Blade Edge

Click the above image for the gallery on flickr cause the embed options all suck. Also all images are captioned with additional information not always included below

This flight took place around the start of December last year – wow I’ve been so bad at writing this up but I also haven’t flown since… I will be doing another flight tomorrow though so time to recap this one.

The idea here with this flight was two fold – for one the Six Flags Great Adventure scenery had been updated recently, and the last time I flew over it darkness had fallen enough that it was hard to see the safari park and the animals in it. The second reason was the US Update had recently landed and brought with it new aerial imagery for southern NJ, so why not check it out?

To attempt to get things looking a bit more drab for winter time, I downloaded a seasons mod that darkened the trees and it definitely helped IMO. They couldn’t get the trees to show as bare models but the darker leaf colors worked well enough.

I didn’t make a full flight plan for this trip, I just sent my friend Andrew the route plan I had worked up in SkyVector. Once again the sim did not want to cooperate on letting us both see each other – I could see him but apparently he was not able to see me. This was unfortunate because the ideal situation would be for him to follow me since I knew the route plan better but more importantly I was the slower aircraft. So we had to make do with me constantly telling him how close I was and whether he needed to speed up or slow down. It worked out well enough I was able to stick with him almost the entire flight – but we’ll get to that later.

Departure was out of 3N6 Old Bridge and the day was quite blustery – I forget exactly but it was definitely close to max crosswing component for our aircraft because rolling down the runway I had to not only rudder into the wind but bank into the wind to keep from getting blown sideways into the trees before I even left the ground. Once in the air heading south, with the wind out of the west I could literally see my plane flying forwards and also sideways as I traveled along! Still, it was not a turbulent experience, so that was nice.

We reached Six Flags with no problems and circled it low and slow twice around, getting a good look at the giraffes and elephants visible at the animal safari. Then it was following Rt 195 west to the Turnpike (I-95) which with 8 lanes at this point is pretty hard to miss. Banking back south we followed it and the parallel I-295 until they branched apart slightly, which was our cue to head southeast over the Pine Barrens. Turning at this point and keeping our altitude below 1,500′ allowed us to stay out of Philly class-B airspace and also vectored us around the McGuire alert area. I’m proud to say I remembered this time to switch to the terminal area chart (TAC) to get a better look at the roads and airports to make sure we were flying where we were supposed to. When we passed Camden (19N) off to our left I knew we were right on course.

Here’s some video of us cruising south along the Turnpike. This was recorded with I think 30FPS but the sim only running around 20 or so. Screw all the people who need 30FPS or higher I never even notice low frames

At this point we were clear of all controlled airspace and just flew as we liked, keeping eyes out for traffic. Climbed up to around 3,500′ for a better view of the new scenery area, which to be honest I couldn’t tell if it looked any better than before but it was good looking all the same. As we approached Cape May County (KWWD) I let Andrew pull ahead so he could fly the pattern first with me following. I quickly lost sight of him but was calling out my position as he was calling out his. We managed to still mess up our positioning though because when he said he was on final as I was downwind I turned base then final expecting to slot in behind him and I actually turned right onto his tail!! I actually just said screw it and tried to land with him but was going to fast and had to call a go-around.

Flying the pattern again and landing was nice and smooth. At the airport Andrew and I tried to get the sim to let us see each other again but to no avail except for the one time he loaded in with an Airbus like “CAN YOU SEE ME NOW?!?” lol. Unfortunately the sim still has a limit on the amount of players it shows within a certain range and 7 aircraft had just loaded up and taken off as we were messing around plus plenty more I could see name tags for in the area. Really cool to see so many people out flying. A test just made today I was able to see both Andrew and another friend Mike who had recently purchased the sim. So that bodes well for my planned flight tomorrow with Andrew (maybe Mike too). When will I write up that one? Who knows…