A word about "cleanliness" in flight simulation.....

NC, I like your shot of the Theodore Roosevelt passing Gibraltar at night. One of those "secret" departures from the Med under cover of darkness that the Russians aren't supposed to know about! :d
 
Look, I can only talk about my personal experience. A carrier airplane had between 3 to 5 months use and then it was shipped back to A&R. You can only slam something on to a hard surface so many times and it starts to loosen up. So the airplanes never got that old. Now any chips and scratches that were not touched up got the plane captain’s leading chief boot in his tailbone. I'm not kidding either.
There was one source of dirt and that was oil stains on the belly. Air-cooled engines are set up loose so that oil will be consumed and carry off heat. Typically there would be a 12 gallon oil reservoir. A typical flight would use four to six gallons of oil. Usually it was during down time that this mess got cleaned off with Carbon Tetrachloride, which I understand is outlawed for some unknown reason.
Now what takes place in this, no LSO, angled deck Navy with all the jet aircraft, steam catapults and women mechanics running around is anybody’s guess.
I can only say that after 6 to 8 weeks out to sea even the worse ones would look good. Salt Peter only takes you so far.
Make them as dirty, filthy as you want.
Just don’t let me see them.
 
I can't speak for the condition of USN aircraft on carriers currently. It's been years since I was at sea. But I'm sure it is still a neverending battle with corrosion problems. I won't EVEN get on the subject of women aboard carriers. Nope, not gonna touch it.

On the subject of no LSO's on carriers now. Have I missed something? They still have them, don't they?

NC
 
If it's built by man, it WILL weather, wear, and need maintanence.
It's the laws of chemistry and physics. Also, on FS models, one has to also consider the effects of lighting, shininess, surface textures... on thier models. In FSX, one can use bumping, specular, and reflective settings
What I hate most on FS paint jobs is large areas one one pure, solid color.
Even the nicest composite smooth plane will have some details, wear, or lighting patterns to break up the monotonous color areas.
 
Seeing as I used to do aircraft detailing for a living, I can tell you stuff....

Out of the seven planes of the fleet that I had to keep clean (Spotless actually) the worst were the four King Air C-90's. P&W PT-6 engines are not clean burning. Combined with the fact that the exhaust stacks are nearly at the front of the airplane....

The easiest was thankfully also the largest. The Challenger 604 while quite large, didn't fly anywhere near as often and a good old wash usually took care of the exterior. The interior was so large (6 feet high and nearly 8 wide) that cleaning the interior was like cleaning my living room. Upright vaccuum cleaner, dust the woodwork etc.

Every six months or so, I'd have to take a buffer and special cleaner to the paint of the King Air's because even if you washed them every flight, after a while the white paint started to turn a little brown from the exhaust. I usually did it when they were in for their 100 hour maintenance cycle.

The small jet was easy on the exterior (Citation Encore. Basically a hot rodded C-II) but the interior was a pain. I'm a big guy and crawling around the interior cleaning this plane was a chore. I won't even get into describing the contortions I had to go through to service the Lav.


Brian
 
"Aged" and dirty are very hard to do well ... here are two we did a few years ago that we were just playing with but decided to release. They are amateurish but folks loved flying them ... and bathing afterwards. The cockpit was rather grundgy. :wiggle:

More shots here: http://www.flightsimonline.com/ac500/bush.htm

"Lands End Cargo" also referred to as "Hangar Queen" was done by André Folkers; the other dirtied up by BC dirt tracks by Scott Thomas who also aged the cockpit.
 
Look Tim, after 3 to 5 months use, wouldn't your 2009 Lamborgini still look good?
Now after hitting that deck hard enough times, the landing gear trunnions might be loose and a oleo might be collapsed and the hook might have let loose. Not to mention the engine mounts that have shifted. But it still would be sparkling, wouldn't it?
As far as Carbon Tet being all them bad things, the same could be said if you ate enough Chocolate. It was a very good degreaser. We used to play with Mercury and turn pennys into silver.
I used both Carbon Tet and Mercury and am still alive and kicking at 80 plus years. Come to think about it, I also ate a lot of lead pencils.
 
Milton Shupe said:
"Aged" and dirty are very hard to do well
Click to expand...

All this talk about aging and dirtying remind me of when I used to play with model railroading; "weathering" was a subject unto itself.

I agree with Milton; doing convincing aging and dirty is hard. Unless the plane was a bush plane that was always out in the field and never got washed (and even those rarely look that grungy in photographs); there was a reason for a spot here and a paint chip there. Like Helldiver said, you have an engine leaking oil; or it had a wrench dropped on it, or was bumped by a baggage cart or was in a hail storm. Just applying stains and paint chips everwhere doesn't look very convincing to me; overdone, it looks no better than no weathering at all. I think it should be very subtile in most cases.

-James
 
true. but seeing bush planes and freighters with no wear and tear, and no dirt at all just (to me) seems a little off.

i was lucky enough to download the repaint for 206 floater from carenado with the non-red interior. when i saw the scum line on the float i actually did a :woot: right here in my chair. i fly that one more than any other skin for the 206.
 
We have bit more dirty paints in the upcoming Aerosoft Catalina.

Not advertising or anything :whistle:
 
Helldiver said:
Look Tim, after 3 to 5 months use, wouldn't your 2009 Lamborgini still look good?
Now after hitting that deck hard enough times, the landing gear trunnions might be loose and a oleo might be collapsed and the hook might have let loose. Not to mention the engine mounts that have shifted. But it still would be sparkling, wouldn't it?
As far as Carbon Tet being all them bad things, the same could be said if you ate enough Chocolate. It was a very good degreaser. We used to play with Mercury and turn pennys into silver.
I used both Carbon Tet and Mercury and am still alive and kicking at 80 plus years. Come to think about it, I also ate a lot of lead pencils.
Click to expand...

I used to build custom rifles, The M1 Carbine was one. Not much you can do except strip the lenseed oil off and reshape some parts. I used Carbon Tet mixed with whiting to remove the lenseed oil from the stock. It took several applications to do that.. The result of that was I got carbon tet poisoning. I had a fever and was throwing up. and the Doc couldn't figgure out what it was. After a while he asked if I had been using some chemicals and I told him carbon tet.
He told me to stop and to never use that again and I did that. I went to tri-chlore ethlene and whiting.
That was just as bad ... got sick on that too. I never found a safe chemical to use for that.
 
Realistically, how clean would even a large corporate jet look after a 2500nm flight? :whistle:

Boeing's Challenger fleet (five a/c) are based here at KGYY. They are washed after every roundtip flight by the hanger crew.
 
n4gix said:
Realistically, how clean would even a large corporate jet look after a 2500nm flight? :whistle:

Boeing's Challenger fleet (five a/c) are based here at KGYY. They are washed after every roundtip flight by the hanger crew.
Click to expand...


Depends on where they flew it and if it sat outside. Challengers are very clean airplanes. Very few leaks and the dirtiest spot was the area around the APU exhaust. The rest of the airplane was washed with a soap similar to standard car wash but made for aircraft. If it dried on it would still rinse off. I used a 16 foot telescoping brush to reach about half the vertical tail. once a year, we'd use the man lift and wash it more thoroughly.

The Citation encore was pretty easy to wash. The Two Citation Excels ware a bit bigger but not hard to take care of.

The King Air's are a pain. They flew the most, leaked the most and had exposed rivet heads everywhere (The jets are very, very smooth) Waxing a King Air was an all day job for two people. Took two and a half days if we needed to buff it out too. And these were small C-90B's Thank goodness we didn't have a 200 or a 350.

The other thing we had to do was buff out the leading edges on the Jets with heated wings. Properly done, you could shave in the reflection. I also had to clean and re dress the de-ice boots on the King airs. After I had figured out a system, I could do one in about three hours, including the vertical tail.

This is a shot of the old Challenger we had.

http://www.airliners.net/photo/Canadair-CL-600-2B16-Challenger/0577604/L/

And this is the one they bought just before I left...

http://www.airliners.net/photo/Canadair-CL-600-2B16-Challenger/1124529/L/


Brian

And I see this is my 200th post too :)
 
Back before the Navy outlawed a lot of chemicals for cleaning aircraft systems, we used to clean aircond. systems ducting with methyl-ethyl-ketone, without any type of respiratory protection. I don't EVEN want to know what the long term health effects it will have on me. Probably better NOT to know!

NC
 
We used to use dry cleaning fluid (name escapes me) for degreasing and cleaning diesel engine parts back in the 70s in the Navy. We'd use washtubs of the stuff and set whole cylinder heads in there. Not only would it remove the oil and grease, but it'd take the paint off as well. One guy that worked with me spilled a couple of gallons of the stuff on his lap and later said when it was all over that his privates just wouldn't stop burning.

Bare metal is also something I've found difficult to do correctly in FS. I can get it either very dull or highly polished easily enough, but getting some thing in between can be tricky. The Merc Air paint I did for Milton's Beech 18 took me several tries to get it like I wanted with just a hint of shine. But as for normal weathering, etc on painted surfaces, I've yet to get a good handle on that. Part of my problem is that I've yet to figure out what to do with the layers in Paint Shop Pro and end up just working with the complete bitmap.
 
Navy Chief, I believe they use some system of lights for a LSO. Too many jets turned the live ones into a crispy critters.
The sooner they go back to recip engines and props the better off they'll be. - And get rid of them females getting everybody randy at the same time.
 
Helldiver said:
And get rid of them females getting everybody randy at the same time.
Click to expand...

THAT is but one of the reasons I retired at exactly 20 years. Another reason was the lack of respect for authority by many of the young sailors reporting for duty. When I first came into the Navy, you didn't dare talk back to a superior. A Petty Officer First Class was considered almost God, and a Chief WAS God! By the time I retired, I had to deal with more than a few boots who not only would question my orders to them, but quite often would tell me to $%#& off. Needless to say, I took immediate corrective action. But the Navy removed a lot of the power of the Chief to discipline now.

As for aircraft cleanliness, I just thought of something else. Before the USN changed to the "tactical gray" paint scheme, the aircraft were MUCH easier to clean. The dirt and grime washed off of the glossy surfaces without having to scrub as much. The tactical gray is much more porous. Aircraft washes take a lot longer, and the end result isn't as effective, I don't think.

NC
 
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