A Pilot’s Blog
A blog about aviation, aviation news, and space.

An absolutely gorgeous shot of a UPS MD-11 taking off from Ted Stevens International Airport in Alaska.

Picture courtesy of Airliners.net.

A screen shot of the “Area 51″ ramp in Flight Simulator X after I turned off the active upon landing at the base in the ‘Janet’ flight mission.

Yesterday I went ahead and removed the installation of Flight Simulator 2004 on my computer, and stuck in the The first “X” DVD. The installation process was for the most part the same as previous versions, with random screen shots from inside the game popping up at intervals through the process, except that when it finished I had 15GB less hard drive space available!

Once installed, I started it up to play around with it. My first observation is that it takes much longer than FS 2004 to startup. Probably 20 or 30 seconds compared to 2004’s 5 or 10. This is coupled with task manager showing that it’s taking up nearly 600 of my 1024 megs of available RAM.

Game play is roughly the same as previous versions, I haven’t noticed any major differences aside from the new ground equipment available at airports (and, of course, multiple new aircraft). When you pull up at a gate, and open the cargo doors, a little conveyor truck will pull up, followed quickly by a luggage cart. There are also other ground vehicles that drive seemingly randomly around the airport.

My only complaint thus far is that I can’t get the new jetways to work! The help claims that if you use the CTRL+J keyboard command, you can attach/detach the jetways. However, when I do this, nothing happens. I know that I have the scenery settings correct because you have to set it to “Very Dense” or “Extremely Dense” to even get them to show up. I’ll keep working on it, and report back later if I have any luck.

Update: I think that the reason I can’t get the Jetways to work is because my graphics card won’t support it. Just lovely.

A somewhat eerie, yet amazing long-exposure picture of a police helicopter circling the night sky.

Picture courtesy of Airliners.net.

I think I could enjoy a nice long transatlantic flight in this seat.

Picture courtesy of Airliners.net.

This is a rare (to my knowledge) view of a 747 cockpit undergoing refurbishment. In this case, this 747 is being modified to serve as an LCF which will transport huge sections of 787 composite fuselages across the globe during their production and assembly.

Picture courtesy of Airliners.net.

Someone painted an airplane on the moon! Oh…wait…

Another great moon shot here.

Picture courtesy of Airliners.net.

Thanks to my wonderful parents I now have a fresh, vacuum-sealed copy of Flight Simulator X: Deluxe Edition! I’ll hopefully have some time to get it installed soon and give it a try. A Merry Christmas to all!

Sometimes the sleigh just can’t get Santa everywhere. Merry Christmas from MrPilot dot org!

Picture courtesy of Airliners.net.

Courtesy of the Airliners.net forums, I found this capture of what is supposedly the pre-flight safety video shown on Virgin Atlantic flights. This is probably the most unique safety video I’ve seen, and is sure to capture your attention quite well, just as it should.

You can view it here on YouTube.