Rob and I finally finished the Air Tour last night but it turned out to be a challenge from start to finish! We had picked GAS Super Stearmans as the ride of choice but within the first five minutes of getting set up and not even taxiing out to the runway Rob had a crash with a OOM error! If you remember we encountered the same problem with the same aircraft before so it does indeed look like there is a memory leak in multi-player just like when we fly the Lionheart Belanca Vikings together! To fix it Rob switched to a different biplane and aliased me in JoinFS to the same type while I stayed in the Super Stearman and aliased Rob to a regular Stearman. That fixed the OOM issues and we could taxi out to the runway.
It was nice to be able to see each other and the ground and to actually enjoy the scenery but as usual things were about to change.
Once more the familiar fog returned and visibility was reduced to absolute zero for several minutes.
It was during the grey out period that I started to notice a potential problem on the gauges as I had nothing better to look at outside the cockpit. When I launched on the flight I had wrong wrongly assumed that because I had changed aircraft it would have defaulted to full fuel tanks! WRONG! The sim had used the fuel remaining from the previous leg and I was alarmed to see that I was less than halfway into the leg and my fuel gauge was showing half tanks! I popped open the aircraft information window in Little NavMap and checked current fuel burn against distance to travel and was alarmed to see that 'fuel remaining' was slightly less than 'distance remaining'! EEK!
The rest of the flight was spent closely monitoring fuel burn, throttle and prop positions and distance to go! Rob dutifully stayed close by just so that he had the co-ordinates of any crash site for the authorities! By backing off on the power and staying on the 'pink line' until I could see the airfield perimeter fence before swinging around for a final approach I managed to eke out enough fuel to get home. I suspect the fuel gauge in the Super Stearman is less than accurate to be honest as it had been sitting on 'E' for 10 minutes before I took this shot and I had been relying on the <SHIFT+Z> fuel value for reference along with the Little NavMap data. If you are wondering why I am so far off the centre-line on final it's because I had a 10-12 knot crosswind to deal with as I hadn't got the fuel to go round to the best runway and that wind had been on my nose for miles which didn't help the fuel situation!
I got down safe and checked the <SHIFT+Z> fuel status and I had 6% of fuel left in the tanks! Boy that was close!
As Rob had now finished his 'nurse maid' duties and seeing as it was the end of an epic trip he thought it was fitting to throw in some 'barn storming' antics! Starting with an inverted low pass which probably scared the bejesus out of the poor AI Cherokee pilot who was on very short final in the background!
The low pass was converted into a barrel roll ............
............ before pulling a tight 'S' turn to line up with the runway.
He 'greased' the landing for a perfect end to a very enjoyable Air Tour 2025!
I had just enough fuel to taxi back to the apron to close out the trip.
At this point Rob and I sat and 'rag chewed' for a while going over the tour and wondering what we were going to do with ourselves now it was done. We both decided that we are done with the snow, fog and gloom as we get enough of that in real life at the moment seeing as we both live in Canada. We both want some warmth and sunshine so our next multiplayer flying adventures are likely to be south of the equator somewhere but as yet we don't know where or in what. Decisions, decisions!
Thanks to 'ViperPilot2' for putting on the event and to all the other pilots taking part, it's been a blast and a reminder of the the fun times we had in past events and in the annual Round the World Races SOH used to take part in along with Avsim.com, Flightsim.com and for a couple of races the 'iFlyOnline' team.
Larry (Tako_Kichi) and Rob (SirGalahad) signing off for now and we'll catch you on the next one!
It was nice to be able to see each other and the ground and to actually enjoy the scenery but as usual things were about to change.
Once more the familiar fog returned and visibility was reduced to absolute zero for several minutes.
It was during the grey out period that I started to notice a potential problem on the gauges as I had nothing better to look at outside the cockpit. When I launched on the flight I had wrong wrongly assumed that because I had changed aircraft it would have defaulted to full fuel tanks! WRONG! The sim had used the fuel remaining from the previous leg and I was alarmed to see that I was less than halfway into the leg and my fuel gauge was showing half tanks! I popped open the aircraft information window in Little NavMap and checked current fuel burn against distance to travel and was alarmed to see that 'fuel remaining' was slightly less than 'distance remaining'! EEK!
The rest of the flight was spent closely monitoring fuel burn, throttle and prop positions and distance to go! Rob dutifully stayed close by just so that he had the co-ordinates of any crash site for the authorities! By backing off on the power and staying on the 'pink line' until I could see the airfield perimeter fence before swinging around for a final approach I managed to eke out enough fuel to get home. I suspect the fuel gauge in the Super Stearman is less than accurate to be honest as it had been sitting on 'E' for 10 minutes before I took this shot and I had been relying on the <SHIFT+Z> fuel value for reference along with the Little NavMap data. If you are wondering why I am so far off the centre-line on final it's because I had a 10-12 knot crosswind to deal with as I hadn't got the fuel to go round to the best runway and that wind had been on my nose for miles which didn't help the fuel situation!
I got down safe and checked the <SHIFT+Z> fuel status and I had 6% of fuel left in the tanks! Boy that was close!
As Rob had now finished his 'nurse maid' duties and seeing as it was the end of an epic trip he thought it was fitting to throw in some 'barn storming' antics! Starting with an inverted low pass which probably scared the bejesus out of the poor AI Cherokee pilot who was on very short final in the background!
The low pass was converted into a barrel roll ............
............ before pulling a tight 'S' turn to line up with the runway.
He 'greased' the landing for a perfect end to a very enjoyable Air Tour 2025!
I had just enough fuel to taxi back to the apron to close out the trip.
At this point Rob and I sat and 'rag chewed' for a while going over the tour and wondering what we were going to do with ourselves now it was done. We both decided that we are done with the snow, fog and gloom as we get enough of that in real life at the moment seeing as we both live in Canada. We both want some warmth and sunshine so our next multiplayer flying adventures are likely to be south of the equator somewhere but as yet we don't know where or in what. Decisions, decisions!
Thanks to 'ViperPilot2' for putting on the event and to all the other pilots taking part, it's been a blast and a reminder of the the fun times we had in past events and in the annual Round the World Races SOH used to take part in along with Avsim.com, Flightsim.com and for a couple of races the 'iFlyOnline' team.
Larry (Tako_Kichi) and Rob (SirGalahad) signing off for now and we'll catch you on the next one!
