Castaway Cay

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For aviation purposes, refer to Armenia.

For aviation purposes, refer to Armenia.

Microsoft official trailer for their free scenery upgrade to Australia.

The cult of Sun Worship is alive and well in the Kingdom.

The buildings are mostly open to the public and although guided tours are provided we elected to wander through at our own pace. Climbing a steep spiral staircase into the attic I was amazed by the huge wooden beams which have been supporting the steep roof for over 300 years.

Walking into Copenhagen centre from our lodgings I made a momentous discovery. The burial place of one the most influential thinkers of modern times! The sign said "Kirkegaarde" and something else, which I took to mean "Kirkegaarde is buried here".

Lars is a Super Geek from way back. He loves flight sims and got hooked on PC sims by Chuck Yeager's Air Combat ... like many of us !

The tourist brochure states these are Europe's largest survivng World War 2 fortifications. That may well be. I can personally attest to their largeness!

Rud is located in the region of South Denmark. South Denmark's capital Vejle (Vejle) is approximately 38 km / 24 mi away from Rud (as the crow flies).

Tried a new 'airshow' landing ; <)

No narration unfortunately as my mike was turned off. Although many people will regard that as fortunate indeed! I tried a short field take-off and landing, with an inverted run up the field and various other shenanigans over beautiful Wellington. Enjoy!

This default airport has a magnificent level of detail and some uniquely Swedish structures.

Flights from "Europe 4"

MiGMan and Flying Singer's first flight in MSFS 2020. Snaps from our training missions at NAS Key West. Great weather, great scenery!

This edition of Falcon 4.0 introduces a Balkan campaign.

Just over the border into Victoria, from New South Wales. | Su-57 by Deimos Inc.

Just over the border into Victoria, from New South Wales. | Su-57 by Deimos Inc.

Just over the border into Victoria, from New South Wales. | Su-57 by Deimos Inc.

One of the crowning achievements in the Golden Decade of flight sims which presaged the fluidity and detail we would take for granted in the years ahead.

MiGMan gave a Flight Sim Masterclass on the November 14, 2006 episode of Good Game which is presented by ABC - Australia's National Broadcaster.

I took a walk around the beautifully sculpted airport by Mr. Miyazaki. What a great opportunity this sim gives us to inspect architectural marvels in this fashion! My one and only complaint was the snack food was a little bit "plastic" to the taste.

Practicing formation takeoff, landing and cross IFR (I Follow Roads) with two MB-339's in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.

Kosovo Border Patrol | Wave the flag at Kosovo's border crossings with Montenegro, Albania and Macedonia.

It's hard to keep up with the MiG... very easy to get behind the aircraft.

I was busy as a one-armed paper hanger on final approach! Quite tricky to get the recommended 10 degrees AOA... more practice is the answer I feel.

This was tough... they shot at me (with live ordnance) ... I thought it was supposed to be a training sortie... ; -(
Check out the next video where I (hopefully) PASS this mission.

I think I only just scraped through this mission because the MiG-21's couldn't find me!

I passed the bombing, not elegantly but nonetheless, then a rudder failure meant trouble on landing... I mean WHO or WHOM parked a tank there?

I did escort the fighters successfully. My wingman did most of the work as I directed him via voice command. And then I took out the enemy AWACS (scratch one MiG-29...).
This is the first video I've made with voice control, using Voice Attack. I make so much more use of the wingman when I can simply talk to him rather than hunt around in the dark for keys!

A simple NAVEX turns into a Badger hunt!

Flight testing my ridgy-didge state-of-the-art hotas voice-controlled Fulcrum!
1. Pan view working and mapped to the HOTAS. Not TrackIR but pretty good for a 20 year old sim that doesn't support mouse look.
2. Voice control for control surfaces (flaps, gear, chute), wingman.
3. Draw distance? Can anyone help? I doubled the draw distance in the MIG29.INI file, but every time you enter the sim it overwrites it back to 26.
4. Low speed, high alpha
5. and... I didn't take the situation at the threshold seriously enough...

In this action packed and punchy edit I refly the mission which is becoming somewhat of a nemesis! But it's still a lot of fun.

Night flying! - - - Dangerous - - - Exciting! - - - Even more so when you're being shot at...
Actually the graphics in MiG-29 Fulcrum look stunning at night, and of course draw distance becomes irrelevant.
Enjoy this one!

Some Tu-160's turned up and put on quite the show with their four afterburning engines! ... Then we shot them down.

Second attempt at this bombing mission. The bombing is very forgiving in this sim... but then we ran into the most 'Top Gun' helo pilot of all time!
Then I shot him down. Eventually I shot him down.
I found the explanation for the 'Top Gun' helo pilot in the documentation for the mission editor. Flight models and aircraft models are independent... and the manual warns not to assign an F-16 flight model to a chopper... which is exactly what some wag at Novalogic did here!

The P-51 Mustang was apparently known as the F-51 in the Korean War. What was one of the most formidable and effective air superiority machines in WW2 was, only 5 years later relegated mainly to a ground attack role. The jet age had begun.

"The F-80 Shooting Star was flying in Italy in January 1945 but didn't see combat.
On the 8th of November 1950 a Shooting Star shot down a MiG-15 in what is thought to be the first jet to jet air combat encounter. The first 4 months of the Korean war saw the F-80 bearing the brunt of the combat with over 15,000 sorties being flown."

"The F84 ThunderJet often ran out of runway in the hot Korean weather and was known as the ""Groundhog"" because of this reluctance to become airborne. I noticed fairly quickly in MiG Alley that on take-off it is important to keep the flaps down until the speed has built up and to keep the climb out fairly shallow. Other fliers have reported that a ""flaps up"" setting is best for takeoff, with a very shallow climb out... barely clearing the treetops at about 2 degrees climb angle."

The F-86 Sabre is modelled in the A, E and F Variants.

Your have five fighter squadrons and two bomber squadrons under your command.

The Forward Air Controllers in MiG Alley are a first for Combat flight sims.

The aircraft in MiG Alley use the classic "Finger Four" formation. This was known to Commonwealth pilots (Canadian and Australian) as "High Battle Formation". According to Christie Harris, who flew for the RCAF in the 1950's, "You started as a wingman, with three practically foolproof opportunities for disaster.

One of MiGMan's wobbly test flights! This video is more for the enthusiast, consisting as it does of 3 minutes dogfight footage of the F-86 Sabre in this classic sim.

One of MiGMan's wobbly test flights! This video is more for the enthusiast, consisting as it does of 3 minutes dogfight footage of the F-86 Sabre in this classic sim.

"If you weren't there to see the 1983 eruption of Kilauea on the Big Island, here's your chance to travel back in time. You'll experience first hand, this awesome spectacle of nature. "

It doesn’t get any better than this! Total realism as I flew under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Except for the bit about flying under the bridge. Previously to get anywhere near this level of detail for a particular locale you would have to purchase a 3rd party scenery pack and then suffer abominable frame rates. Not any more!

Demonstrating just two of the many thousands of free 3rd party add-ons available for the Microsoft flight sims.

Breaking every rule in the book I fly under the Sydney Harbour Bridge, through a football stadium, and frighten the diners 60 floors up in Centrepoint Tower's revolving restaurant! Oh, and it's at night in a Vought Corsair, which Microsoft thoughtfully provided for us in every copy of Flight Sim 2004.
And then I land at Sydney International Airport... probably in the wrong direction...

Like most (all?) folks, my first flight in MSFS 2020 had to be to my childhood home.

In my first caching experiment I cached the Williamtown RAAF base near Newcastle. That only used 45mb of space, so this time I set my sights higher. Or broader.

Compare this to the same flight in Microsoft Flight Sim 2002.

One of my wobbly test flights!
In the default Bell 205B helicopter, taking a sedate flight over the strip in Vegas. Landmark areas of scenery such as this received particular attention by the developers and they pushed the software and hardware of the day to the limits to achieve this amount of detail. Compare this to the same flight in FS2002

Unbelievable atmospherics and lightinng from Asobo's engine make this Canberra sunrise jaw-dropping!

Prepar3D v.5 running &ORBX Cityscape Canberra for FSX and Prepar3D& - Oct 5th, 2020

The aircraft model reflects the state of the art in 2023 within MSFS 2020. And that standard is very high!

I'd spent some hours mapping my HOTAS and Voice Attack computer, and saw no arrestor hook command on the official list. Must be automated, I thought, wrongly. After the second bolter I whipped out my future-phone (it was 1979) and searched the inter-web with Alta-Vista. Aha!
H = hook.
Kind of important to know that.

"Expansion for Strike Fighters 2: Israel. Adds flyable Mystere IVA, Meteor F.8, and P-51D Mustang to a historical campaign set in the 1956 Suez Crisis." READ ON

"Intense air combat experience in the skies over Middle East during three major historical conflicts - 1967 Six-Day War, 1973 Yom Kippur War, and 1982 Lebanon " READ ON

"... recreating the intense air combat experience in the skies over North Vietnam at the height of the air campaign during the Vietnam War." READ ON

From the excellent manual. The documentation is exemplary.

Some of my favourite gun camera snaps and theatre footage taken by my trusty wingman.

This was the "Save Boris Yeltsin" mission which was typical of the fun to be had in this series. The footage was shot in the 1998 Windows collection Fighters Anthology.

In 1995 MiGMan and PC paid a visit to Amberley, a RAAF base in sunny Queensland, Australia. as guests of No.1 Squadron. Australia is the only country in the world operating the F-111, the Americans called it the "Aardvark", or "Vark"... the Aussies call it the "Pig". Aardvaark is Afrikaans for "Earth Pig"

Charles H. Cook flew a B-24D named "Cookie" with the 90th Bombardment Group in the southwest Pacific in 1942-1943. At that time, Allied forces were greatly outnumbered, and Japanese invasion of New Guinea and Australia was a very real threat. Bruce Irving has interviewed Charlie Cook and composed this valuable record of his aviation career. The entire article is also available for free download.

What is it about? | Timeline | Data | Resources

They give a great tactile feeling, expecially on sounds like piston engines, slow firing guns, afterburner rumble and .... incoming fire (makes me almost leap out of the seat).

Holiday snaps I took in Boston, August 2009 as a guest of Flying Singer and his charming family.

Royal Navy veteran & F4 Phantom pilot

Fairly detailed overview of the entire air war from the 1939 Blitzkrieg in Poland to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan.

On an unusually grey Sydney afternoon in October 2006 MiGMan was a guest of Microsoft at the launch of their new flagship product - Microsoft Flight Simulator X.
The creme-de-la-creme of Australia's gaming journalists gathered at Kingsford Smith Airport, Sydney, and embarked on a champagne flight over Sydney Harbour in a C-47, the military transport version of the Douglas DC-3.

After getting special permission from a nervous civil aviation authority an RAAF F-111 was granted permission to fly at under 500 feet altitude - practically IN the stadium during the closing ceremony. As it passed over the flame the pilot engaged afterburner and then dumped fuel, resulting in the trademark 100 foot plus trail of fire - as if a chariot of the gods had picked up the flame on the way to Greece.
As it flew 14 kilometres towards the Sydney Harbour Bridge it was accompanied by a sea of flame as the Parramatta River seemed to explode, with fireworks every 500 metres.

Table based comparison of the F-111 Aardvark, and it’s proposed replacement, the F-35 JSF.

In 1993 a famous air to air collision occured between two MiG-29s...famous because it took place in front of the world press!

This 2003 book is a sort of "oral history" of the BoB, little on the strategy/politics and hardware, mostly personal stories based on conversations, old letters, diaries, etc. of the fighter boys themselves. Plenty of flying and action, but focused on the personal stuff.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants a detailed treatment (626 pages!) of the air war in the Pacific.

MiGMan was keynote speaker at Australia's first ever Flight Sim Expo, held in the old Ansett terminal at Kingsford Smith International Airport, Sydney.

This article by Mark Schimmer is about connecting game port rudder pedals to the Saitek X-45 but it may help with other game-port style rudders and newer sticks.

Way back in the distant mists of time I attended a primary school in Australia. One day an English migrant lad turned up and started raving about an action / adventure TV show which had the most incredible aircraft.... piloted by puppets! Needless to say we thought he was quite mad and attributed his ravings to the effects of the tropical sun. Little did we know! A couple of years later Thunderbirds turned up on our TV screens and started for many of us a lifelong fascination with aviation. In this exhibit I compare the 1966 ac with the 2004 versions.

US approach charts, frequencies and more. Great flight sim aid.

"I had a week long trip to Berlin and also visited Peenemuende, where the "Secret Weapons" of the 3rd Reich (V1, V2 and others) were developed. Quite impressive place." - Mark Schimmer

The 1989 incident was at the Paris Air Show, and involved the famous Anatoly Kvotchur.

Phantom in Combat tells the story of the F-4 in combat from the pilot and Weapon system operators' perspective. It contains blow by blow accounts of some of the more famous engagements between MiG's and Phantoms.

Due to help from staff at the ORBX forums, the Canberra scenery revealed it's full glory!

Peter Inglis’ submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Inquiry into Australian Defence Force Regional Air Superiority, 2006

In 1994 I was lucky enough to witness the first flight of a MiG-21 in Australia!

"First time I climbed into the Aeroplane I was 10 years old, and I will never forget the experience."

Mark Schimmer is building his own cockpit and got hold of a genuine helicopter control stick.