A Flight Simulation Tale

[Wing_Z]

think about her culinary skills. Amy Johnson was a great aviatrix, but her cooking was no reason to follow her halfway round the world, in the other direction!
No, Our Intrepid Aviator had prepared a suitable Puss Moth

set the correct time and date

had it loaded correctly with fuel in the baggage

and fervently hoped that this little aircraft had been built with a rather large margin in take-off weight.


It was going to be a close thing...

 

[Felixthreeone]

....especially considering the fact that there were still 100 pounds of cinnamon rolls to be factored in to the equation.....

 

[Wing_Z]

Cannily he took out half the bottles in the crate of Scotch to compensate, and decided on one, rather than two, squares of toilet paper.
Now for the ultimate test...
Would the stout little plane manage to drag itself off that soggy bit of Irish soil?
Only the Youtube clip would tell: [YOUTUBE]bkcS6XesYzc[/YOUTUBE]

 

[Wing_Z]

Miraculously, the plane made it out over the sea without having to jettison any of the remaining bottles of precious amber fluid, although toilet paper count was now nil.
(In truth the FS model was tested at 1,000lbs over MTOW and flown off a cliff.
It remained airborne, and maintained a climb rate of 1ft/hour.
No wonder they were used in all kinds of long-distance record flights).

Up up and away then

Luckily the weather broke quite soon. Puss Moths had a little issue with wing flutter in turbulence, with unfortunate and terminal results.
The fix, a small strut added to the rear wing root, doesn't seem to appear on our hero's model!

Settling at a comfortable 5,000ft cruise, Our Intrepid Aviator could look out over the water. Lots of water.

Much water later, and seven hours down the track, the engine sputtered out of fuel.

Time to pump over some of that baggage then, while maintaining the glide and hoping for a good air start

Things were not looking too bad for OIA...

 

[Wing_Z]

Nothing could compare with that feeling: sky, clouds, unlimited views

The navigation looked to be going well, too.
The sim fitted somewhere between the various possible real-world routes, as plotted by the Automobile Association.

For those concerned about how this was all possible in 1932, a word from that year's Flight Magazine:
The shortest distance between the coasts of Ireland and
Newfoundland would have been a great-circle course. To
fly along this, however, Mr. Mollison would have been
obliged to make five changes of course at predetermined
points, and would therefore have had to calculate his position
with considerable accuracy. Flying solo as he was,
this would have presented great difficulty. An alternative
would have been to follow a rhumb-line course, but this
would also have involved changes of course to correct for
the changes of magnetic variation. To overcome these
difficulties, the rhumb-line course was taken, and to this
was added the average difference in the magnetic variation
between Ireland and Newfoundland. On this course the
pilot would be north of the rhumb line, as the average
magnetic variation at first exceeded the actual. Halfway
across the actual and average variation would be the
same, and finally on the second half of the Atlantic crossing
the actual would exceed the average variation, and
the pilot would find himself gradually approaching the
rhumb line.

 

[Wing_Z]

But now, the sun had raced him to the horizon.
This was a different Kettle of Fish, flying over the ocean at night.

No ipod, Sudoku hadn't even been invented...Jim had to sit tight, grip the stick, and wing it.
Our Intrepid Flightsimmer, however...

 

[Wing_Z]

had meanwhile downloaded Damian's (correct) repaint for this bird, and, as the first rays of dawn spread over the sky behind...

he could see that he'd been flying in black & white!

Taking new courage after the long and lonely night, our hero flew ever westward in his little yellow aircraft.
Landfall at Nova Scotia lay a scant 3 hours ahead, his spirits began to lift...

 

[middle]

...as the fuel began to sink....

 

[Wing_Z]

...and the unthinkable happened.
After pausing the sim for nearly a month to figure something out, there was no way around this:

[YOUTUBE]oTitQUDA-88[/YOUTUBE]

Presumably this was Nova Scotia, and presumably this was the reason Mollison took a little longer to finish the flight.

Two bottles of Scotch, a can of pemmican, and an old RAC map of Canada were all that was left on board.

What to do?

 

[Wing_Z]

Would Mollison have tipped a bottle of the precious amber fluid into the fuel tank to finish the journey?
Probably not, but our intrepid flightsimmer made it so, deciding a 50:50 split would see to the needs of both man and machine.
The resultant flightpath is however, probably quite close to the mark, given the time it took Jim to get to the next point.

Then: More disaster!
MS forgot to include the field at St John's...

Undaunted, out came the AFX and within mere minutes, the deed was done.

Nothing left but to put her down and wait for the adulation of the crowds.

...which, strangely, were conspicuous by their absence!
Even avid watchers of the SOH thread had wandered off into the middle distance.
Ah well, perhaps history would record the exploit as heroic.

The flight, and all the other record-breaking long-haul trips of the day, must've been a soul-deadening experience.
Watching oil paint dry would've been hectic in comparison.

 

[Wing_Z]

Totally exhausted after nearly two months of fighting the little aircraft across the Atlantic, our intrepid flightsimmer climbed back into his bathtub for a little quiet reflection.

But, as these things go, within minutes he started scheming again.
This time, he thought, there was going to be real ACTION, real ADVENTURE, and DANGER!

He'd gained a lot of experience now, and knew that being properly equipeed was one of the most critical things in being an aviation hero.

Oh yes...