I had an extremely busy week, so on short notice we can do the next two legs of the Great Canadian Float Circuit.

CAN3 Ucluelet SPB CAW5 Port Hardy SPB 65 130
CAW5 Port Hardy SPB CAQ6 Queen Charlotte City SPB 114 227.6

Stay Calm and fly your aircraft.

Well I downloaded vPilot and installed it and all seems well. I connected to Vatsim okay and showed up in Plan-G in the "ServInfo" information window but I still haven't spoken with anyone yet. That may be because I have never managed to get Squawkbox or FSInn set up so I'm not really sure what to do with a program that *actually* works.
Anyways, I continued my "I'm Mr. Lonely" flights last night and spent the whole morning in the Public Relations dept. of CVA trying to un-ruffle some feathers. (It's strange how Darryl and Frank always seem to be anywhere there is a title) I had to tell them to make the most of a bad situation and play it to our advantage. So right there on the spot in front of both of them I came up with tomorrows headlines and exactly in which order they should be released. Oh, did I mention that the first thing I did after installing vPilot was drop my headphones and crack the plastic casing on the mic boom? It was dangling by two tiny red and green wires so I did what any self-respecting CVA simmer would do... I stayed calm and duct taped it to the head band ...and carried on. A quick mic calibration test in vPilot assured me that the mic was still functional it even played my voice recording back to me so I knew it was loud and clear even wrapped in duct tape on the top of my head.

The first leg (flight 0223 from CAN3 to CAW5) was starting out uneventful It was raining and a little poor on the visibility side but I stayed calm and carried on.


Pilot uncovers indisputable evidence of Bigfoot!
Warning! the next picture is a graphic, and may make you rethink your belief on what reality really is. Please, stay calm....:


Racing on now to Port Hardy with concrete evidence of the Sasquatch:


Yeah! that was a good leg! I touched down at a respectable -63fpm and carried on! For the next leg which was considerably longer (from a Fairchild 24 point of view) I switched to the DHC6 Amphibian. All I can say is "Thanks a lot Mr. Aerosoft!" I spent so much time trying to paint this plane I never really did get around to reading the (very long) manual*s*. I guess I did do the basic steps though particularly "enabling failures". I got off the ground okay and climbed out and starting enjoying the scenery for nearly an hour before right out of nowhere this happened:


Well what could I do? I stayed calm and tried to fly my aircraft. My first thought was "fire suppression" so what seemed like nearly an hour but I'm guessing was actually less than a minute I pulled the right switch and extinguished the blaze. To bad really the flames were quite nicely modeled and were kind of cool to look at. Just flickering away out there ...


Well I had to make a decision, the fire was out but there was so much thick black smoke I decided to shut down engine number 2. That's where everything started to unravel on me. First the batteries in the headphones went dead, and that was drawing my attention away from the problem at hand. The thought did occur to me though that maybe I ought to feather the prop on engine #2 errrr how do I do that?


Anyways, long story short I focused on trying to feather that dang prop so intently that I never noticed that mole hill in front of me turn into a mountain! Flight over, need I say more? Do not pass go, do not collect any airmiles...............

Gary,

Have you tried loading and running VatSpy or the other one, that shows all the people and controllers on Vatsim at present time? That's what I do. Then when I see where people are, I go to the airport and just park, with no flight plan. Then connect Vpilot. The Vpilot window, after a few seconds, should show the active frequencies for the controllers. Tune your Com1 to one of the frequencies and just listen to make sure you are hearing them. Make sure your headphone and mic are configured. Then you should be able to request a radio check from a controller when they are not busy. Oh, make sure you also configure your PTT button.

Whenever flying on Vatsim outside of a controlled area, Comm1 should be tuned to 122.80. Comm2, for CVA, should be tuned to 122.85. Don't know if Comm2 works on Vpilot yet though. It is supposed to.

Too bad about that Twin Otter, that's why I don't use the 'totally realistic' settings. I don't need engine fires. Is there any way to steer that beast without the dual throttles thing?

Barry

Good stuff Barry!
-I think the servinfo feature in Plan-G is doing what you say. I can see the traffic and pilots/controllers who are online. Now I am just going to follow your advise and park at an airport and fiddle with the knobs
-When you say Comm2 for CVA do I have to enter the IP address somewhere in settings?
-I'm pretty sure I'm going to be shutting off the failures thingy until I want to play with them.
-I haven't given the steering thing much thought although I find with 2 throttles she steers a lot better than the original twotter. You could try poking around in your keyboard settings and map a couple of separate keys for engine2. I don't know if it can be done or not but it might be worth a shot. Or better yet Open the profile you use for your yoke and map the 2 engines in mode1 (on the throttle quadrant I mean)the prop rpms in mode 2 and mixture levers in mode 3 and save it as a separate profile altogether. That way you could take the third lever and map it for something like the trim wheel or whatever and just use that profile for twin engine planes

I don't think so with this Vpilot, but I'm not sure. Since I haven't used it. I did request a radio check with the tower at Gatwick EGKK on Comm1 a while ago and got a loud and clear from them. To send/receive on Comm2 the airplane's radio must be capable of switching from C1 to C2 - both send and receive - on the audio panel. The Bendix Radio Stack, which I think is in the default Cessna panel, can do that. I've added that stack as a pop-up in several planes so I can do it.

Well finished up this weeks flights and now at CAQ6. Forgot to check fuel when I left CAW5 so mad a pit stop at CAR9. Thank god they had Fuel Anyway ready for the next run. Hope to see you there.

On another note the new VPilot is awesome! Very easy to set up and manage.