684th fly-in: Colombo, Sri Lanka (VCBI)

[Kumiankka]

link to fly-in index thread

Quote

Those of us continuing from last week's destination will have a short hop in store for this Sunday, February 4th, as we are heading for nearby Bandaranaike International Airport, Colombo, Sri Lanka (VCBI) as the island nation celebrates the 70th anniversary of its independence. The airport currently has one 11000+ foot runway, and after a recent runway resurfacing is capable of handling even the Airbus A380, for which it serves as an emergency diversion and refueling airfield. Two more runways are planned in an ongoing airport expansion, but for now we will have to do with just the one - I have a hunch we will be needing the ATC skills of RAFish once again! Based on our previous two visits to Sri Lanka, I can highly recommend a tour of the mountainous inland regions, which looked incredible even as far back as X-Plane 8.

Pleasant trips - සුභ ගමනක් වෙවා / இனிய பயணம் தொடரட்டும்

 

 

New pilots are always welcome, read the threads linked here to get started

How to get started flying online
Fly-in guidelines
Teamspeak info thread

 

[Hsolov4]

It'l be my first week back at the fly-in over a month. Very exited.

[ManofMac]

On 2/2/2018 at 7:51 AM, Hsolov4 said:

It'l be my first week back at the fly-in over a month. Very exited.

Welcome back

[Skylark2992]

Welcome back @Hsolov4, not sure we've 'met' in the skies before.

I'm trying to create and upload orthos for VCBI, but uploading to my Google Drive keeps failing lately. It may be the same ISP problem causing X-IvAp to disconnect a lot lately. I'll do my best but if I can't upload, I'll at least share my results should anyone wish to create their own. Edit: Sorry, still unable to upload, will look into that next week. Arc ZL16 did look quite good though.

[Buckyjunior]

I hope to be of some minor assistance near Columbo, Sri Lanka.

I did say minor.

Bucky

[dirt_mcgirt]

I will probably show up around 12z or so, local only.  Here's my .CSL for the week :

 

[Skylark2992]

Not sure it's useful at this late stage, but here are the corrected ILS for RWYs 04 and 22 at VCBI.

 

[JohnBray]

Today, I tried appearing using ICAO codes ECT2 (Eurocopter H145 - basically a Eurocopter 145  with a fenestron) and then as an AS65 (Aerospatiale Dauphin), both of which caused problems for others.  Is there a standard, universally-available helicopter I can use that won't make me look like a nose-down Airbus to others? 

 

Edit: Maybe next time I will try with this:

 

[frungy]

As long as the user has installed a CSL package containing one of the following ICAO codes and you are filing as any of the codes, it should be mapped correctly.

A109 A119 A129 ALH ALO2 ALO3 ANST AS32 AS50 AS55 AS65 B06 B06T B105 B209 B212 B214 B230 B305 B407 B412 B427 B430 B47G B47J B47T BABY BK17 BRB2 BSTP CH7 COMU DJIN DRAG EC20 EC20 EC25 EC30 EC35 EC45 EC55 EH10 ELTO EN28 EN48 EXEC EXPL FH11 FREL GAZL GYRO H12T H2 H21 H269 H43A H43B H46 H47 H500 H53 H53S H60 H64 H66 HUCO IS2 JAG2 K126 K226 KA25 KA27 KA50 KA52 KA62 KH4 KMAX LAMA LR2T LYNX M34V M74 MD52 MD60 MH20 MI10 MI14 MI2 MI24 MI26 MI28 MI34 MI38 MI4 MI6 MI8 NA40 NH90 OH1 PHIL PSW4 PUMA R22 R4 R44 RMOU RP1 RVAL S330 S360 S51 S52 S55 S55P S55T S58 S58P S58T S61 S61R S62 S64 S65 S65C S76 S92 SCOR SCOU SH4 SUCO SYCA TIGR UH1 UH12 ULTS V500 W3 WASP WESX WG30

Some should be available in Bluebell "BB_Heli.rar" package

A few are also available in the X-CSL package: http://csl.x-air.ru/news/item/306/?lang_id=43

Note: Do not install Bluebell and X-CSL at the same time

[Buckyjunior]

What fun! During the week, I'll have to go back and actually fly around Sri Lanka to check out the scenery. On a whim, I decided to fly a pattern for my 3 hours online. I had to take off from somewhere, so I started at VCBI. Danern had been parked in an outlying lot as I taxied to runway 4.

Making the east-bound leg of the pattern...for the fifth time.

Then, my FMS plan ran out so I continued on planning to land at VCCC. Unfortunately, I wasn't paying attention and found myself approaching VCCN. Turned around and managed to get down on runway 4 VCCC, narrowly missing some deer. I think I'll bring a big dog next time to shoo away the deer.

Keep the blue side up.

 

[cyl8]

1 hour ago, JohnBray said:

Today, I tried appearing using ICAO codes ECT2 (Eurocopter H145 - basically a Eurocopter 145  with a fenestron) and then as an AS65 (Aerospatiale Dauphin), both of which caused problems for others.  Is there a standard, universally-available helicopter I can use that won't make me look like a nose-down Airbus to others? 

Hi JB55, it's much less of what you indicates, but what people have the craft CSL installed and recognized. In the BB obj8 CSL package, only 3 helos are defined and they are B06, EC35, and S76. EC35 is probably your best bet. 

I often declare A109, an Agusta Westland 109. I have no clue where CSL comes from and it's not in any package i have, but most people seem to be able to see a descent CSL of a red SAR helo.

happy hovering

[cyl8]

It's kinda funny that i started from wrong airport and I didn't realize that until i was airborne and wondered why I was not displayed on map... instead of VO80 near Thoothukudi, I started from VOTV of Thiruvananthapuram. It was foggy and cloudy while taking off VOTV in the default BE58. Such a gentile and stable craft.

As I looked at map and noticed suspicious activity from AARTIC, soon the plot thickened...

AARTIC drew an arrow pointed toward the airport! All pilots went toward it!

Rafish miraculously managed everyone to arrive one after another super efficiently! MrMac, GAO, Kumi, and with me just a little behind. AARTIC was running out of flight plan and came out of loop to land. I spotted him on my 10 as I had just captured glide slope on my way to ILS runway 04. Its a little difficult to see him near wing tip at this image resolution...

Touched down nicely with a little chirping of tires and brakes applied, rolled off runway and parked at gate A09. Just as I was rolling to a stop I saw MrMac appeared. Was it you MrMac who's having problem seeing others? did it finally work?

Anyways, thought of heading to the Sri Prada Adam's Peak so started in AS350. The low cloud was cutting in and out in a sudden as I approached the peak, i took my eyes off just a bit on the message window as I hover for a touch down, in the matter of seconds i touched down too hard and rolled.. oops.

I beamed myself back to VCBI, lifted off just in time to watch Kumi's landing. Perhaps I didn't have the right CSL, it looked like f16 to me but it should have been something resemble a Mirage according to Kumi.

side stepping and following kumi slowing down on runway

oops gotta run

[ManofMac]

Yes, that was me having a problem seeing others.

So this afternoon, after the fly-in I removed all the BlueBell CSL's from x-Ivap and replaced them with the ones that came with the x-Ivap bundle. (the new one)

Then, after leaping all over the world trying to catch someone who was flying, I found JB555 at VCBI flying his A320! and HBBest at ASDF, (a little field in Switzerland) flying a C172.  

So, my question is:  Where to get the OBJ8 CSL files from?  (I thought the ones I downloaded were correct) 

and

How to install the OBJ8 CSL's into the X-Ivap Resource.

The Bluebell CSL's that I have are contained in a folder called BB_x (where x indicates the aircraft type) and contain a .dds file and a .OBJ file

All suggestions welcome

Thanks

P

[cyl8]

I have mostly BB package plus individual ones posted here on the fly ins as we go.

I did realize one thing today that the BB_Heli folder has extra layer, which is wrong. I moved that extra layer up now. Everyone with BB_Heli double check your CSL folder, it should not be BB_Heli/BB_Heli.

 

[ManofMac]

If I have this right, the CSL folder should contain separate folders, BB_Airbus, BB_Boeing, etc.

Is that correct?

P

[cyl8]

I believe so. Every top level folder (directly under CSL dir) should have an usb_aircraft.txt and i think it's no more than 2 layers deep but don't quote me on it... And then we need to manually ensure that there's  no duplicate of icao in all the usb_aircraft.txt ... thus x-csl says not compatible because they will install duplicates and causes problem... wish there's tool to manage usb_aircraft.txt

on a separate note, i thought AARTIC was trying to do this at first ...  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/18/-in-the-sky-us-navy-pilots-grounded-over-obscene-drawing

 

[ManofMac]

Not quite. :-)

 

 

[ManofMac]

Just been through all the BB OBJ8 CSL folders and a lot of them do not have the required xsb_aircraft.txt files.

Going through them now to recreate.   S L O W work

Appreciate the pointers

P

[GuyB]

Nice media coverage everyone and thanks for the CSL information.  My Sunday flight turned out to be a bit too eventful as I was having power cuts so I had to park in the hanger early.  I still managed to get some of my own pics before stopping.  

I was just about to cross over the Laccadive Sea when everything went out here.

I had a great time though and might try the full journey again later this week.

 

 

 

[Buckyjunior]

17 hours ago, cyl8 said:

on a separate note, i thought AARTIC was trying to do this at first

Hardly. That's the level of maturity & kind of graphic quality found on grade school lavatory walls.

But, you've started the temptation to think about some "stunning" graphic. Maybe next year.

[ostkamp]

Hello guys,

I was on what seemed to be a long haul compared to others, since I started from Mumbai, where I left off at the last fly-in.

That morning began with a bit of a shock since after 3.5 years my Flightsim PC refused to boot and greeted with some beep-beep-beep sounds telling me that it had encountered a CPU fan failure Still I have no idea why that happened, this is a 2014 Asus Haswell board with i4770K overclocked and the best CPU fan I could get (Noctua, if I remember correctly). I opened the case, removed all dust I could find, but to no avail. The fans are visibly turning ok but the 300-400 rpm rate is reported as a problem. Maybe the BIOS forgot about special settings? Still I could go to BIOS menu and continue the boot process - also the Core temperatures remained normal according to some CoreTemp tool so I continued with the flight.

I am also not too sure whether this has changed the Hardware ID of my system, since I suddenly had to re-activate some of my aircraft models I had used the day before without problems.

I flew the Aerobask Eclipse 550 v2 for this adventure. My mistake was that I loaded too much people (4 including pilots) and I thought I would be fine with the fuel I could load given the passenger weight.

I was parked at the front side of the airport apron.

Getting ready for takeoff using runway 32. I feel XP11 almost always adds a lot of haze compared to XP10. There was no one else at the airport, so I could start right away.

I had calculated a GPS waypoint based route according to planned altitude with Little Navmap.

Here we are passing the Indian coast towards Sri Lanka.

Since the waypoints used for a STAR according to Little Navmap where unfortunately not present in the Skyview, I took the chance and asked @RAFish for vectors. At this time in flight as already shown by others, he had quite a lot to do since now a large number of aircraft entered the area at once.

A few miles before reaching the coast of Sri Lanka, my headspeakers got silent. Huh? Engines had stopped running. Fortunately there was sufficient altitude left to refuel in the air and restart engines. It seems someone else ( @ghun1 ?) suffered from the same problem but plunged into the sea.

I got vectored ok and setup for final shortly followed by @Kumiankka who was sitting in some Jet much faster than my little Eclipse 550 which needs about 80-90 kts landing speed. @RAFish wanted me to leave runway early at first, but we then decided it would be better to leave at end of the runway, since my BizJet has only ineffective brakes and no reversers.

I had good sight at the runway from some distance but then ...

suddenly the haze kicked in and I completely lost sight on it for a while. ILS to the rescue!

On final, now seeing @RAFish playing plane spotter at the beginning of the runway.

Baby, let´s settle down!

When I had turned around and taxiied back, I saw @Kumiankka slowing down on the runway. He used "ALK..." as callsign, so he must have been carrying the drinks. 

When I was about to get parked, MrMac suddenly popped up at my stand, so I had to divert.

I did some last sight seeing trip to the next 2 airports South of Colombo with Din05, then called it a day.

See you next week - as long as my CPU doesn´t melt down in the meantime.

[ghun1]

CSL AVAILABILITY

As I managed somehow to install and make work various CSLs using the new X-IvAp interface, for a while I thought I would make the entire folder structure available for download for anyone who wants to try. At least you could see how I managed it. Save your existing X-IvAp folder first, then try this one, if you want to.

Note that it contains a mixture of individually downloaded CSL objects, the X-CSL automatic installation, plus the latest Blue bell obj8 CSL objects. X-CSL includes a mixture of classic and obj8 CSLs. I have deleted duplicates to avoid complications within the plugin system. That is important if you wish to continue updating them, watch out for duplicate entries and remove one of them.

To get the download simply click on the link (its around 1.3GB compressed): https://drive.google.com/file/d/16DKwUnhtNCL7oOeTtsifGoVWdH4Lj30l/view?usp=sharing

I think the bluebell obj8 CSLs could be made a bit smaller in future as obj entries are duplicated for each and every livery (rather than one object for all its liveries, which is what X-CSL package does). Maybe due to the fact they were converted for CSL use from those that are in use by world traffic.

Best of luck 

Gary

 

 

[ostkamp]

16 hours ago, ManofMac said:

Just been through all the BB OBJ8 CSL folders and a lot of them do not have the required xsb_aircraft.txt files.

Going through them now to recreate.   S L O W work

@ManofMac I suggest to accept the offer of @ghun1 and download and take over his installation.

Wrt. to xsb_aircraft.txt files: It is sufficient if the first level of folders underneath CSL contains an xsb_aircraft.txt file. There is no need to have an xsb_aircraft.txt on the first and the second level since the first level file already references the files in the sub-folders.

So e.g. if an CSL/BB_GA/xsb_aircraft.txt exists there is no need to have an CSL/BB_GA/BE20/xsb_aircraft.txt. If you look inside the xsb_aircraft.txt, you can see that if already references OBJ8 files inside the BE20 folder etc.

[cyl8]

Bump for ghun1’s offer. He is our CSL expert

[Skylark2992]

Thank you @ghun1, I may try your approach when I start a fresh 'install' of X-IvAp. Although, I don't think that I have any CSL issues, and if I did, then I doubt they would cause X-IvAp to disconnect every ten minutes or so.

I enjoyed reading the PIREPs so far. I'll upload mine tomorrow but being disconnected so much, it felt like I was not really taking part at all. Oh well, nevermind! By the way @ostkamp, sorry to hear about your hardware issue - how scary and frustrating! Glad you seem to have resolved it, not sure what would cause that exactly, especially on a powerful and relatively new system. Also, I know you were not using orthos but this in picture, your scenery looks quite different from mine - you have a kind of sandbar on approach. My mistake: without orthos, it looked like a different scenery but in fact that 'sandbar' is actually the coastline, creating a kind of lagoon. I think the orthos look great here though, so I'll try to upload them for others to enjoy.



Also, is the Eclipse-500 NG more demanding on FPS than other similar aircraft? I've done a lot of reading and it seems to demand more FPS because of its complex avionics than even the x737 series or some other bigger aircraft (which also tend to have more complex systems). It looks fantastic, just not sure whether to upgrade if I must lower my settings quite a bit. Thanks for any input; I'm always interested in what current pilots think.

Nice PIREPs so far, keep 'em coming!