Obviously I have free time on my hands.I was going in to fix that, but looks like someone already beat me to it.
Obviously I have free time on my hands.I was going in to fix that, but looks like someone already beat me to it.
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BE ALERT TO ARPT BDRY ONE MILE NORTH FM MEXICAN/USA INTL BORDER
We do actually have clients who pull the tapes on their students flight when they've been especially liberal in their interpretation of the regs. My personal favorite was a fellow in a ATR-72 trying to land at Brown Field (KSDM). He nearly put it down into nearby Tijuana instead....4 times. It's almost as though they should warn/remind pilots that the airport is just 1nm from the Mexico/US border.
Ah
That airport configuration is just not fair to pilots. It should say on the AFD "if you see heavies/747's you are looking at the wrong airport and are in Mexico". Or "if you fly over a prison on final/base, you are in the right spot"
And if you have to shoot an approach to that field know that what you think is the runway is actually a highway overpass. Seriously, the TACAN (or is it just a VOR, I can't remember) final course is 90 degrees off of runway heading.
So how does one sign up?A quick update, the network was launched to the public on Oct 1, 2011. It's now growing steadily among the civilian community, including home users, flight schools, colleges and even higher end sim centers (we just completed integration with a Citation CJ3 Level 6 FTD).
Here's a video of the system being demoed (by a civilian private pilot, fair warning!), showing two laps of the pattern at Palm Springs with a T-6 Texan II, including an unscripted gear deployment issue (suggest watching full screen, HD if you're able):
As a reminder, the ATC is provided on a distributed basis (the controllers are online 15x7, distributed all over the country) to a wide range of training devices...everything from a laptop running X-Plane (as shown in the video) to full Flight Simulators, and everything in between.
Had there been other aircraft in the pattern, they would've been visible out the window, and audible over the radio. This was just a quick technical demo in an aircraft that would be of interest to the DoD.
The environment becomes so much more realistic and meaningful once you know that the ATC is real and that the other entities are watching and listening to you. I'm not sure how well the video conveys that fact, but we've seen people reduced to blubbering wrecks when they try this out at tradeshows because they didn't have their head in the game.
We're hoping this can produce a more well-prepared pilot and reduce the time spent in the airplane to get trained.
If anyone has any questions (publicly or privately), fire away. We are chipping away at getting this in front of the right people in the UPT world, but it's slow going.
The gear is down on those aircraft only due to drawing limitations in the sim that I was using, btw!
Nothing gets past you, sir...except perhaps the part of my post that read:
The gear on those drones are up, but my sim is showing them as being down because it doesn't have the ability to animate the gear.
I'm surprised you haven't addressed the part where they fly through the tops of some of the hills That's due to terrain differences between X-Plane 9 (which was used to record those flights) and X-Plane 10 (which I'm flying in the video).