@Sine_Nomine’s identity finally revealed…
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Jim from “The Office”? 
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It’s “Mister President” to you. 
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He’s looking a little Rambo for a President…did he have an argument with Dwight again? 
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#JackRyan2020
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Well looks like it time to fire up some planes and mosey on down to NSTU.
Ill be using FSX:SE, Default scenery and payware aircraft and a traffic add on to make the airspace more lively.
For my flights ill be leaving KTBR going to NSTU. We will have stop in KSAV, KATL, KLAX, and PHNL.
I will be using the Default C208, the Aersoft Airbus x A319, and the Level D Sims 767.
Leg 1 KTBR to KSAV
Leg 1 is a short little hope to KSAV to get a bigger plane.
We will be flying the C208 with 14 people and hauling 808 lbs of beer and hunting gear.
Flight plan
Holding short of RWY 23 at KTBR
Climbing out to the east
On final into KSAV rwy 10
And parked at KSAV
Up next a brief trip to KATL.
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Haha…just when we think we have you figured out…
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Any Caravan gets an upvote from this guy…!
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I’m currently still in New Orleans, starting to go broke and my liver is sending me signals that it is soon time to move on (oh…and a mysterious burning sensation…) I’m trying to build some ortho for my next leg since there is no premade ortho…
Next leg is looking like New Orleans Lakefront (KNEW) over to Beaumont, TX (KBPT)…
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I’m on my way out of New Orleans (8 hours bottle to throttle…right on…). Unfortunately, it looks like X-Flight Server is down. I’ve tried multiple times to connect to it…and I also don’t see anyone else flying, so something is amiss. So live tracking will not be available for this leg (I know, it is soooooo exciting anyway!)
http://xfsd.ansorg-web.de/fsdmap/
Our route will take us from New Orleans over to Beaumont, Texas on a 208 nm hop. The plane we are using is the fifth type of plane that shows up in my real log book - the PA-28 Warrior…!
Should be a fun flight across the coast…a smidge of weather to contend with coming in off the Gulf, but we can pop-up IFR at any time…
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Looks like the server is undergoing maintenance perhaps based on this message on the X-Plane forums:
“The November 18th fly-in in Riga, Latvia (EVRA) is postponed until Sunday, November 25th due to flight server downtime this weekend. Sorry for the inconvenience.”
Good to hear it might be back up soon…
Leg 6 - Noshahr (OINN) to Ashgabat (UTAA)
Ok, this leg goes into regions of the world I have barely ever heard of. Noshahr I of course never heard about. Ashgabat on the other side sounds familiar to me. Would I have known that this is the capital of Turkmenistan? No… Turkmenistan is a country I’m well aware off, however I never really knew where exactly it is. Now thanks to the Christmas flight I do: Turkmenistan is one of the little known countries that emerged from former Soviet Union. It has almost the size of Spain but only a population of 5.6 million.
I realize that a major part of my flight will be over dessert and I plan to do it in VFR. In order to prepare well, I equip myself with some proper survival gear. This will increase my chance to continue the Christmasflight after a forced landing.
In order to avoid the big heat, I take-off early in the morning around 7 AM when everyone else is still sleeping…
No surprise, there is nobody available to push back my aircraft. I therefore do it on my own by engaging reverse trust.
My aircraft is again fully loaded and by CG is aft, still ok but but definitely at a point where I do not want to use my brakes while pushing back with reverse. Working with the prop only I push back a bit and of course very gently, go back to idle to wait until the aircraft slows down and begins to move forward. No tail-strike
Backtrack to the turning point and off we go…
I fly along the cost into the hazy morning
Flying at 15’000 ft the cloud cover closes below me …
I’m going to catch the next whole to circle down in order to slip below the cover.
After a few turns I finally get below the clouds and I can continue my flight…
It was much nicer above the clouds but I feel safer down here.
Flying along the last valley where there must be enough water to create a green landscape.
With every mile I fly further east, the landscape gets dryer and dryer.
I must say that X-Plane default scenery matches the google maps images pretty well.
After a bit more than 1 hour I reach the valley from Ashgabat, where again water is available the the landscape turns back to green again.
I now definitely arrived in Central Asia and my VFR flight, which I did with dead-reckoning still needs some improvements. I plan to fly VFR through the Himalayan and therefore definitely need to do some more practicing.
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Way back when I was in VF-32, the rule was No Drinking within 50 ft of aircraft; No smoking 12 hours prior to a flight…at least that’s what we went by back then. 
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Up next leg 2, KSAV to KATL.
We will be fly an a A319 with 147 people and hauling 5126 lbs of toys and games
Flight plan
Holding short of rwy 9
Climbing out to the east
Turned back to the west and continuing climb
Climbing through some clouds
Beautiful sky tonight
Nice colors as the sun sets
Starting descent into Atlanta, Looks busy as usual
Decending into the clouds, the moon looks on
Lined up for 27R, other traffic lined up for 26L
Apparently we are under IFR conditions,
Visibility got worse as I got closer
And made it to the gate,
Thats it for now, A day or two of sight seeing in Atlanta before we continue on to LAX
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Meanwhile, at the Tocumen Airport…
“Mister, we heard that Guy Martin bloke was unavailable. We’d like an excentric lad that speaks funny, has a taste for suicidal stunts and can’t finish half his sentences. Are you in?”
I blinked nervously.
“What? I, I wasn’t listening, sorry… I… I… Mate, I think, I think I was just staring at the awesome… at that bloody beautiful hunk of british greatness behind you, sir…”
The RAF officer smiled.
“You’re hired.”
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LEG 5 - PA-28 Warrior - New Orleans, LA (KNEW) - Beaumont, TX (KBPT)
So to recap, as I work my way through my real life logbook in an attempt to fly all of the types I have in there on the way to Pago Pago:
LEG 1 - Cessna 152 - Gastonia, NC (KAKH) - Mountain Air, NC (2NCO)
LEG 2 - Cessna 172 - Mountain Air, NC (2NC0) - Andrews-Murphy, NC (KRHP)
LEG 3 - Cessna 182 - Andrews-Murphy, NC (KRHP) - Tyndall AFB, FL (KPAM)
LEG 4 - T-34 Mentor - Tyndall AFB, FL (KPAM) - New Orleans, LA (KNEW)
So the fifth plane making an appearance in my logbook occurs a few years after my first solo flight and check outs in the 152 and 172. I scaled back my flying significantly while I was in college due to the expense and the discovery of beer and girls. While I would occasionally rent a plane and do some casual flying, it wouldn’t be until I graduated from college and found myself pumping gas on the flight line at North Myrtle Beach airport (KCRE) just after graduation. Each pay period, I’d deduct a little money from my check for rent and drinking, then sign my check back over to the FBO to put into renting planes and earning my Instrument, Commercial, Multi, CFI, and CFII ratings.
So it was April 20, 1994 when I got checked out in one of the FBO rental fleets Piper PA-28 Warriors N215SA. After having mostly just flown Cessna high wings over the previous few years (amassing a whopping total of 160 hours to this point), the low wing Warrior just seemed like a really airplaney feeling airplane.
Off we go from New Orleans, and keeping with the hurricane visitation theme I have going on during this Christmas Flight so far, I’m hopping two hours west to Beaumont, TX - a location I visited in real life last year during the Hurricane Harvey evacuations after Beaumont’s power and drinking water distribution systems were put under water by severe flooding.
TheVFlyteAir Cherokees are simply awesome, and take me back to those single engine Warrior days where I flew up and down coastal North and South Carolina taking in the sights, building hours toward my 250 hour Commercial license requirement…
It is a bit of a murky day, with weather coming in off the Gulf and marginal VFR conditions toward Texas. Just after takeoff, I fly over the Mississippi River and take a glance toward downtown New Orleans…most recently the scene of the crime of the slaying of my Philadelphia Eagles. I believe I can still see feathers and blood down there…
The VFlyteAir “classic” Cherokee is fun to fly - and I’m lucky in that it has an autopilot, something the Cherokees I flew back in the early 90s did not have (nor GPS…even Loran C was out of the realm of cost effectiveness back then!)…
I did a batch build of about 12 tiles via Ortho4XP (thanks @fearlessfrog - I keep coming back to your guide!) and it only took about an hour and a half. The tiles covered New Orleans to Houston…
Coming up on the weather toward the end of the flight. Not bad…just some light rain and turbulence, and no icing of course this far south and at 4,500’…
Approaching Beaumont, it is easy to see why these Gulf Coast areas are so prone to damage and surge from hurricanes. They are just all swampy already. Throw in 10 or 15’ of additional water on top of that and, well…there is just nowhere for it to go…
After about two hours of flying I turn in for Beaumont, Texas. It looks better in the sim than it did in real life. The pall of the burning chemical plant, the dozens of rescue helicopters, and the buzz of many dozens of fixed wing air ambulance planes was missing. I’m sure Beaumont is largely back on its feet a full year after Harvey…but I’m sure they keep a nervous eye towards the Gulf each late summer.
So in five legs, I’ve only knocked out a bit over 700 miles in my journey from North Carolina to Pago Pago with 712nm flown and 5,162nm remaining. Obviously as I work through my logbook, these light trainers have shorter legs, so we’ll start to pick up miles as we find some other planes that I was checked out in. So hang in there!
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Of interest (or not), is that the next logbook entry after the PA-28 is lots and lots of time in the FBO’s ATC 610 simulator. This was a really interesting piece of hardware. It had no visuals at all, it was simply an IFR trainer. By selecting different radio frequencies, you would position yourself at different airports. Then you just used the simulator to fly and practice instrument procedures, holds, approaches…all with no visuals at all. Later models of the ATC sims would add screens and visuals…but these early sims were all about procedures.
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This is why I love this community so much. 