naval Academy Bridge. Just on the far side you can see a little cove and beyond that a spit of land that juts back out into the Severn River. That’s Horseshoe Point. There is a house on that point that Jack Ryan would almost certainly live in, if he were real. It has enormous bay windows looking over a majestically sloping hill that runs all the way down to the wooden seawall. Complete with white painted, brass topped flagpole surrounded by white stones.
It was the place I always said that I would live in when I became rich.
Spoiler: I don’t live there.
I decided to do a turn about the Academy and “my” house because,
A. Why should that guy get any sleep? And
B. Because, when you are flying an airplane with US ARMY emblazoned on the bottom of the wings in 3 foot tall letters over the US Naval Academy, you really need to fly OVER THE US NAVAL ACADEMY! 
Perhaps as some sort of Karmic punishment for being mean to the Navy, the weather instantly went from “Clear and a million” to “Dog Squeeze” in a manner that only Microsoft Flight Sim can manage. Now with Cloud to Cloud lightning!
I began rethinking my choice of open cockpit aircraft. But would you look at how MSFS shows the sun shining on the ground through the clouds. Magnificent!
I did actually need to hold a heading for this trip (call sign: Magellan) and found my next turn point, Andrews AFB/NAF Washington…OK, OK. JOINT Base Andrews.
The only question is whether to consider my ETA as the time that my nose gets there or I do. Man that thing is long!
Andrews etc, etc. That hangar on the left side at the end of the ramp is where I hung my hat for my last tour in the Marine Reserves. Miss that place.
OK. Nowhere near my intended route of flight, but HEY! The Capitol! What you can’t see is the forest of Surface to Air Missiles that are now being shot at me.
There really should be air races on the Mall…I’m just sayin’.
Well, maybe it was the fact that I forgot to lean the mixture, but none of the heaters managed to track.
Heading south now and passing abeam the Pentagon, the Puzzle Palace, the Five-Sided Paper Mill, the Pandemonium Palace on the Potomac, the…well, you get the idea.
Flew down the Potomac for my last leg. Passing over what I think is supposed to be Mt Vernon.
Flying down the river a little further, I followed the scent of boot polish and stress to find my destination, MCAF Quantico. Home of the Marine Corps. I can still feel my blisters just looking at the place!
Passing Quantico Town (Q-town to those with a high and tight and laundry to wash) and the only US town that exists entirely within a military base, I hooked an extra long abeam and gunned the throttle in support of the officer candidates sweating nearby.
Parked at the base of the tower. Just in time too considering the showers I saw prowling further south on the river.
This was a long one (well, long for me). Thanks for sticking with me. You can be my wingman any time.
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Superb AAR! You hit on a lot of the places I’ve flown in real life - not the least of which Quantico MCAS where I learned to fly (ooph…nearly 30 years ago now!). Our current boss at my current job is a soon to be fully retired former HMX-1 pilot. He and another of our pilots are both Naval Academy grads. Good thing you didn’t conk out the engine over the Academy…if you had landed there they would have had it painted blue and gold by sun up.
Great report…!
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Thanks Beach!
Yeah, between the Academy and MurderDeathKill River, I’d have been safer flying a twin!
Well, any other choice is better than driving I-95…
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great pic! I feel urge to reinstall MSFS
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I like it the other way around, cause I hate to look again at a pic because the caption below mentions something I missed at the first glance
btw can be this ‘forced’ pls in the ‘rules’ in the first post of this thread @BeachAV8R ? 
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A quiz question: When flying in rain in an open cockpit aircraft, will it actually rain INTO the cockpit?
for sure! ( when you stops for refuel )
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As with all things, not if you do it fast enough!
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I can see that.
Looking back at my earlier AARs, I did both.
In other words, the most confusing way! 
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Bratislava LZIB - Linz LOWL - Salzburg LOWS → 190NM
forgot to connect joystick to laptop so flew it with touchpad 
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Pretty! I’m guessing that’s not a stock Aircraft?
If I may ask, what is it and how do you like her?
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I ask you to bear in mind that when I started this leg I was concerned that it would be too boring.
Leg 5/6 MCAF Quantico - NAS Oceana OR NAS Patuxent River - NAS Oceana.
This is one of those flights that can best be addressed by a good thorough brief…followed by an afternoon drinking at the club.
My mount for this ride was to be the beautiful but complicated Milviz Corsair in VMF-221 colors, courtesy of Jan Kees Blom.
The Corsair is fairly complex, system wise, and also lacks any modern Nav Radio implementation which seems to be par for my course these days. It makes for some interesting flying but, without so much as a decent GCA controller anywhere in Flightsimland, it really limits my options navigation wise.
So, 800OVC was not exactly what I was looking for.
Well, they don’t pay me not to do something stupid…
OK, so back to captions above, by popular demand!
Took off from Quantico in the low claggy darkness. Hauled back the power almost immediately lest I go right into the soup!
Turned as tightly as I dared back over the Potomac. If you look at the DG, you’ll notice that the indicated heading is about 130. But I’m pointing at the rising sun and I’m about 90 degrees to the river.
My compass isn’t working.
Don’t ask me how long I puzzled over that gauge while turning low over the water. You won’t like the answer.
As an aside, I can’t for the life of me figure out why the instrument doesn’t work. There is only one switch marked “Instrument” and it was on. I’ll just assume it was me here, but I still don’t know how.
So, let’s see:
Stuck below 800ft cloud deck? Check.
No working compass? Check.
No Nav radios? Check
Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up drinking.
Even though I had planned to cut the corner to Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay, I knew that if I could only keep sight of the river, I could follow @BeachAV8R’s advice and hug the coast to Norfolk. I just had to stay out of the clouds. And out of the water.
Eventually, I pick up an airfield which seems to be a good candidate for Dahlgren Naval Surface Warfare Center.
At least now I know where I am…I tell myself.
Shark Tooth Island! I might just pull this off!
Oooooooooh! Looks sooooo nice up there.
Never has a sucker hole sucked so much!
As I’m running the scud, I managed one miracle by properly turning the fuel selector from Standpipe to Center Droppable. But, if I run that drop dry at this altitude, I’m going for a swim. Better switch to mains and drop the, you know, drop.
Alright. Nice job. You did it!
Hey, what has two thumbs and is a kick ass pilot?
This guy!
This is the point that the feces hits the oscillating unit.
It’s always dangerous when a pilot begins to look around the cockpit and ponder.
"Huh, that CHT looks a little low. Well, I don’t know much about CHT. But I DO know about green bands and how good it is to be inside of them. Cowl flaps are already closed. Maybe if I lean the mixture juuuuuuust a little…
I click back one notch on my mixture axis. The mixture knob moves back a bit. I click back once more. The mixture knob moves back a bit more. I click back one more time…
The mixture goes to Idle Cutoff. 
There was a long pause.
I know that they say “no fast hands in the cockpit” but mine moved so fast that they nearly caught on fire.
Mixture back to Full Rich, Fuel Pump on, Starter on!
No dice. When Goodyear makes a control that says, Idle Cutoff, they mean IDLE. CUTOFF.
Maybe I’ll look for a new job while I wait for the SAR guys to show up.
PART II THE MIXTURE STRIKES BACK
Well, in the spirit of flying vintage airplanes, I’m pretending that I’m living in the times when shanking one into the sand trap wasn’t a career ending event.
So, I book on over to Pax River and hop in Old Lucybelle. Maybe Pappy will bring me some luck. This is also a Jan Kees repaint.
Off we go again into a slightly higher overcast. Daylight helps.
I still don’t think my compass is working, but I think I can figure this one out.
I come upon the string of islands that leads me to Tangier.
Hear that they still speak the Queen’s Good English there. Need to visit sometime.
I continue down the far coast and spot the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. First time all day that I knew where I was.
Flew into that soup that you can see in the distance. But circled low over Norfolk until I could find Oceana.
Set up for the break. Well I didn’t have much choice with the low ceiling!
You know, every time I land, there’s always some emergency vehicle racing over to me.
I’m beginning to get a complex.
Old Lefty was the gutsiest lineman I knew.
Well, THAT was an experience.
I may drive the next leg.
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You sure about that? 64/264 is… vehicular rugby. And if you’re looking to get to I-95, avoid Highway 58 and Emporia, Virginia like the plague. Had a sailor get pulled over and ticketed for 36 in a 35. Downhill. Right after a speed change from 45.
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