I've been thinking it would be nice to have some flights with a different model myself. Most of the propeller driven alternatives would need a shorter route to keep the flight time near or under an hour though. Maybe we could plan for a DC-3 or Ford Trimotor flight with the Beech Baron or Kingair as an alternate for FS 2002 pilots. We could fly to or from airports like Santa Barbara, Lompoc, Vandenburg or Bakersfield. Maybe we could even include fields as far as Ventura or Monterey.I'll look in the documentation for the seaplane port listing, but we may have to use unlisted "Bush Flying" bodies of water to have a floatplane flight within the Central California Coast area. We could do a round trip betwen an airport and a "Bush Flying" lake or harbor.
For the single engine fans, we could have flights from the closer fields like Paso Robles, Oceano and maybe Santa Maria Hancock. From those fields we could fly aircraft like the smaller Cessnas, the Piper and the WW I vintage planes.
I've noticed many of the planes don't stop very well if they have more than about 30% or 40% of their fuel capacity aboard. I've been reducing the fuel load of my plane at the begining of the flights. Could takeoff weight account for the speed and climb performace differences we have been experiencing? Do we have enough people that can handle the Learjet or 737 well enough to have a flight from someplace like Las Vegas?
I think the multiplayer room is set up to generate random weather conditions and feed them to us with changes on the half hour. Ben can provide more information on that and if it would be feasable to manualy set weather for a scheduled flight. That Piper is a bit of a chalenge to taxi under calmer conditions, unless the tail wheel specifications are edited. I'm not sure how many of us could safely reach the parking appron in a 25 kt wind.
I'll let others comment on the takeoff order suggestion. Maybe we could orbit the takeoff field for a few minutes and gather a bit closer together in the air. It's hard to keep closer than about half a mile spacing in flight with the lag time making other peoples planes apear to shift around in a random manner though. It sometimes looks like the simulator displays positions in the order they are received instead of ignoreing updates generated before the last position displayed. I've been backing off the throttle a bit during the flights to try keeping close to the middle of the group, and keep within what appears to be a ten mile range for the multiplayer aircraft tags. Unfortunately the lead plane is sometimes more than 20 miles ahead of the trailing plane though.
As usual, the routes are suggestions and we can wait until late in the week to decide where we're going to fly.
Robert
Near KORF