Kumiankka Posted March 25 Share Posted March 25 link to fly-in index thread Quote Since our next fly-in falls on Easter Sunday, March 31st, attendance might be a bit lower than usual with many of those celebrating the holiday no doubt a bit busy for the moment. But if you're lucky enough to get the chance to pop in for a visit, we have a brand-new Easter destination this time (we can only go to Easter Island so many times) - instead, let's pay a visit to the smallest country in the world, which is barely big enough to have one heliport within its tiny surface area of less than half a square kilometer. Vatican City Heliport, using the fictional ICAO code VAT1 in the linked scenery, is located at the western tip of the ecclesiastical microstate, which is in turn surrounded entirely by the city of Rome. Those flying in cross-country may need alternates more suitable for fixed-wing aircraft, the most prominent of which is Rome's main international airport of Leonardo da Vinci - Fiumicino (LIRF), though a couple other options suited for smaller planes are also linked below. Happy Easter - buona Pasqua / beatus Paschae! New pilots are always welcome, just read the guide on how to get started and remember to listen in on Teamspeak! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Quintao Posted March 31 Share Posted March 31 (edited) Happy Easter to all! As I mentioned during the last fly-in, this weekend I am away from home, so I took on a technical challenge to test that it would be possible to run the fly-in setup on the cloud and participate on the event while being away from home. Challenge accepted! I started thinking of running X-plane 12 and Swift Pilot client on an AWS EC2 Windows machine (G5.2Xlarge to be more specific) on the closest AWS region to my location this week while away from home and remote desktop into it and participate on the event. The only drawback would be flying with a keyboard and mouse. I started on the cold and dark Laminar Research C172 out of LIQS Siena-Ampugnano Airport. All scenery were default as I was not trying to test the scenery, but rather that it would be a good experience. Taxied and departed LIQS runway 18. Slowly climbed to 8,500ft and headed to Rome. Weather was giving hints it would not be all VFR. While climbing I got concerned with icing conditions, but that turn out to be ok. About 30 minutes later I was cruising with no concerns. it would be a good flight! Another 45 minutes and I was flying over Roma Urbe LIRU airport at 1,500ft and circling to land on RWY 16. Parked at the ramp for a quick coffee break. Here is the map for the first flight. @Kumiankka and @CHASMAN2014 were already at LIRF Fiumicino. I headed to LIRF next where @rajo had landed and was preparing to depart, Landed on LIRF RWY 16R and parked at the ramp by the big birds. Departed LIRF enroute to LIRA Ciampino airport while @ostkamp was landing at LIRF RWY 16L. Next hop was to LIRA where all were gathering at time, managed to get there and Chas was still on the ground on his helicopter. Final metropolitan route and pilots connected at the time. I'll update the fly in post with the total cost of running this experiment on the cloud. The performance was very good, better than I expected, fps were great as per the pictures, no lagging or latency issues. Happy to show it can be done if you don't own a powerful computer but still want to participate on the fly-ins. See you all next weekend! Ps: Cost breakdown below, Friday and Saturday were a couple of hours a day for setup / tuning / tests, Sunday was the fly-in. All together about $23, 72% being compute, 28% in block storage and networking utilization... ""Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.". I am not looking to run this on a consistent basis, but it serves the purpose when away from my full blown setup at home. Especially now in the Spring where my schedule is all over the place in terms of travel. I'll likely give it a try next time with a smaller instance (lower costs) with 4 cores in CPU rather than 8 cores, although that one has limited GPU DRAM. Edited April 1 by Quintao Added AWS link, and cost breakdown 8 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kumiankka Posted March 31 Author Share Posted March 31 Amazing to see your AWS setup actually worked @Quintao, although I don't envy the idea of going back to the keyboard and mouse one bit! Started out from Venice Marco Polo Int'l, a little bit ahead of most of the crowd maybe partly due to the switchover to summer time. Flying the XPP A340 in Italian government livery by @Customworkx. The weather in Venice wasn't particularly great, so I had to be quick with the screenshots during departure before the city disappeared beneath the low clouds. Out of the soup again, and on course for Rome Some downsides of Ortho4XP here, the Italian orthophoto sources seem to suffer from a lot of missing textures. Ready to start the descent into Rome Fiumicino Turning final... ...and touching down on 16L In hindsight I probably should've picked 16R, because it was a very long taxi across the airport over to where @CHASMAN2014 was parked Ready to head for our actual main destination in the VSL Cabri G2 Following the Tiber River to Rome Here we are, the Colosseum was of course an unmistakable sight More local landmarks at Piazza Venezia And the main destination of Vatican City Quick touch 'n go at St. Peter's Square Hopping over to the actual helipad Parked off to the side, leaving room for other incoming traffic Continuing to tour the area in the Sikorsky 76, in @Fatherofsam's special livery Passing Ciampino Airport... ...and arriving at Castel Gandolfo Heading back to the city in a Bell 206 I had planned on going to Rome Urbe next, but diverted to Ciampino since everyone else was there at the moment The B206 was very unsteady at low speeds since it hadn't been updated for XP12, unstable in both yaw and pitch. This would make for a challenging landing... And there we go. I managed to keep the yaw under control but not so much the pitch, nosing over immediately after touching down. Switched to the Aermacchi MB339 next. @CHASMAN2014 was just vacating the runway at Ciampino, with more traffic inbound Reached the hold short point just in time for a perfect vantage point to watch @Quintao's keyboard-and-mouse-only landing. My turn to take off Back downtown, but with weather conditions quickly deteriorating @F5Chaser and @rajo were buzzing around the Vatican here, barely visible through the fog. (@Big-IN also down on the helipad and not visible) @F5Chaser timed his flybys well with mine, appearing in both shots above Next I turned back to follow the Tiber, making sure not to run out of energy during the sharp turns along the river Approaching Fiumicino Leonardo da Vinci Int'l again... ...and pulling off an improvised "bridge challenge" stunt after finding these arches along the airport rail line Entering the pattern for 16R Landing at LIRF again, this time a bit closer to the ramp Last flight for the evening, the VSkylabs Tecnam 2006 Heading for Rome again along an already familiar looking route The weather was getting worse and worse by the minute. Marginal VFR at best. The Colosseum was barely visible by now... ...and Vatican City almost completely hidden by the fog. @samen appeared to be paused in the air as I passed by Entering the pattern at Rome Urbe @rajo was the last one still online, observing as I landed on runway 16 Parked and shutting down Happy Easter, and see you again next time! 10 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rajo Posted April 1 Share Posted April 1 All flights for pilot rajo Date From To Aircraft Type Duration Distance Earnings Action 2024/03/31 12:51:53 LIBP LIRF DCRAJ750 Cessna Citation X 00:59 93 -$43.99 View 2024/03/30 22:08:46 LDSB LIBP DCRAJ750 Cessna Citation X 00:42 121 -$1,127.47 View 2024/03/30 19:08:17 LDDP LDSB DCRAJ750 Cessna Citation X 00:28 36 $3,259.21 View 2024/03/30 18:10:50 LQSA LDDP DCRAJ750 Cessna Citation X 00:37 61 $377.40 View 2024/03/30 13:54:54 LYNI LQSA DCRAJ750 Cessna Citation X 00:57 157 $3,877.76 View Contrary to my announcement that I wouldn't be there at Easter because of a seminar, I took part after all because I caught a cold at the beginning of the week and left immediately according to the rules. But after 3 days I was ok again. the day before I was on a Croatian island. Actually, there shouldn't have been any balloons there, because the wind was very strong, 25 knots I was a bit late, but the weather was better, the wind had died down taxiing to the east-facing runway airborne, leaving the beautiful city Pescara https://flyvirtual.net/index.php/pireps/view/303191 I underestimated the fuel consumption during the long slow flight and low approach and didn't quite make it to runway LIRF 16L then go looking for my colleagues with my favorite helicopter LAMA SA315B. There are a few back there... and soon the Vatican helipad is enjoying great popularity. Everyone is allowed to land and is welcome. Peace be with you! However, the tail of the Russian helicopter @Big-IN is walled in and the German @ostkamp one has fallen on its head you can only land on the side at the front was a lot of fun again. Happy Easter! 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ostkamp Posted April 1 Share Posted April 1 (edited) Hi all, I had left my Cirrus SR22 which I own in FSE at Venice Tessera at some earlier fly-in and now took it for the trip to Rome. First leg was flying 1 kg of cargo to Forli airport (LIPK) and then continue with 3 passengers to Roma Fiumicino Leonardo Da Vinci (LIRF) airport. All flights for pilot ostkamp Date From To Aircraft Type Duration Distance Earnings 2024/03/31 13:37:29 LIPK LIRF DE-GAO001 Cirrus SR22 G2 01:10 142 $2,403.00 2024/03/31 12:18:11 LIPZ LIPK DE-GAO001 Cirrus SR22 G2 00:41 80 $134.10 There I had to leave FSE and fly still with the Cirrus SR22 on my own to Roma Urbe (LIRU). On my way I was accompanied by @Big-IN aka Dino5 who used to fly helicopter all the time. Getting ready at the rainy venice airport, Dino5 is already hovering in the background. The bad weather continued whileI was flying across the Laguna di Venezia towards the main land. I stayed very low because of potential icing. Crossing the river "Po" (Latin: "Padus") if I remember correctly. I need to take into account this is an Italian word and not German (in German the term means "butt" 😉). Short of the mountains I turned left to enter ILS approach to Forli runway 12. Moments before touchdown. I felt a little bit lost on the large apron. Looks like Austin was here too according to the trucks. @Big-IN´s large helicopter. From there went to Roma Fiumichino Leonardo da Vinci airport. First for a longer trip over the mountains of course. I went up to 6000 ft without icing. 👍 Airport runway 16L ahead (sorry that I made a wrong announcement here, must have mixed up the runway numbers). I stopped nearby and declared the FSE flight finished, then got setup on 16C this time for continuing to Roma Urbe. On final LIRU runway 16. Got parked here and switched aircraft. My only chance was one of the Verticopter models. The original ones had been for XP10 only, but someone had at least converted one to XP11 and that could be loaded in XP12. I had tried several times to practice with that one, but it was anything from easy. I think in XP12 the model has much less power than is expected, since it won´t lift without full power at all. Also I experienced that even with stabilizers on and in vertical mode, the aircraft would not move forward. Instead it was constantly moving backwards unless I changed rotor angle. Anyway, flying around the St. Peter´s Basilica and the St. Peter´s square next to it was no problem. My landing attempts were terrible. I once got down somehow but went through some vegetation until reaching the heliport. Other experiments ended with crashes. With the stock helicopter R22 I could not survive getting airborne for longer than 5 seconds, then it flipped over in some direction and crashed. 😟 Nevertheless the scenery was great and thanks to others for their great images of the vicinity. See you next Sunday and have a good week. 🙂 Edited April 1 by ostkamp 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
F5Chaser Posted April 5 Share Posted April 5 Hello everyone, Late one for me this week. I started off from Milan in a Phenom 300. Unfortunately most of the trip and beautiful scenery was obscured by clouds. For the first leg the plan was to arrive in Ciampino to switch to a helicopter. I miscalculated the descent timing and ended up 6,000 feet too high and ended up making an improvised pattern. The good part was the skies had cleared up right around the airport allowing me to continue on a visual approach. Number three on approach. Merlin was number two and I forget who was ahead of him. The Phenom is such a joy to land. It's flare is so smooth it feels like a butter landing every time. I joined @MerlinEng over on the ramp to switch to an S-76. While I was doing that, @Kumiankka, @Quintao, @rajo and @CHASMAN2014 came by to visit. In a short time, I departed from Ciampino headed for the Vatican. Some pilots were already on their way or arriving there as well. I circled around the west side to check the wind and decided on a southward approach. The wall and sloped terrain in my scenery made it a real challenge to land. Don't want to have a tail strike! Landed safely! @Big-IN was already there observing the others come and go. I departed again and flew around the VAtican to admire the scenery. Kumi's flyby over St. Peter's square was perfectly timed to end up in this shot. @ostkamp made a successful landing on the helipad. Afterwards, I formed up with Chas for a bit before heading back to Ciampino to call it a day. Landed safe and sound at Ciampino. Thanks for another great flight everyone and Happy Easter! See you this weekend in Batman! 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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