The Mighty Howard

Had enough Irish Creme and decided to fly on towards London to drop off a few passengers and pick up a few more. I tend to avoid Gatwick and Heathrow, much preferring the older Croydon airport. It's a shortish grass field, but nothing that the Howard can't handle. I need to get back to the continent, but I'm wanting Merc Air's crack mechanics check out the Howard after that near disasterous landing at Glasgow, so it looks like I'll be making a stop at Merc Air's secret HQ next.......
 
I'm having fun so it's no problem. :d

To get to the Secret HQ, it's best to follow the Thames down to the sea. But first you have to find the Thames and if you're in London, it's hard to miss as it's the river that flows through Central London. Here's some shots of the Thames in London that as all too often with the forum software are scrambled up a bit. Good thing I numbered them in proper order.

I particuarily like the first one. It's almost a re-enactment of Pink Floyd's Animals album cover just missing the big flying pig....
 
Okay, now that we're out of London, just follow the Thames to the sea. I've got a Sea Forts scenery that I use as a marker to let me know when I'm close. Merc Air HQ at Rochford will be just on the other side of the Southend airport a few miles. One of these days, I'll have to get the scenery uploaded again. More on that later.

I got the passengers dropped off at the Cantina to keep themselves occupied while I have the Howard looked after under a maintenence hanger. Hopefully it'll get a clean bill of health so we can continue on.

The Rochford scenery is an old CFS 1 scenery that was done by Ralf Triebel for the Combat Flight Center which was the predecessor site to Sim Outhouse. Merc Air kind of took it over for use during our multiplayer CFS doings. I just decided to try it out one day in FS9 and to my surprise it worked, kinda sorta. Like everything CFS 1, it's scale is almost double standard FS scaling. But that works out for larger aircraft to use the hangers. There is an issue of the original runways and taxiways ghosting in and out when you're above it. I've yet to find a cure for that, but then I'm far from being any kind of a scenery guru either. Other issues were solved by putting a flatten and an exclusion in the scenery.cfg file for it. And I did an AFCAD for it to put in new runways, taxiways, ramps and parking in that are compatible with FS9. All aircraft in the pics with the exception of the Howard are AI. I hate static aircraft and prefer to have anything that's hanging around AI that can move around. All in all, it just makes a nifty "little" airport/base in the SE of England with good access to the rest of Europe. Hard to believe the scenery is over 10 years old.
 
Willy said:
...I particuarily like the first one. It's almost a re-enactment of Pink Floyd's Animals album cover just missing the big flying pig....
Click to expand...

Small world...I was just downriver the other day.
Didn't find the HQ though.

LondonHeliport.jpg
 
The Howard checked out okay and I got the passengers back on board, so it's off to Rotterdam. On the way across the channel, I came across the USS Lexington, so I got low for a good look. Once we passed the carrier by, it was a shortish trip to Holland.
 
Left Rotterdam and made a little sidetrip up to Valkenburg Navy base. Then after finishing the bidness there, followed the coast on down to Oostende, Belgium.

I'm thinking I've spent too much time in the low countries and need to get out of the area.

Edit: The pics are scrambled up again.
 
Decided to fly to Interlaken Switzerland and have a visit with Merc Air's bank there. The weather started out pretty good, but the closer I got, the worse it got. Just after I crossed the Swiss border, the ATC got all excited about this Lufthansa Convair 440 that they thought we'd gotten a little close to. Shucks, there was plenty of distance between us. Wasn't like we were swapping paint or anything.

Darn it was foggy over the Alps. I hopped the ridge going into Interlaken and had to loose about 3000ft of altitude in about a minute to get lined up for approach to the runway. I just dropped the wheels and the flaps all the way and throttled the engines back to idle and came on down. Pulled out of the dive at about 2500ft and I was set up for short final. Just a matter of keeping above the trees until I got to the runway.

Oh well, off to the bank to see how poor Merc Air is these days....
 
I just hate getting a runway 23 take off at Interlaken. Nothing like hurtling along straight towards a tall mountain while trying to get up enough speed to get airbourne. Fortunately the Howard has enough horsepower to pull it off cleanly. I still had to climb out through the rest of the mountains though. Once I got clear of the peaks, I headed south to Italy.
 
I figured Rome would be a good next stop. Sure was some pretty countryside along the way there. I did fly a bit low over the city on the way to the airport.

As usual, I'm pretty undecided as to where to go next.....
 
Wing_Z said:
Small world...I was just downriver the other day.
Didn't find the HQ though.

LondonHeliport.jpg
Click to expand...

Nice one. That'll be Battersea Heliport, the power station (without its Pink Floyd pig) in the background. The river is used to demarcate the helicopter route in central London. Used to work at a place called Sands End, opposite on the Fulham side of the river, and on nice days me & the lads ate our sandwiches just across from the Heliport and watched them going in & out for an hour's lunchbreak. The river there has cormorants & the occasional seal, so fishing must be good!​
 
We've sat in Rome long enough on the hunt for good pizza. Figured it was time to head out for Athens. A bit longer flight than I normally take, but sometimes you just have to go for it. I'd intended to take off in the morning, but I got held up with other things and it ended up being a late evening flight.

I normally don't take screenshots in the dark, but I hadn't caught a HP 42 in a long while and figured Ralf would like to see that Imperial Airways is still plugging along.....
 
Flew this one earlier today, then my ISP decided to shut down for several hours so I couldn't post it until now.

Made a little side trip to Thessalonki. Had another Howard 500 come in behind me so I got a pic of it. Not much here. Just a couple of Olympic DC-3s and that Howard. I'll be taking off again shortly.....
 
More than two hours of flying and lost the screenshots... :banghead: Went back and got one parked at the destination so I'd have something to post.

Left Thessaloniki and headed south to Kos, Greece, then turned southeast to go on to Haifa, Israel. Pretty uneventful flight that I spent a lot of time with Otto flying the aircraft while I hung out in the cabin. Maybe I should have been keeping a better on the "camera".....
 
Left Haifa for Cairo via Jerusalem. Jerusalem was just a low fly over though.

Imperial Airways sure gets around, they were hanging out at Cairo when I got there. Got a better pic for Ralf.

Off to see the pyramids......
 
Boy did I ever mess up. Got into an ouzo drinking contest with this Olympic Airlines pilot and when I went back outside to check on the Howard, they'd changed Cairo airport up.....




California Classics just released their Africa 1960 scenery which changes over 100 airports in Africa that served airlines in 1960 to how they looked back then. O' course I had to install it.
 
That'll be the ghost of the last Handley Page that vanished over the Red Sea during WW2... Someone down at the Cantina once told me that it appears during times of marvels & wonders (though the pilot ISN'T a Dutchman).

Had a preview of the '60s Africa, great that it's now available in full. It'll be nice to replace Nasser's depressing '63 HECA: downloadin' tonite & powering up the Speedbird to go check out the likes of Khartoum, Livingstone, Entebbe & Jo'burg! :applause:

All power to the Mighty Howard :salute:
 
One thing that has held me back on installing the more recent Classic Sceneries is all the static object libraries that have to be found, downloaded and installed. It all seemed rather confusing to me and I've not bothered with a lot of the newer Classic sceneries. In the Africa 1960 scenery readme is the name of a file that Wolfgang uploaded to FlightSim that has almost all the library bits needed (minus the Abacus one and he gives a link for that). It's classic_libraries.zip and is rather hefty at 170mg. Took me about 45 minutes to download it last night as I don't have a premium membership at FlightSim. But it's worth it.

So, I've spent the morning installing a ton of Classic Scenery for airports in Asia and Australia and insuring that they are compatible with my AI set. (Yep, I thinking about flying on to Oz)
 
Took off from Cairo and while I was in the neighborhood, I had to overfly the pyramids at Giza. Then, I turned back around to the north east and headed back to Israel and landed at Tel Aviv for a few minutes.
 
After the bidness was done at Tel Aviv, I took back off and headed north up the coast to Beirut. Thinking it's about time to head east again..

Pics got scrambled up again. The last one is the only one in the right place....
 
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