MandoMark's Flying Circus

Leg 1 - part A

Well, this was an adventure. Registered too late to seriously have any expectation of finishing before midnite tonight, but figured it would be good practice for next month's race. Little did I know.... (sigh)

I had set up my FS last night, flew a couple practice legs just to refresh my memory on how a Piper Cub handled - no problem. Tonight I sat down to fly and it was like the plane was a gyro, spinning around the propeller! Couldn't advance the throttle far enough to take off without the plane suddenly ground looping to the left. Or if I held back the throttle enough to get off the ground, I was too far down the strip to climb out and clear the trees. Realized finally that the last thing I had done last night was to crank up the Realism settings in FSX to their max settings before saving the flight. Grrrr... Spent the next two hours between trick-or-treaters crashing, adjusting the realism settings, crashing, adjusting, ad nauseum. Finally figured out that I had the Gyroscopic effects of the prop set too high, and it wasn't a requirement for the race anyway so I cranked it back down to something reasonable, and was soon taking off like a champ... until I started the Duenna software that is! Calmed down and FINALLY made it off the ground with the Duenna running. (Yeah, I realize I crashed more than twice, but what the heck, I wasn't going to finish the race at this point anyway, so I kept flying)

Made it to the first checkpoint, the Indian Creek Strip, flying as low as I could manage, picking pine needles out of my teeth as we swept over the tops of the trees, made a beautiful 3-point landing, only to re-read the description of the leg and realized I didn't need to LAND, just overfly the Indian Creek Strip. Oh well. Pushing on I took off again and made it to the ACTUAL landing strip a Thomas Creek - Yay!

SO-o-o glad this is all practice anyway LOL Maybe I can see how I compared with my low flying.