Baron B58 NZHN - YSNF

[Chairman]

I was inspired by something Trolly wrote to try my Auckland to Perth trip again in something a bit smaller. Obviously that meant breaking it down into legs - GA planes for some reason just can't handle those 4000nm sectors - and for a bit of variety, seeing as I wasn't in a Boeing, I left from Hamilton.



Climbing out of Invercargill Perth Hamilton. Sorry there's not much of a view of the city, I had to take the shot pretty low while the ground was still visible at all.


I can't help thinking that if I was in my Boeing I'd be up in the sunshine now while bikini clad stewardesses served drinks and played volleyball in the aisles (what do you mean your VA doesn't do this ?)


Hey look, there's Auc- oh, you blinked. Sorry ...



Once we got north of the big car park we could see a bit further



... sort of ... That's the Kaipara down there, we're now sitting on G591 and will follow it all the way to Norfolk Island.



I think that's Dargaville airstrip that the step is pointing at. It's down there somewhere ...


That's Kaikohe over there.



Remind me again what was it Trolly said that inspired this ? Oh yes.

QUOTE (Trolly @ Apr 29 2006, 12:53 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Originally I went straight for the heavy-metal and flew for KLM Virtual around Europe, but soon tired from the same old take-off's and landings, seeing no scenery but clouds on my journeys and packed my virtual career in, turning to the lighter side of things.

Welcome to the Bay of Islands. Kerikeri airport is somewhere directly underneath.


This is mid-Tasman, about halfway between ELNOS and MUGEN. If you know where that is without looking it up, GEEK !!!



I've just cut power to begin a nice slow Descent to Norfolk Island, about 30 miles to go. I'm so glad I'm not doing this in heavy metal seeing no scenery but clouds



Land Ho !! Maybe I should have done the whole thing at 2000'



A tad high but no problem, the runway is nice and long. Look Ma, no ILS or autoland or even autopilot !



I'm actually still too high, but the VASI follows the eyepoint not the plane



It wasn't quite as gentle as this makes it look, but as they say any landing you can be sued for was a successful one.


Parked up at the end of the leg.


A couple of insights from the flight -
1 - If you want to look at scenery and it's cloudy, turn off real weather.
2 - On oceanic legs, clouds are all there are to look at.
3 - If you want to look at scenery and it's cloudy but you always fly with real weather on, then maybe as real as it gets is more real than you want.

I'm off to the beach. Enjoy the flith and drizzle in NZ, it's lovely here

Gary

[ardypilot]

QUOTE

I was inspired by something Trolly wrote to try my Auckland to Perth trip again in something a bit smaller.[/quote]
I don't remember writing anything, but good on ya all the same!

How many hours all up was that then? And does you Baron have any autopilot systems? Like a wing leveler or anything, or did you just trim her out and hand fly all the way out to sea?

[Chairman]

It's your intro in the SimAddicts Anonymous thread - it's seriously what triggered me to do this flight, and I just couldn't resist pulling that quote out of it

The plane is the Dreamfleet Baron - it has a lovely autopilot and the to-die-for RXP Garmin GPS in which everything is modelled including the godly vnav page. Purely to get that one page the unit has also quietly snuck onto the flightdeck of my DF 727 (of course I'm using all the other pages ...)

What was done manually was the approach and landing - none of this "LAND 3, Autobrakes 3, Spoilers armed, Flare + Rollout modes armed" here ...

Cheers
Gary

[Peppermint]

A sporty Baron sporting a sporty paintjob...long journey too! Everyone knows red makes things go faster...did it seem faster than a normal Baron?