Скачать или смотреть [ MSFS2020 | VATSIM ] we invade the "Flight of the Living Dead" KUNV-KAGC-KBKL in the A2A Comanche!

You know, I don't ever want to say that a livestream with friends in the chat, friends in the skies, and friends staffing ATC positions is an absolute nightmare. I guess it would have been more appropriate for our recent stream for Denver ARTCC's "Nightmare on Colfax" event. Tonight we loaded into the A2A Simulations Piper Comanche to join the staggered slow-walk into the "Flight of the Living Dead" hosted by the Cleveland ARTCC, and a Virtual USA Flying Club "GA invasion" of the zombie-themed event!

Unfortunately the "brains" of the operation -- not club founder JetPilotCinnamon, mind you, but the "brain" of my sim PC -- was the one who made things a nightmare. We checked out the plane during the club briefing, silently noted a looser than normal left flap, got taxied out to the runway, found a substantial drop in RPMs from one of the magnetos during run-up, cleared the fouled plug as best as we could, and got underway. With all that, though, it wasn't the plane that caused us the issues. We found once airborne that the sim was suffering from major stutters and seizures -- presumably related to our recent upgrade of the sim PC from Windows 10 to Windows 11. This led to us wandering southwest at 2,500 for an extended period, trying to troubleshoot and/or adjust settings to compensate.

We were able to make a few small tweaks which improved things slightly, but did not solve the issue entirely -- and then set upon figuring out where we were in relation to our visual navigation plan. The group flight took us from University Park (KUNV) to Allegheny County (KAGC), the latter being tucked up under the Pittsburgh Bravo shelves. The club had planned out a visual route down the Allegheny River, but the trip from our origin to the join point was a straight 80nm leg. Rather than rely on a GPS like I presumed many of my club counterparts would, I endeavored to navigate that part visually, using a series of lakes and reservoirs along the path to cross-check my timing and heading (i.e. pilotage to supplement deduced reckoning).

The navigation worked well, and the club's plan to space out and put faster planes first meant that we had basically no spacing issues following our colleagues down the river. We were briefly confused by the pattern entry instruction, feeling like we had to fly well past the airport to join a downwind leg which meant we would, well, fly past the airport again the other way. But we did it, and the sequencing worked, and all was well after leg one.

We did a full shutdown of the aircraft, so that we could close and re-open the sim without causing any weirdness with the airplane and its state persistence. But we got loaded back into roughly the same spot and started our second trip's preflight. Again, that left flap seemed a little too loose -- something we vowed to check on when we got up to our final stop.

We were soon up and running and headed to the north to find Burke Lakefront (KBKL). I briefly followed the wrong river east of the airport, and did in fact brush the very edge of the Bravo shelf before finding Lake Arthur. We then stayed above the Deltas along the path until over Lake Erie, our signal that we could descend without violating anyone's airspace.

Wind favored an arrival on the Runway 6s, but there was only an ILS to Runway 24R to use as a guide. With perfect VMC on our VFR trip, though, it wound up not mattering. We did suddenly find ourselves with a left flap failure -- something foreshadowed at the outset of the second hop -- but with a few extra knots on final and a runway slightly longer than a standard cow pasture, the Comanche is more than capable of a safe no-flaps landing. We flew a neat pattern on the edge of the lake and the city of Cleveland, slipped into the crosswind, and made it down left of centerline but otherwise uneventfully at the adorable little lakeside strip. -- Watch live at   / slantalphaadventures