🇨🇦 931st fly-in: Yellowknife, Canada (CYZF)

[Kumiankka]

link to fly-in index thread

Quote

For next Sunday, November 13th we have another great suggestion from @CHASMAN2014, actually sent in a couple of months back but kept in reserve until now for an early winter revisit of Yellowknife Airport, Northwest Territories, Canada (CYZF). Thanks to @relicroy and @Moooze, we have some very impressive scenery for the occasion, and if you're brave enough to try out those early XP12 versions this should be a good chance to test the built-in winter functionality. Those (like myself) still flying on XP11 can instead install the SAM Seasons package and select the "Deep Winter" setting.

Have fun!

 

 

 

 

New pilots are always welcome, just read the guide on how to get started!

Remember to listen in on Teamspeak, new channel assignments listed here:
121.00 - fly-in main channel
123.00 - fly-in pre-flight
124.00 - small talk (in German)
125.00 - general comms (non-fly-in)

 

[Quintao]

This week I broke the mold a little and flew the MSFS update commemorating the 40th anniversary of the simulator. I still remember playing with the early versions of it in the 80's. I don't recall ever being able to have a good landing at that time, I'll blame on the poor graphics and immersion and not on my lack of skills flying on a keyboard. How the times have changed!

 I started the flight, using made up weather, at the Hay River CYHY airport. My plans were to fly West aboard the Beechcraft Bonanza G36 to the Deh Cho Bridge before heading to Yellowknife CYZF.

 

Fake weather meant not many clouds on the sky, no snow on the ground and plenty of daylight.

Fueling complete, checked on Navigraph how to taxi to RWY 14.

Taxi A and backtracked on RWY 14.

Took off RWY 14 and flew around the airport before proceeding with my plans.

Flew over the Great Slave Lake enjoying the scenery.

Continued up the Mackenzie River towards to Deh Cho bridge on the Yellowknife highway.

Rather then flying under, did a close by as you can see the top of the bridge just out my left window.

At this time @CHASMAN2014 started reporting snow on the ground at the airport, so I enabled real weather, but this meant little sunlight and snow on the ground.

Flying over the iced lake this time on my approach to the airport with hints of sun light on the horizon.

Closer to the airport visibility became very poor but enough to proceed with a visual approach given the runway lights.

I haven't figured out if it is possible to have the callsign labels visible, so I am guessing that this was @ghun1 on a 737 close to the taxiway.

Chas was seen as an ATR from AirEuropa.

 

 

The default scenery was basic for MSFS.

But the ATR seemed very detailed!

 

Last picture of both the Beefchcraft Bonanza and the ATR.

Long live the flight sim community and the great software that makes it possible. 40 years is a impressive milestone, can only imagine how it will look 40 years for now!

[Vega66]

Hi, great pilots

 

Quite a Murphy day for me, one of those where almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong...

For this destination, planned to stick to the iconic Buffalo airways and one of their best represented aircrafts on the sim, the DC3, to make a tour around their three main bases, Red Deer, Yelllowknife and Hay River.

Scheduled the first flight from Red Deer to Yellowknife.

 

Cold and icy morning, needed to perform de-icing procedures, which further delayed an already late departure.

Good snow effects on the default scenery.

At approximately half way of the flight, the engines started to lose power. Thought I had all the de-icing switches properly set, but checking all the gauges found that the carb temp was droping below 0 centigrates, despite the cowl flaps being fully closed, which finally led to realize that the carb de icer was not properly set. Too late, as the accumulated ice led to the blow up of the engines. With great cost managed to touch down on a fairly flat field. 390 miles out of Yellowknife.

 

By that time almost every pilots were already at or near Yellowknife, and I was also far late for my necessary break. So much for the first flight.

Next, jumped to Hay River, for a chance to get one touch down at Yellowknife. Decided to stick to the Buffalo DC3, which I kept for all of today's fly in.

Loading the sim at Hay River got a fatal error loading some simheaven libraries. Not much time to troubleshoot, so deleted the America simheaven folders and proceeded...

About half way, met @Kumiankka that was performing the opposite route, also with a Buffalo DC3.

About 6 miles out of Yellowknife, on ILS final, was caught up again by mr. Murphy, with another fatal crash, this time from simheaven Europe files... later found out that it was due to a deprecated version of XP12 simheaven from my side.

But this was a fly in that I was commited to finish, no matter what, so deleted all simheaven files and started again from Hay River, this time teaming up with Kumi, that had arrived and was ready to return to Yellowknife.

  Lining up (once again)

 

A slightly improved weather conditions favoured a Visual approach, and on the third attempt finally managed to land safely at Yellowknife.

The ice and snow effects on XP12 are very good.

Kumi arriving a couple of minutes after,

 

Slowly taxied over the slippery lane and parked next to him

 

A few minutes troubleshooting and upgrading the simheaven libraries, while Kumi was starting the last flight, towards Ray Lakes.

Managed to finish the updates still in time to join him for that last flight. 

 

This time, an uneventful flight, except for one final scenery load fail, due to a missing third party library. But this time, nothing fatal and safely parked next to Kumi and called it a day.

Amazing iconic destination, thanks to @CHASMAN2014 for this wonderful idea.

Edited November 14, 2022 by Vega66

[172MC]

I have not participated in a Fly-in in a long time, but the location this week very much appealed to me as motivation to change my XP11 installation to winter mode.  XP12 with its ability to adapt to seasons would have been the obvious choice, except it stutters and freezes very badly, even though my system is among the most powerful available (Intel 12900K overclocked to 5.4 GHz, 32GB DDR 5200 RAM and EVGA RTX 3090 with 24 GB VRAM - the interesting thing being that, no matter the settings, the CPU is always the bottleneck, even though LR has moved much work from CPU to GPU in XP12).

In any event, I launched at CYZF at dawn, with snow falling (which, unfortunately is not very visible in the screenshots) and low dark clouds; I then spent the little time I had this morning (Z -7) roaming on the slippery grounds, looking for runway 28 and then doing one circuit in the pattern.

I wish you all a very good week ahead.  See you next time!

 

 

[rajo]

All flights for pilot rajo

Date	From	To	Aircraft	Type	Duration	Distance	Earnings	Action
2022/11/13 13:56:08	CYFR	CYZF	N-081EB	Beechcraft Baron 58	00:41	81	$3,436.98	View
2022/11/13 00:30:39	CYZF	CYFR	C-GNLY2	Diamond DA62	00:51	81	$1,645.22	View

Actually I wanted to fly the whole FlyIn with the DA62, because it is very well adapted to XP12, and supports the XP12 features excellently.

But during this test flight shortly after midnight (CET) I had to realize that the airplane is not really ice-proof: over the sea I had to descend to 1000 feet and was lucky that some things thawed out there again, so that I could avoid an emergency ditching, which would certainly have been fatal here.

Somehow I made it to the airfield by the skin of my teeth. Remember: do not fly the DA62 below 0 degrees Celsius!

Still in the night I equipped the Laminar Beechcraft Baron BE58, which of course also supports all XP12 features, with the Reality Expansion Kit (Simcoders), I had read that this is already XP12 capable.

However, the 3 heating sliders do not work yet, which means either fully automatic or irrelevant heating. There I wanted to be surprised.

In the damp, cold, foggy soup, the DA62 would surely have crashed soon

I didn't fly very high, I think only 5000 ft, and after gaining some safety I was even able to approach the rw16 via this elegant wide 180 degree approach

I was also satisfied with the landing, but because of the slippery snow I didn't take the taxiways, but went directly over the ice to the block.

various colleagues arrived directly before and after me

this is the XP12 default airport. I found out that the scenery offered by Kumi is not XP12 ready.

XP12's weather simulation is a huge step. I have not seen anything better yet

then I was looking for a bridge for the "bridge challenge", but found none

back at the airport

now come the stragglers

last of all @Kumiankka

see you soon, happy landings

 

[Kumiankka]

Amazing winter shots from XP12, the ice and snow effects do look so good you won't need a third-party package anymore (at least as long as they fix the framerate issue...)
Also, is that really the default airport @rajo? Sounds like you didn't really need the custom package on XP12 anyway, it looks almost the same as the custom scenery anyway!
 

Indeed I was one of the late arrivals to Yellowknife, having started out from distant Iqaluit in the FJS 737-200.

 

Over three hours of cruising across northern Canada left plenty of time for coffee breaks, until it was finally time to start the approach to CYZF.

 

Despite a light tailwind I went for runway 34, the ILS very convenient in the low visibility conditions.

 

@CHASMAN2014 and @ManofMac were holding short of the runway just as I arrived

 

Parked outside the main terminal, watching @CHASMAN2014 take off 

 

@ghun1 arrived just before I logged off to change aircraft

 

My choice of aircraft for the next flight was the same as @Vega66's, the famous Buffalo Airways DC-3.

 

Hay River across the lake was a popular destination, so that's where I set course, staying below the low clouds all the way.

 

Arriving at Hay River/Merlyn Carter Airport

 

Just as I was logging back on for the return trip, I caught a shot of Vega's second departure from Hay River

 

Didn't have a CSL for the DC-3, so I remapped Vega to an Air Canada Dash 8, getting another glimpe just as we arrived in Yellowknife again. My own plane was a Dash 7 of local Air Tindi, purchased from Air Greenland and still carrying the Greenland livery with just the tail number and airline name changed!

 

Parked at CYZF again, about to switch planes for one last flight

 

The Canadian Forces Twin Otter was my pick for one last flight to Gamètì/Rae Lakes Airport even further up north.

 

The low clouds returned on the way north, so even though Vega tagged along for the trip, I couldn't see much of his plane while we were still enroute.

 

Moderately high hills and low clouds near the airfield didn't leave much room to maneuver, but we both managed to land safely to call it a day.

[surfintucson]

Agree on the amazing winter seasons in XP12! Alas, that's going to mean a new PC for me so I will likely wait on v12 until some time next year.

[CHASMAN2014]

1 hour ago, surfintucson said:

Agree on the amazing winter seasons in XP12! Alas, that's going to mean a new PC for me so I will likely wait on v12 until some time next year.

I'm in the process of building a new system just waiting on the hard drive and video card to come in. Hope it works when I plug it in 😆.

Storage:

SAMSUNG 980 PRO Heatsink M.2 2280 1TB PCI-Express 4.0 x4 V6(12xL) V-NAND 3bit MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MZ-V8P1T0CW.

Seagate BarraCuda 8TB Internal Hard Drive HDD – 3.5 Inch Sata 6 Gb/s 5400 RPM 256MB Cache

Motherboard, CPU, & Memory:

Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (2X16GB) DDR4 3200 (PC4-25600) C16 1.35V Desktop Memory

ASUS Prime X570-P Ryzen 3 AM4 with PCIe Gen4, Dual M.2 HDMI, SATA 6GB/s USB 3.2 Gen 2 ATX Motherboard

AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-core, 24-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor

Case & Power Supply:

Thermaltake V250 Motherboard Sync ARGB ATX Mid-Tower Chassis with 3 120mm 5V Addressable RGB Fan + 1 Black 120mm Rear Fan

Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 850W 80+ Gold SLI/ CrossFire Ready Ultra Quiet 140mm Hydraulic Bearing Smart Zero Fan Full Modular Power Supply

Graphics Card:

ASRock Radeon RX 6700 XT Challenger D Gaming Graphic Card, 12GB GDDR6 VRAM, AMD RDNA2

[CHASMAN2014]

Greeting fellow pilots.  This was a lot of fun flying in the snow, not a big fan of driving in it 😆.  Great PIR's, love the XP12 effects, really nice!  Thank you @Kumiankkafor using this suggestion.

Started from Hay River (CYHY) flying the ATR72-500 with the UPS livery.

Departed RWY 14

Hay River city in the background.

In the soup as I approached Yellowknife Airport RWY 16.

Parked at stand 6  Yellowknife Airport.

@ghun1B733 and @F5Chaser Dash8 below:

@ostkamp E35L and @dino5 FA7X below:

@rajo below in the BE58:

@Quintao taxing to parking:

Have a nice week everyone!

Chas

Edited November 14, 2022 by CHASMAN2014

[F5Chaser]

This was a cool change of pace this weekend (no pun intended)!

I began my flight in Uranium City with the Q4XP in full Canadian colors. This flight was set to be challenging, starting off with very low visibility and some turbulence.

This was the first time I've received the "Ice detected" warning in the Q400. Fortunately it comes prepared! The clouds cleared up a little curing cruise allowing me to breathe easier. X-Plane 12 looks great, although I did run across the cloud flickering issue and some other graphical glitches in cruise.

The cloud tech has some real potential. I broke out of this cloud bank into a large "dish" of many cloud layers during descent into Yellowknife. Soon this smoothly transitioned into the low visibility. For some reason it seems all clouds have mild/moderate turbulence in X-Plane 12. I wonder if that is realistic and was never simulated in 11. It made it a challenge to maintain control of the aircraft!

The pavement was glassy and very slippery as I tip-toed my way to the gate. I pulled in straight as an arrow, but as you can see the rear wheels were sliding even at 2 knots! Next to me were @CHASMAN2014 and @rajo with @Big-IN landing a DC-10 (?) in the background.

The scenery required some quick patching in WED to work in 12 but after that it worked perfectly. The author made this look very much like the real airport and I love how well it blended with the automatic snow scenery!

Thanks @CHASMAN2014 for recommending this one! It was a fun challenge and rewarding getting in here!

See you next week in Switzerland!

[rajo]

4 hours ago, Kumiankka said:

Amazing winter shots from XP12, the ice and snow effects do look so good you won't need a third-party package anymore (at least as long as they fix the framerate issue...)
Also, is that really the default airport @rajo? Sounds like you didn't really need the custom package on XP12 anyway, it looks almost the same as the custom scenery anyway!
 

Indeed I was one of the late arrivals to Yellowknife, having started out from distant Iqaluit in the FJS 737-200.

 

Over three hours of cruising across northern Canada left plenty of time for coffee breaks, until it was finally time to start the approach to CYZF.

 

Despite a light tailwind I went for runway 34, the ILS very convenient in the low visibility conditions.

 

@CHASMAN2014 and @ManofMac were holding short of the runway just as I arrived

 

Parked outside the main terminal, watching @CHASMAN2014 take off 

 

@ghun1 arrived just before I logged off to change aircraft

 

My choice of aircraft for the next flight was the same as @Vega66's, the famous Buffalo Airways DC-3.

 

Hay River across the lake was a popular destination, so that's where I set course, staying below the low clouds all the way.

 

Arriving at Hay River/Merlyn Carter Airport

 

Just as I was logging back on for the return trip, I caught a shot of Vega's second departure from Hay River

 

Didn't have a CSL for the DC-3, so I remapped Vega to an Air Canada Dash 8, getting another glimpe just as we arrived in Yellowknife again. My own plane was a Dash 7 of local Air Tindi, purchased from Air Greenland and still carrying the Greenland livery with just the tail number and airline name changed!

 

Parked at CYZF again, about to switch planes for one last flight

 

The Canadian Forces Twin Otter was my pick for one last flight to Gamètì/Rae Lakes Airport even further up north.

 

The low clouds returned on the way north, so even though Vega tagged along for the trip, I couldn't see much of his plane while we were still enroute.

 

Moderately high hills and low clouds near the airfield didn't leave much room to maneuver, but we both managed to land safely to call it a day.

you are right!

SCENERY_PACK_DISABLED Custom Scenery/CYZF_Yellowknife_2022/
this line I saw in the XP11 scenery_packs.ini. In XP12 was not diabled! Apparently I knew a week ago that this Scenery goes very well with XP12

[ostkamp]

Hi fellow pilots,

XP 12 really looks promising wrt. Winter conditions, icing on the runway and so on. As said in Teamspeak, I think the brakes finally work ok on snow and ice. You can slip around when turning and braking, however you can get to a halt without using reverser which was needed in XP 11.

I started with a couple of FS-Economy flights already the day before the fly-in

All flights for pilot ostkamp Date From To Aircraft Type Duration Distance Earnings Action 2022/11/13 14:29:44 CFS6 CYZF DE-GAO002 Cessna Citation X 01:08 321 $4,693.44 View 2022/11/13 13:20:47 CYLB CFS6 DE-GAO002 Cessna Citation X 00:53 175 -$89.72 View 2022/11/12 18:04:15 CYWG CYLB DE-GAO002 Cessna Citation X 01:54 615 $9,696.17 View

I picked up my privately owned Cessna Citation X (substituted with X-Crafts Legacy 650) which was waiting for me at Winnipeg (CYWG) for a first flight to Lac La Biche (CYLB). Had to pay for some repairs beforehand since the aircraft had not been flown for some month.

Aircraft Serviced: DE-GAO002
Maintenance Handled By: FALCON Air Alberta - Lac La Biche (ORBX Free)
Aircraft Repair	$2,858.00

Landed at CYLB at Saturday evening Central European time.

On the fly-in day I picked it up there again for a short leg to Loon River (CFS6) accompanied by @Big-IN aka Dino5.

Starting up at the apron.

Leaving from runway 29.

It took a while to spot Loon River airport.

Had to get parked here, shutdown engines for boarding for the new passengers which had booked for Yellowknife.

@Big-IN aka Dino5 on his takeoff roll while I was holding short since there were no taxiways to beginning of runway.

When approaching Yellowknife the weather situation started getting worse and I then decided to switch landing runway from initially planned 16 (according to wind) to runway 34 which was ILS equipped.

Runway in sight.

Touch down.

Taxiied to gate and got parked with many fellow pilots already here @F5Chaser, @CHASMAN2014, @Big-IN, @rajo and @MerlinEng.

@ghun1 aka Gary landed a bit later with the IXEG 737, if I remember correctly.

Called it a day here (unfortunately @Kumiankka was still far out at this time so we could not wait for his arrival).

I have still 2 fly-ins to go until leaving for longer Winter vacation, provided I can leave when I want to. See you next time!

Edited November 15, 2022 by ostkamp

[surfintucson]

2 hours ago, CHASMAN2014 said:

Hope it works when I plug it in

Ha! I hear ya. Good luck! When I built my current rig--my first and only full build--I remember telling my engineer brother-in-law: "well, I plugged it in, turned it on, and there was no smoke, no crackling sounds, no burning smell." Success!

When the time comes. I'm going to do a DIY build again. I love that my big PC is whisper-quiet thanks to a huge heatsink and a lot of extra quiet fans. Will have to look into the state of affairs with Intel/nVidia versus Ryzen sometime next spring.

 

[ghun1]

great pireps again. Oddly enough my real weather via active sky (ASXP) was not as bad as some seems to have been, just patches of poor visibility.
I chose a real-world route from Edmonton (CYEG) in a B737-300 of Canadian North. I checked CSLs as usual and there was no Canadian North available (AKT) so I logged into swift as a B733 of Air Canada. Even so it seems to have shown up as a B738 with winglets.

The 737-300 I like to fly is the one by IXEG which is really good, but unlikely to make it to X-Plane 12. Shame. Same can be said for the excellent ini builds A300 and A310 to mention just two more. I am hesitant about spending money in future on developers who are not well established in X-Plane, I loved the DC-6 by PMDG but they left in a hurry too. Ah well. Plenty still to choose from.

No problems with weather etc all along the way. Just patchy areas of low or zero visibility. I was expecting rwy 34 but then changed as(nearly)  everyone was using the opposite.

Switched to the very nice T-6 texan from AoA in CAF livery for some sight seeing. Not much to see actually 🙄

Using SAM seasons shows that not all custom scenery uses the same library and many green trees show up. I do not much appreciate the difference between the old 2D and new animated 3D trees, as from most altitudes they look very similar. I challenge anyone to spot the difference. The same problem of 2D green trees is going to show up everywhere in XP12 whenever custom scenery is used (unless the developer updates it). So as I mostl;y use custom scenery at the airports I like to fly in and out of there is little point to having them available. Maybe by the time XP13 is about to be released I will see them everywhere. By which time a new computer will no doubt be needed, so good luck Chas, you are much braver than me, I chickened out of a self build and got what I could buy off the shelf when I switched from Mac to PC.

see you in Switzerland apparently,

Gary

 

 

[ostkamp]

2 hours ago, ghun1 said:

The 737-300 I like to fly is the one by IXEG which is really good, but unlikely to make it to X-Plane 12. Shame.

@ghun1 I have sent you a PM about this topic.

[Skylark2992]

Great PIREPs everybody, thanks for sharing! That was quite nostalgic for me; it was like watching Ice Pilots all over again.

You are very committed @Vega66 - third time's the charm, eh?!

I really like X-Plane 12's new weather engine - what a great winter wonderland, like living in an ice bucket! Although MSFS's weather also looks great in my opinion @Quintao, interesting comparison.

@rajo Wow, what a beautiful, low visibility approach - ausgezeichnet!

Edited November 18, 2022 by Skylark2992

[ghun1]

On 11/13/2022 at 6:49 PM, Quintao said:

I broke the mold a little and flew the MSFS update

could you tell us how easy it was to get Swift to work with MSFS? I had supposed the CSLs needed would be quite different. I am amazed we can mix it up like this, or have I missed something in the past? Does it mean anyone using a simulator on the list in swift can join? Not many of those pilots probably know about our fly in and most likely flying virtual air traffic.

Good to know though.

 

[Quintao]

5 hours ago, ghun1 said:

could you tell us how easy it was to get Swift to work with MSFS? I had supposed the CSLs needed would be quite different. I am amazed we can mix it up like this, or have I missed something in the past? Does it mean anyone using a simulator on the list in swift can join? Not many of those pilots probably know about our fly in and most likely flying virtual air traffic.

Good to know though.

 

This is going to sound like an oxymoron when referring to Swift, but it was "relatively simple", that is, I followed the 10 or so steps in the video tutorial listed on the swift page and it worked great. One positive mark for MSFS is that it didn't require the extra step of converting the CSLs.

It is my understanding that indeed using the Swift client one can join from any of the sims it supports. I think it is a great software!

[ostkamp]

Just as add-on hint:

While I am on vacation I watched a 10 years old Canadian drama tv series named „Artic air“ where season 1 is currently available at some major streaming service, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Air

Guess what, it plays in Yellowknife and they are using a couple of old Douglas DC-3 and other aircraft. 😉