Combined PIREP
 Pics from the "Splash trip" sight seeing tour. We had beautiful weather, which allowed us to undertake a couple of water landings and departures (for some extra $, of course). |
 Having the ground view popping up every now and then makes the flight in the scattered cumulus a pure joy. |
 Just one of the lakes we visited on our trip. |
 I can hardly imagine there is something more exciting in this sim than to fly the Waterpipe with cruise power settings under such weather enjoying beautiful scenery made by one of my friends... |
 Each landing made the passengers clapping their hands, cheering and hailing the pilots awesome skills... One should be allowed to fly such thankful folks once a week! |
 Just for the geeks & curious ones: vis 20nm, extremeRes, 32 bit, 1280*1024 - I am enjoying frame rates up to 180/sec. :-) |
 As I wrote in my last PIREP - I had a tight schedule last week, since I booked quite a set of sim hours, and had the luck to get some jet training in various aircraft. |
 For example my first jet flight since more than a year (!): in a Maverick 1500 TwinJet. After just one hour of type rating in a sim, we took off to get the memory refreshed in real time... |
 Then, the luck struck me, and I was invited to have a flight lesson in a A-10 Warthog, where I was supposed to slowly get in touch with the philosophy (...) of weapon systems and their handling. |
 Stan was extremely humoristic ( he gave me a barf bag instead of an oxygen mask on the first leg... |
 One might be inclined to laugh at me... but if you loock at the cocpit picture above, you might understand that this wasn't a bad idea at all. |
 We tried some ROFL (Regular off field landings). On the last leg, we have been escorted by one of those fancy EuroFighters. And while on final, Stan had already arranged to get my poor ass into that winged rocket-bomb. I wasn't sure if I should be happy or not... |
 I must say - I was deeply impressed by that machine. Once you get used to the tricks and treats of such a flying bomb, you might even fall in love with them... |
 We had some amazing touch and go trials on some remote airfields around Cold Lake. It's big fun to just put your "feet" on the ground and go around with screaming engines, full AB with a climb rate around 8000ft/min. |
 A simple promise to let him steer the Waterpipe for a water landing gave me access to one of the F-14 Tomcats that were still in Cold Lake at the time. Another one hell of a machine. Too twitchy for me... |
 Still - at that moment I loved to fly inverted, and we enjoyed the colorful fields above our heads. |
 Not Stan, but Pete. You know, once you are stuffed into those clothes, you cannot tell the difference between those guys... |
 The view from the cockpit of the Tomcat. |
 The last hell ride was given to me in a F-16 Falcon. |
 All flights went well, and I slowly begin to feel prepared for the training our Cpt. DW is arranging. |
I am a bit out of physical shape after these flights... so forgive me if I cannot be found at any bar right now...
Still, I am looking forward to meet you nomads of the sky e.g. in a local tea house... Clear sky! Hak |