The official 3rd Annual Mudspike Christmas Flight - 2017 Edition

Flying up the Maldives chain: looking at how the atolls are spread out north-south I think this is next on my bucket list! (Anyone else get this brown sky early in the morning in X-Plane? My wife thought it was beach sand!)

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Ok the sun is higher & sky looks a bit more “normal”: Kadhdhoo VRMK just visible on the right. FL200, still with a nice tailwind: 570nm to go to VCBI

continuing from the teaser…

For the less keen-eyed:


So I was over water, in a storm with precipitation and my engine was failing.

How did I get there?

That’s right, the tropical paradise of phuket was letting me down a bit. Despite the gorgeous airport scenery, the weather was not as imagined.
Expectation:


Reailty:

We departed in the evening this time (real time, no cheating today).


Our destination: Kuala Lumpur! WMKK


As the sun set, we flew between tow layers of clouds.


Luckily, the city of Kuala Lumpur is hard not to find by night.


While trying to find where we should park such a tiny plane on this huge airport, I fell asleep.


The next morning, I woke to find that Henk had parked her very nicely.

With renewed courage, I put myself to reading charts again.
Where shall we go today? It is close, but we should be able to make it to Jakarta. If not, there are plenty of divert opportunities along the way.

For departure, I thought it best to get out of this very busy airspace as fast as possible.


The SALAX waypoint would put us right outside controlled airspace.
I chose the BUNIK2 arrival at Jakarta.


Then after a lot of taxiing…

We left this huge airport, the last one on the Eurasian mainland, this very rainy evening. Off to Jakarta!

We turned on all de-icing equipment and dialed in a VS of 1000 ft/min initially

I’m missing some pictures for the next part. Remember those blue blocks in the flight planner? Turbulence. Although we were just outside the SIGMET region, this was not a comfortable flight. As we were flying through some wery dark clouds, I was feeling my way around the upper panel, checking whether the ignition was still set to continuous.

We hit a bump in the cloud, and my hand must have pushed the starter switch down to the STOP position as I got kicked up from my seat, because our right engine died.


I quickly changed the VS to -500 so as not to stall and frantically kept pushing the starter switch up. Check fuel pumps, check ignition… still no good. I flipped the UNF PUMP switch on the right side of the starter panel, still nothing… Oh maybe set Power to F1 (near idel) and set the Speed lever to low… Still no joy.
Then Henk pushed the emergency procedures booklet that he had been reading into my hands, set the speed lever to feather/shutoff and started the engine.


I guess I should read stuff like that before flying halfway around the world.


We could then slowly climb above the clouds. The flight over Sumatra was uneventful, with only cloud cover below us.

On the approach, we could see the lights of the Jakarta shining through the clouds…
This time I flew the proper altitudes, even though I still couldn’t seem to get my FMS to calculate a descent profile.
On the descent, we passed through a thunderstorm.


But we broke out right in front of the runway. Caught the localizer, not the glideslope, but luckily the PAPI lights were visible again.

The terminal closest to the runway, wow… Santa has some connections here.


Even fetched us a BMW! Or is it @TheAlmightySnark’s car that he smuggled in here?

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:sweat_smile:

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Perhaps I was the real Santa all along?

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Sierra Oscar Sierra, @BeachAV8R @TheAlmightySnark
. . . _ _ _ . . .
. . . _ _ _ . . .

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I’m departing tomorrow morning so I hope tonight’s sea wont be too frosty :wink:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKZ6rlqu-pg&feature=youtu.be&t=4s

The plane seems to float somehow… Henk and I are sitting on top, waiting to be rescued.
This will be a cold night.

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S.O.S received…! Mounting up now…!

Track here: http://xfsd.ansorg-web.de/fsdmap/

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Prepping the flares…
Great to hear those engines!

The sun must have come up…because I’m flying in daylight… :rofl:

Wonder what the sea state is down there…these amphibs can get exciting in X-Plane sometimes…!

Navigator says he’s spotted something…!

Appears to be a sailboat rendering assistance…!

Working on the transfer…gotta figure out why my anchor deployed…

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Used prevailing winds to estimate drift…

Found ya’ here…

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Kind of hard to make the transfer when Denise Connor wants to keep making 13 knots…I wonder if @Sine_Nomine is stowed away belowdecks?

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Got em…on the way back…

Back on solid ground. It was hard tearing the boys away from the gal sailor…but she was headed for Christmas Island too…


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