Flying man festival - Network flights with Capt. Brick


St.Bernardino, Saturday 6th of july 2001

Sitting in a comfortable chair, watching the TCP packets comming in and going out, I suddenly became aware of the presence of Sir Brick in the pilot lounge. He had that very same twitching in his eye lids... so I guessed we both were hot for a flight...

Without loosing a single minute, we went to the briefing room and checked the availability of a network flight slot. We both had the licence to fly in Vogel Island, and we both had all the keys to the dESPair hangar. Just like all good test pilots, we agreed to not fly the old, secure and reliable stuff, but go straight for a 5.66 flight.

However, we decided to keep our maneuvres close to the "beginner test pilot's handbook" guidelines, which means: we agreed to trash the XP prefs, and startup in default XP setup (San Bernardino, default 747). We eventualy met in the network lounge and programmed our FMS with the proper IPs -and we got the ok from the ATC: "let's rock"!



We rushed to the hangars and entered the aircraft, rolled to the rw 06 and tried to get in contact over radio. Everything worked flawless, except in the hurry, we both seem to have missed the correct aircraft. We desperatedly ran back to the hangar, switching aircraft, to no avail. Somehow the system played jokes with us and we were basically unable to sit on rw 06 in the same aircraft type. At one moment, the picture shown on the right side has been snapped by Victoria, who is still giggling and chuckling silently whenever I mention this stage of network flight...

Mother and son on rw 06... gniiii heheee!




Did I mention that Capt. Brick and myself were having fun at that moment, despite the aircraft selection problems? To my big surprise, Sir Brick's Lancer suddenly jumped, yes right: JUMPED, over me and began a shamanistic dance to please the aeronautic gods.

I must admit, my mouth dropped open, and remained that way for a couple of minutes, until the gracile and highly fascinating dance of Sir Brick has ended. Luckily I had my digicam with me in the cockpit, so after overcomming my motionless stunning, I snapped this picture -->

We've been flying around San Bernardino for a short while, and once back on the ground we decided to switch to Vogel Island and try the flying man festival contest route.

Ok. I think it's fair if we don't loose to many words about our first start trials. Some pictures say more than 1000 words:

In short, we had to wait for good winds, and the aircraft selection weirdness went on... this time, I saw Sir Brick entering a Huey for the glider flight?!!?!?!?? On the radio channel, Sir Brick asked me if I really want to fly the contest in a Me-262... sigh.

Once the winds had.changed, we both got it going right and we could take off almost synchronously. Although Sir Brick's Huey had the rotor mounted vertical, he did a good job in keeping the speed low... I was following in my camouflaged SG-38 (still looking like a Me-262) and we both had a first attempt to land within the target circles.

Sir Brick hit the bulls eye almost perfectly. And no, even if his SG-38 looked like a Huey, he was really flying the SG-38. This, I can tell from the performance of his aircraft during the flight.

Myself was lucky enough to survive and land close to the target area.

Sir Brick decided to reboot his (XP) aircraft system to check if we can remove the camouflage from our SG-38s. To no avail. When he reappeared on my screen (I was waiting patiently on the start platform), he still flew a SG-38 that looked like a Huey with wrongly mounted rotor.

But what he sayd to me over the radio almost made me spilling my beer over the panel: "Now you are a Space Shuttle" - ROTFL. I was prepared for many things, but not to fly a space shuttle down to the target zone! :-)

Anyway. To the right, you find a picture showing an experimental fusion between two SG-38s, one camouflaged as a Huey, the other showing it's real "face" . Well, nothing can hold two dESPair test pilots from taking off...

We had three networked contest flights total, and the last one ended very successfull, seeing us both sitting in the innermost target circle. Ok, Sir Brick said his SG-38-Huey is in fact now the Islander...


Our conclusions:

1) XP networking Mac to Mac in v 5.66 works
2) XP chooses a random aircraft to show
3) and you can't change that aircraft until you reboot XP.
4) Even then, there is little chance XP picking the right AC.
5) If Sir Brick chose the "Make this the primary machine", then my XP copy froze.

Networking works somehow, but it doesn't do it nicely. But I think we had quite a bit of fun anyway. "You're a Space shuttle now" - Mhuaaaahaaaa-bwhaaahaaa-sniff-heheeeeee....


Clear sky!

Hak