CHAPTER 3
ALOHA…MES AMIS!
San Francisco International Airport (KSFO), San Fransisco, CA TO Honolulu International Airport (PHNL), Honolulu, HI
10 October 2023 0700L (1400Z).
2082NM. ETE: 10+50
Alright, it was time to nut up or shut up. San Fran to Hawaii. Over 2000NM. No Navaids. No Landmarks.
I hadn’t been entirely satisfied with how the last leg had gone. Sure, I had corrected the most egregious error, but I still had the creeping feeling that I was missing something, or things. So, with at least some idea of the concepts involved, I decided to try this one OG.
That meant that there’d be a lot more of this stuff [from the Nautical Almanac and Sight Reduction tables].
I also had another decision to make. The thing that had set me down this path of madness in the first place was the release of the Clipper. But, despite much trying, I couldn’t for the life of me get the autopilot to hold a heading within about ten degrees from where I engaged it. As it was, I was already going to have my hands full figuring this stuff out without having to “tack” back and forth across my courseline in random ten degree cuts. I needed another option.
Fortunately for me, 2023 proved to be the “Year of the Flying Boat". 
Enter the Latécoère 631. A beautiful, buxom, behemoth of a French Flying Boat with a capable (if basic) autopilot and a flight deck that you could play shuffleboard on. As sad as I was to leave my Clipper dreams behind, this would be a lovely ride.
San Fransisco Bay. 0700L. Just before dawn, but still darker than a black steer’s tuchus on a moonless prairie night under the marine layer. Hoping that no one in the Bay area had decided to do a little predawn angling, I pushed all six throttle levers forward.
And, with an agreeable lack of crunching sounds, lumbered into the air over San Fransisco Bay. My original intention had been to circle up, remaining over the water until I was clear of the surrounding hills, not to mention setting myself up for a better start than last time.
Which I didn’t quite manage, crossing north of the city. As consolation, at least I got a good view of the Golden Gate Bridge in passing.
The Latécoère is a very pretty aircraft. But a bit…French. French, in that I don’t speak the language. I found myself having to use a good bit of intuition (and tooltips…and Google) to figure out what to push, pull, or set. It doesn’t help that this thing has a near Concorde level of instrumentation smeared all over the flight deck. It’s enough to make a single pilot busier than a one legged man in a butt kicking contest.
That’ll be important later…
As the sun broke the horizon, I made ready for my first sextant shot.
The Navigator’s station, where I spent 80% of my time. Importantly, it contains the only clock in the aircraft. This proved to be a challenge as I had had to manually set the time in sim in order to make the daylight work out. Unfortunately, that meant, if I wasn’t at this desk, I would have no idea what time it was.
To keep me from missing a sighting (as I spent as little time sitting at the desk as possible), I kept my own time with a small pocketwatch that I had gotten at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, England. It seemed appropriate for the task. The hard part was keeping in mind that this was going to be my time for the next eleven hours.
You never realize how many clocks you have in your house, until you try to ignore them all! 
While I kept PPOS off for most of the flight, I did (at first) briefly toggle it after each sighting to evaluate the quality of the fix. Here, my celestial position is indicated by the intersection of the three lines to the northwest of the red circle. The aircraft symbol still represents my PPOS. So, not great, not terrible. This first sighting did take place after my climb out, however, so I wasn’t quite in steady state cruise yet. As the airspeeds change, winds shift, etc. my path and speed might have been expected to waver a bit.
I also didn’t figure any winds into my Dead Reckoning solutions. In general, I’m fairly circumspect about the winds aloft (particularly over water) in MSFS. On previous flights, I’ve seen weather stop or start abruptly, winds not match weather products, and other anomalies that make me a bit reluctant to bite off on any varsity corrections until I see it with my own eyes in the sim.
As it would turn out, it took me several fixes to refine my groundspeed calculations and “catch up” to where I thought I should have been. On the plus side, this Old School method seemed to be doing a better job of keeping me on course laterally.
Or so I thought…
The next several hours passed more or less like this. A flurry of activity: plotting my DR position, calculating my celestial data, crosschecking my instruments. Then 40 minutes or so (my ciphering time dropped considerably with practice) where I try to stand up, walk around, and play the long game. Finally, back to the dome to take my next sighting.
Rinse. Repeat.
It was shortly before the 2100Z sighting that it happened.
I had gotten up to stretch my legs, only to return to find the ship slowly dutch rolling back and forth and the altitude unwinding. Looking at the engine instruments, I saw that the RPM on all three starboard engines had dropped. I wasted precious time misdiagnosing what I thought at first was a simism, since what could have made 3 of my engines fail simultaneously?
Then, the left three engines began to sputter as well and I performed an unceremonious water landing onto the uncommonly pacific waters of the, um, Pacific.
What could have made the engines quit? Fuel. Lack of fuel could have made the engines quit.
This one was on me as Pilot In Command. While I had read the slim but colorful manual for the Latécoère, I still walked away not quite knowing whether I needed to manually transfer fuel from the Aux to the Mains, or whether (simism or not) the transfer happened automatically. Maybe it was that the entire process of transferring fuel in an airplane with six engines (and at least twelve Cessnafulls of engine instruments! ) was supposedly controlled by the single tap shown below.
Or maybe it was that this tap was, somewhat unhelpfully, labelled “Fuel Shutoff Valve”, though one could argue that this is technically correct. Whatever it was, I had grown increasingly reluctant to turn this valve as the hours passed behind me in case I somehow misunderstood and starved, rather than fed, the engines.
I had been keeping an eye on the fuel levels in any case of course, waiting for the moment that the mains would run dry. In retrospect though, I’m not sure why. If I waited for the engines to quit (as they had), it would have taken me as long to select the proper instrument view and fix it as it would have to have actually run back there in real life (they’re on the back wall of an at least 15ft long flightdeck). So, the odds of me taking my attention away from flying the airplane long enough to go hunting stopcocks and not crashing were (had I given it any consideration) incredibly low.
The fact that the tanks chose to empty while I was in the Loo was just a hilarious coincidence!
A smart pilot might have tested this system before he went overwater (ala ETOPS). But, like unicorns, there were none of those on this flightdeck. 
And so, there I sat, bobbing like a Seagull, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Approximately 856NM from Hawaii. 7 hours into my 11 hour trip.
I’m not going to lie. This one almost tripped my “F-it” wire. 
