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I had originally planned to make this flight Wednesday, when my parents would be in Ketchikan on a cruise, but turbulence was enough to make Buster put the barfbag in his seat to good use. I was too busy in the real world to do it on Thursday, so it was Friday by the time I flew him over. I took the Goose by Mike Stone, with the Alaskan Clipper repaint by CapHavoc, using a modified version of his panel. I used real weather with everything except the winds, which came in at 120 knots (I didn't know they had hurricanes!!!). I was blown right off the runway, so I took that zero off and began. Probably just a bad transmission to Jeppesen. There were also 2 low overcast cloud layers, and about 3 miles of visibility. Anyway, here I am on dirt strip 15 at AVSim Base.
I took off right at 13:00, but I used almost all of the strip to do it. No problems, though, cleared the trees, and started my climb. There's Buster on the right side. He didn't touch the controls, though.
I turned onto heading 040, and sped off towards the Level Island VOR. The clouds lifted a little bit, so we could cruise at 2000 feet. Here we are, about 15 nm out from Level Island. This is a shot of the modified panel I made with CFGEdit. I still have a few little things to work out, but overall I'm pleased with myself. Maybe later I'll try to get rid of the white part around the throttle controls too.
After I came within about 5 nm of Level Island, I turned and flew down over the water more or less at a heading of 120. I set the NDB at 515.0 and turned on the ADF and waited for it to start beeping morse code at me, so I would know when to look for a good place to turn. Beforehand, I had decided to fly over PAKT and on to BFUn. Here I am after I turned, with PAKT on the right and Bridgeman on the left.
I flew over it with no trouble, nobody was there to see me, so I didn't announce that I was entering the airspace. After a few more minutes, I saw BFUn.
I made for a straight-in approach. As I did, it began to rain. Here I am, on final at BFUn.
I touched down at a rather fast speed, about 110 knots, right at the top of the runway, at about 13:49. But the brakes on the Goose are just awesome, so I didn't need the whole runway to slow down. But both Buster and I were a tad nervous about bouncing on touchdown. After looking at the replay, there was a slight one, but I didn't feel it when I hit. Here we are, on the runway, still going fast.
After slowing down to a safe speed, I turned off the runway and taxied over to the buildings. Here I am, parking it here for now to let Buster out.
I went in, got a drink, and chilled in one of the cabins for a while. I'll probably stay here tonight, then fly on up to Juneau Int'l to meet my parents there.
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