Saturday 2 June 2007

Leg 7 New Caledonia to Auckland,New Zealand

OK, I was writing my log entry and was well advanced and then this crappy Internet Explorer crapped out and I lost all the work I had written for this leg! Basically from Honiara in New Caledonia to Auckland New Zealand crossing into a new timezone (UTC+12).


I don't like doing the same thing twice so I am afraid the story is lost as I do not feel like writing it again. Here is just the gist of the thing.


Auckland Intl. Airport charts (SID and STARs) can be found here.


This flight was conducted entirely at dark as the local time was after midnight and arrival was around 5AM (Auckland time). Obviously IFR, FL310 because the a/c was not able to reach FL350.


I chose a new aircraft from my collection, the Project Open Sky Boeing 767-300ER with SAS colours. Unfortunately this proved a bad decision as this model had several problems and shortcomings, instrument problems, weight balance way out of place, etc.


Arrival procedure was changed so things got pretty confused in addition to the a/c problems (do notice, this is all fictional in the sense it is only VIRTUAL aviation, a flight conducted online with no association to the real airlines! so be warned!).


And you guessed it, after nearly 2:45 hours "flying" (in the virtual world!!!) problems developed, the aircraft was on fire when the airfield was in sight. I am sad to say that the plane crashed landed and all the virtual souls perished. It was a sad day in virtual aviation and a very disappointing world tour leg :(.
Analysis shows that too many problems developed from the beginning. I described them in the original blog entry but as I said, Internet Explorer crapped out and all was lost so you will have to take my word for it.
Anyway, instrument problems, weight-balancing was way off in the model,, it was also unable to reach the cruise altitude of 35000 ft. and then all lead to the crash. (it had even crashed my Flight Simulator during take off!).
As a result of this disappointing leg, I decomissioned this B767-300ER model. I have now downloaded a new model dating from two years later (2004) which has KLM colours. I have patched it to also have the SAS colours but unfortunately with the "bad" model. But at least this new set does have proper balancing.
On the next leg I will try the new model and hope it does not lead to disaster.

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