I know I’m too late with ths AAR, but because of the realistic time & date setting (late afternoon/evening) I had to raise the brightness and lower the contrast on almost all of these shots, and then we went to my gf’s family in Germany so I didn’t have time to do it anymore. We did fly a lot of DCS there, so I can’t complain about flying time: her entire family is, much to her annoyance, at least as crazy about planes as I am, and her father and brother bought some modules in the current sale.
OK, now to the AAR. At first I had some problems getting the old X-Plane 8.06 (DVD version) to run, turns out you just have to download the updater HERE to get it to 8.64 which runs fine on Windows 7. When I saw it was working, I did what I used to do when I was 8 years old: go to X-Plane.org and download lots of freeware. Reader, you are warned, I flew like an 8-year old on this last part of my Christmas flight. And I’m using the v7 world scenery included on the DVD. Enter nostalgia.
After landing in my Mi-8 and opening the doors, I noticed the pile of presents on the ramp of Krasnodar airport was not where it was supposed to be. I did spot some weird guys in white uniforms, and after following them, saw some bright taxi lights on the ramp.
That’s the Lambda-Class Imperial Shuttle (Click!). I can’t let the Galactic Empire steal Santa’s presents, we’ll never see them again. And they’ll be probably be used to fund a terrifying space weapon.
So, I do the only sensible thing and sneak aboard while the on-guard stormtroopers are checking up on my Mi-8 which is still running. I flip some switches and to my surprise, the ion engines start glowing. I move the biggest slider forward and off we go!
After retracting the gear, I look around the cockpit. There are three other sliders next to the throttle; one is in middle position, the others are both fully up. I slide the last two to the other side and the ramp is withdrawn and the wings drop. I guess the last one is used to transition from hover to forward flight and reverse thrust. After moving it about, I find moving it forward makes the Shuttle go forward.
While in a 40 degree climb at Mach 0.8, I look over my shoulder and read the letter that’s attached to the bag of presents: It reads: “for the children in Katwijk, Netherlands” in a dozen languages.
It takes a while to fire up Skyvector on my phone (terrible reception over Krasnodar at 20,000 feet), but then I turn to heading 293. Let’s go to Schiphol.
I decide to aim for an altitude of 200,000 feet maximum, and try to keep the speed around Mach 10 to be there as fast as possible, without burning through all my fuel. I noticed on the climb out that the Shuttle does not like the transonic regime, but high and fast seems to be the way to go.
At altitude, the sun suddenly lights up the Shuttle.
Over the weirdly familiar radio, I explain the situation to the tower at Schiphol.
After using the thrust reversers to quickly lose some altitude (fuel is clearly not an issue in the Imperial Shuttle, especially for sub-orbital flights), I spot the lights of Schiphol, also known as Amsterdam airport.
And the (unedited) cockpit view:
The transition to hover is not easy, here you see me hanging on the insanely powerful thrust reversers.
But once in a hover, landing an Imperial Shuttle is just like landing an Mi-8.
The next day, all the presents are loaded onto one of the new A400M planes (great work, best 2D cockpit I’ve seen! Download HERE!) and we’re ready to deliver them to Katwijk, Netherlands.
Man, this thing climbs!
Although there’s probably not that many people on the beach in December, you never really know. Especially with the great weather we’ve been having around here lately, so I decide to do a low level delivery at the nearby Valkenburg former naval air station, right next to the runway.
Almost flew my constant Mach propellers through a flock of birds there!
X-plane 8 with v7 world scenery does not look pretty, and this was probably not the most serious or in-depth AAR you’ve ever read either, but this is very much how I used to play X-Plane when I was a little kid. I relived some of my very first flight sim moments; even if I flew completely unrealistic spacecraft at Mach 10, this sort of ‘flying’ is how it all started for me, and I hope you appreciate my sharing it with you.
I wish you all a very happy and healthy 2016 and look forward to flying with you! 