The Mighty Howard

The Indochina scenery is from the California Classics Indochina 1962 package. I've installed a bunch of the CalClassics retro scenery and one of the things I'm doing on this trip is seeing how well my AI set matches up to the scenery. I've used an earlier version of the propliner AI set of theirs in the AI along with a bunch of other vintage aircraft that I've converted to AI. For the most part it's all working together pretty good other than some mistakes that I've made that I'm correcting as I find them. The most recent one was I had North Vietnamese aircraft flying out of South Vietnam and vice versa. I think I finally got that all squared away this morning. I don't have a clue what I was thinking when I did that originally.
 
Left Cambodia and made the trip to Bangkok. This puts me back in position to follow my regular route through here to Australia. O' course as I don't like flying for hours on end, I'll be making a few stops between here and there.
 
Busy flight. Left Bangkok for Phuket first. Nice flight but the weather wasn't going along with the program for the most part. Landed at Phuket and dropped off the passengers and picked up a couple more headed for Kuala Lumpur. About halfway into that leg, I hit rough weather and ended up landing in the middle of a thunderstorm. But we made it down safely and I guess that's what counts....

Caught a lightning flash in pic 3. First time I've done that.
 
Took off from Subang for the shortish flight to Singapore. Pretty nice flight, if you don't mind low level fog.

Pics are scrambled up again. The first one should have been the last one.
 
Decided it was time to head out of Singapore to Jakarta. Really wasn't much going on this flight. Just took off, flew at altitude for a while, then landed. A nice quiet and relaxing flight..
 
Took off from Jakarta and headed east to Surabaya. Had a bit of a headwind all the way so it took a little longer than I thought it would, but it all worked out okay. Now to decide if I want to make another stop in Indonesia or just fly a long one on into Oz....
 
Australia!

Decided to go whole hog and take the long flight on into Darwin. A bit over 1100 miles, 4 hours and landed with 12% percent fuel left. I do like that Shadin fuel minder gauge on the Howard panel. Between it and the ETE on the GPS, I was able to adjust the engines where I'd have a little bit of AvGas left for reserve at Darwin in case I had to circle around a bit. As it was, I got to fly straight in.

Think I'll do a little sightseeing from here and work my way towards Sydney.

And as happens all the often, the pics got scrambled up again. The last one should have been the first....
 
Left Darwin in the rain and headed deep into the Outback. Got a little confused as to my exact where abouts so I stopped at this small airport near a big rock.....

(wonder if there's an "Outback Steakhouse" around here?)
 
Left Ayers Rock and headed east to Alice Springs. On the way out, I did a fly over of the rock.

Alice Springs had a bit of a rain storm going on which lowered visibility, but nothing too bad. Their ground control needs a bit of work though. Told me to turn onto the next taxiway and when I did, they put a Stinson and an Avro trimotor onto the same section going the opposite way.
 
Headed south out of Alice Springs to Woomera. Longish flight without much to look at. Think I'll keep heading south for a while anyway.
 
Made it to Adelaide and the southern coast. Fairly nice flight but it's sure getting a bit foggy....
 
Great weather for flying on to Melbourne. As it was kind of shortish flight, I opened the Howard up a bit. Riding the barber pole and with a tail wind, I got an impressive amount of speed out of her. Think I'll head over the Australian Alps next....
 
Left Melbourne for Canberra over the mountains. Nice enough flight but things got foggy after I'd got over the mountains good. Enough so that I missed seeing the runway at Canberra (that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it) on the first attempt and had to go around and try again.

Had a message waiting for me at the airport operations office. Seems someone needs a discreet flight out of Sydney to Auckland. I can do this. Heading for Sydney next....
 
Made the flight to Sydney and parked at a gate to pick up my new passengers. Interesting fellow named Smith with his female assistant Miss Jones. Speaks excellent English with a bit of a Russian accent. Somehow I suspect his name aint really Smith, but he's paying very well and seems to like his privacy enough to pretty much leave the flight crew alone. I had the copilot, Gus, play stewardess and show them around the cabin. Actually I told Gus, that they're his worry and to keep 'em happy as they're paying the bills.

To tell the truth, Gus couldn't fly a paper airplane across the room, but regulations say I have to have a copilot and he has other uses that he's very good at. So, officially he's the copilot and I fly the plane.

The pics attached in reverse order
 
Not a real good start getting out of Sydney as the traffic was backed up at the active runway.

Auckland is a bit farther than I care to try to go without refueling somewheres, so I planned on stopping at Lord Howe Island and refueling there before continuing on to Auckland. Once I landed there, I put Gus to filling the tanks at the self service pump while I did important pilot stuff. Mr. Smith and Miss Jones went for a short walk to stretch their legs. Fortunately it was a pretty fast pump and we were soon off again across the water.....

Pics reversed again...
 
It started getting dusk on us as we approached Auckland. I turned on the cabin lights, but Mr Smith got very agitated about that, so I turned them back off. I'm thinking he's afraid that someone will see him in the lights when we are taxiing.

After we landed and parked, Mr Smith asked if I would mind flying him on to another destination once he finishes his business in New Zealand. He pays very well, so I told him sure. Looks like we'll be staying on here for however long it take him to get done.

Pics got all scrambled up this time. They're numbered and the map was supposed to be last.
 
Well, Mr "Smith" dropped a bombshell on me. I was figuring he was wanting to go back Australia or something similar. Nope, seems he has some mining interests in the Andes and he's not too trusting of his partners so he wants us to "discreetly" cross the Southern Pacific and kind of sneak up on them for a surprise visit. He's thinking they'd expect him to show up flying commercial from the North and won't have a clue about us.

So, I worked out a flight plan that should get us to Chile and we can head north from there. Going to be a lot of island hopping with some pretty darn long overwater flights. Hope Gus can swim if need be. Maybe I can get a good deal on an inflatable rubber raft somewhere just in case.

So we loaded up in the rain and started island hopping.

First stop was Norfolk Island where I ran into a familiar Howard 500. Didn't spot the owner though.
 
We refueled and took off again heading north to New Caledonia. Mr Smith and Miss Jones seem to be enjoying the flights and to tell the truth, it is kind of nice to seeing a part of the world that I've only been to once before and most of that was at night in a race. Smith isn't in a real big hurry to get to South America as long as we keep making progress.

We landed at New Caledonia in a fog and will overnight here....
 
Sent an overnight wire to Virtual Howard Aero requesting range information and got a response right back along with engine setting recomendations. Can't say enough good about their service.

Took off from New Caledonia for Fiji. A good part of the trip was spent flying through a big thunderstorm. Got shook up a bit in the turbulence, but we came through okay and landed at Nada Intl in Fiji just fine...
 
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