re: Aviation Question

What if you calculated in surface rotation speed for whatever latitude you were traveling? Is eastward flight marginally faster?

Does a plane have to change direction to deviate the landing direction being offset by rotation?

Seems like it should matter if you're covering anything over regional amounts of distance.

They actually fly in a pretty straight line on a route like that, they just have to adjust the heading due to their proximity to the magnetic pole. It looks curved because you're seeing the route on a map versus a globe. In general, the only reason a commercial airliner will turn in flight is to get into and out of the traffic pattern at it's departure or arrival airport or to change which airway route it's on for traffic control.

Planes also don't really fly level at cruising altitude. There's a constant up attitude to maintain level flight, it's just a matter of adjusting the attitude to maintain the proper elevation.

Nice

Damn son, you need to up your plane game.

Get some PMDG action in there.

FSX sucks on Windows 8. I can't keep the thing running without hitting some critical error. Kind of stinks when you're hitting the STAR after a long flight and the damv thing dies.

I'ts crashed twice on me so far. This might be an excercise in futility.

I hate FSX. I'm running Windows 7 on this machine, and it crashes too. I'd build a new desktop and see if that would help, but I only use it for flight sims, and it was great with 2004. I should probably just reinstall that on here and be done with it.

Do you ever Falcon? I love that sim, but once you stop playing, its a bitch to relearn all the systems and shite.

You should try it. It's pretty fun. Flying TACAN and set waypoints, dropping guided GPS bombs. Using MODE4 IFF. Landing on carriers, that game has it all. Lots of fun, but there's a fricking learning curve like no other.

If I was a real fighter pilot I would suck at dog fighting, but I can drop a JDAM and get back to base like a mofo.

I'd like to see a game that combines combat sims with military FPS. Both worlds being independent of each other, but missions are set for joint operations. Like one day your flying a CAP and get tasked to lay down ground support for troops that are surrounded by the enemy, because some guy playing his FPS made the call for the fast movers.

Or, you're tasked with hitting enemy targets of opportunity in front of ground movement from the grunts.

That would be cool.

Ok, made it to Bangkok in 15 hrs. 21 mins.

I'm enroute back to LAX using a GPS flight path, which still used the arc towards the North Pole, but not as pronounced. It's estimated at 14 hrs. 1 min. I'm using real world weather, so I don't know if that estimate take Wx into account.

I'll have to do one more tomorrow using my own dead reckoning from LAX to BKK to see if a straight flight path is faster.

I'm simming at 16x so it doesn't take that long, about an hour, until I'm on approach, then that takes another hour. Probably can't do both legs tonight.

This will prove nothing, but I'm knee deep in the shite now.

In the real world you would run out of fuel on a straight longitudinal course going from LAX-BKK. No aircraft could make that haul without stopping once.

Ok, I made it back to LAX in 12 hrs. 56 mins.

Of course, going west is always faster.

I'll continue this test tomorrow or never.