bosspecops
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A bit of background, my youngest daughter is an Air Traffic Controller with the RAF, currently based at RAF Shawbury in Shropshire. They have a social club there called the 'Aries Club' and while I was visiting her once we went here for refreshments, as you do. 
I found some great pics on the wall of various RAF aircraft all named 'Aries', a Lancaster (the original 'Aries') with Lancastrian nose and tail, a Lincoln ('Aries II') and a Canberra ('Aries V'). In fact the whole station is associated with the name 'Aries', it's the name of the station magazine and their annual Awards are called the Aries awards, and I was lucky enough to attend one of the Aries Awards ceremonies once.
I started to dig into the source of this legend and it seems the original 'Aries', a Lancaster 1, PD328, was the very first RAF aircraft to ever fly right around the world! Amazingly this didn't happen until 1944, while WWII was still in progress, and having just done an FS RTW flight in a Short Sealand amphibian, I decided to do the 'Aries' flight in FSX myself too.
Luckily PD328 was a pretty standard Lancaster 1, but which was fitted with a Lancastrian turret-less nose and tail, and had no mid-upper turret, as well as having it's interior specially fitted out with hi-tech (for the period) navigation equipment, so I was able to use a base Lancastrian FS model and I repainted it to look like PD328 for the flight, and here's the result. Luckily PD328 has been pretty well covered for images and I was able to find enough to do a decent repaint for her.
I needed to increase the fuel tankage to mirror the RW aircraft's extra tanks, but that was just a matter of working on the .cfg file, and soon I had an 'Aries' that should be able to reproduce the original flight.
I started this whole thing quite some time ago, when many of us were based on Flightsim.com, but of course that's all gone out the window now and we've found a new home here for our particular brand of FS craziness. So far I've got as far as Hickham AFB at Honolulu, starting from Shawbury EGOS of course, and flying via Prestwick EGPK, Reykjavik BIRK, Goose Bay CYYR, Montreal CYUL, Andrews AFB KADW, Colorado Springs KCOS, Travis AFB KSUU and Hickham AFB PHNL.
There the whole thing came to a grinding halt for some time as a few test flights proved that even with the extra tanks my 'Aries' didn't have enough range to reach the next RW waypoint, which was Faleolo Int. NSFA in Samoa, and no matter what altitude I flew at or what speed I chose there was no way I wasn't going to have to ditch in the Pacific, not a good move to my mind.
But after some brain-storming with my long term FS buddy Melo Scanlon, Melo965 on here, we figured out I'd screwed up the mixture settings on all the legs I'd flown so far, and was lucky that I'd actually made the flight to Hickham! So here I am, many months after being virtually marooned on Hawaii (how terrible eh?) setting off on the longest leg of the whole flight, some 2859 nms to Faleolo, which should take around 10.5 hrs or so flying with FSTRamp's GPS navigation and auto-pilot.
Running with Active Sky 2016 in Real World Weather mode I needed to take-off on Hickham's 04L or 04R runways, and I chose the longest 04R as I had no idea how far the Lancaster would need with its tanks brim full. It took for EVER to taxi there (about 3.5 miles!) but eventually I was off, right alongside an AI Airbus A321 on 04L.
Naturally the A321 was a lot faster, and climbed a lot faster than a 1944 vintage Lanc, and he soon overhauled me as I turned off to the southwest.
So sometime tomorrow morning I should be landing at Somoa, all things being equal.
I hope this is just a tad interesting, even if it's not a real 'multi-player' on line flight. It'll be a long thread until I'm back on the ground at Shawbury and I hope that some of you will be along for the ride.
Regards
Kit
I found some great pics on the wall of various RAF aircraft all named 'Aries', a Lancaster (the original 'Aries') with Lancastrian nose and tail, a Lincoln ('Aries II') and a Canberra ('Aries V'). In fact the whole station is associated with the name 'Aries', it's the name of the station magazine and their annual Awards are called the Aries awards, and I was lucky enough to attend one of the Aries Awards ceremonies once.I started to dig into the source of this legend and it seems the original 'Aries', a Lancaster 1, PD328, was the very first RAF aircraft to ever fly right around the world! Amazingly this didn't happen until 1944, while WWII was still in progress, and having just done an FS RTW flight in a Short Sealand amphibian, I decided to do the 'Aries' flight in FSX myself too.
Luckily PD328 was a pretty standard Lancaster 1, but which was fitted with a Lancastrian turret-less nose and tail, and had no mid-upper turret, as well as having it's interior specially fitted out with hi-tech (for the period) navigation equipment, so I was able to use a base Lancastrian FS model and I repainted it to look like PD328 for the flight, and here's the result. Luckily PD328 has been pretty well covered for images and I was able to find enough to do a decent repaint for her.
I needed to increase the fuel tankage to mirror the RW aircraft's extra tanks, but that was just a matter of working on the .cfg file, and soon I had an 'Aries' that should be able to reproduce the original flight.
I started this whole thing quite some time ago, when many of us were based on Flightsim.com, but of course that's all gone out the window now and we've found a new home here for our particular brand of FS craziness. So far I've got as far as Hickham AFB at Honolulu, starting from Shawbury EGOS of course, and flying via Prestwick EGPK, Reykjavik BIRK, Goose Bay CYYR, Montreal CYUL, Andrews AFB KADW, Colorado Springs KCOS, Travis AFB KSUU and Hickham AFB PHNL.
There the whole thing came to a grinding halt for some time as a few test flights proved that even with the extra tanks my 'Aries' didn't have enough range to reach the next RW waypoint, which was Faleolo Int. NSFA in Samoa, and no matter what altitude I flew at or what speed I chose there was no way I wasn't going to have to ditch in the Pacific, not a good move to my mind.
But after some brain-storming with my long term FS buddy Melo Scanlon, Melo965 on here, we figured out I'd screwed up the mixture settings on all the legs I'd flown so far, and was lucky that I'd actually made the flight to Hickham! So here I am, many months after being virtually marooned on Hawaii (how terrible eh?
) setting off on the longest leg of the whole flight, some 2859 nms to Faleolo, which should take around 10.5 hrs or so flying with FSTRamp's GPS navigation and auto-pilot.Running with Active Sky 2016 in Real World Weather mode I needed to take-off on Hickham's 04L or 04R runways, and I chose the longest 04R as I had no idea how far the Lancaster would need with its tanks brim full. It took for EVER to taxi there (about 3.5 miles!) but eventually I was off, right alongside an AI Airbus A321 on 04L.
Naturally the A321 was a lot faster, and climbed a lot faster than a 1944 vintage Lanc, and he soon overhauled me as I turned off to the southwest.
So sometime tomorrow morning I should be landing at Somoa, all things being equal.
I hope this is just a tad interesting, even if it's not a real 'multi-player' on line flight. It'll be a long thread until I'm back on the ground at Shawbury and I hope that some of you will be along for the ride.
Regards
Kit
