1U7 To KWYS Point-To-Point (Full Flight)

This is leg two of my place-to-place flights, 1U7 Bear Lake Co., ID to KWYS West Yellowstone. This is a full flight video with no edits and with PilotEdge flight following along the way. If you’d like the scenery, it’s here: 1U7, KWYS. As always, thanks for watching.

Fly With Me: KSUN to KGIC Today 3/24 & 15:00 ET / 20:00 Zulu

Today I’m going to continue the Saratoga’s point-to-point travels with a flight from KSUN (near Sun Valley, ID) to KGIC Idaho County, via the Donnelly VOR. 182 miles and I’ll be flying at about 150 knots for a flight of just over an hour depending on the winds. You can see the route here. I hope to use real-world weather unless it’s VFR, in which case I will fly with clear skies.

If you’re on X-Plane KSUN is already in the scenery, and you can download KGIC here.

I will be doing this flight on PilotEdge. Anyone PE user who wants to fly with me can meet me on the ramp at KSUN a bit before 3:00 PM ET today on 123.45 for a briefing before we switch over to the CTAF. If you’ve not used PilotEdge, this is a great chance to try it out with their free 14-day trial and you can get started via their website. Make sure you get the Western US expansion as that’s the airspace in which I’ll be.

Hope to see you then.

KWYS Yellowstone (X-Plane)

KWYS Yellowstone (X-Plane)

Yellowstone Airport sits at the west entrance to Yellowstone National Park. While open only from June to September of each year, it has commercial service via Delta Connection and over 4,000 passengers a year transit via the strip. It also hosts the West Yellowstone Interagency Fire Center, which I’ve roughly rendered here at the north end of the field. KWYS sits at 6,469 feet, so be certain to lean your aircraft before making that takeoff roll.

To use this scenery you will need these libraries:

It also benefits from Airport Environment HD, as do all X-Plane airports.

This scenery is good for XP 10 and 11. The attached screen caps are with my own orthophoto tile underneath and World2XP America / HD Mesh 3, but note that this scenery has no embedded ortho images. I also added a Delta Connection bird on the ramp, which is not in these screen caps. This is a first start at this strip, and while it’s not ORBX, I hope it’s a nice addition to your library and I will likely improve it over time.

This scenery is freeware and you may get it here at the .org. Thanks for looking and happy flying.

KWYS 2

KWYS 3

KWYS 4

1U7 Bear Lake County (X-Plane)

1U7 Bear Lake County (X-Plane)

Bear Lake County Airport sits just north of Bear Lake along the Utah / Idaho border. It averages 200 hops a month, with only four GA aircraft based an the field full-time. This strip is a nice stopover for your flights from the mountains and National Parks of Wyoming and Idaho to those UT. To use this scenery you will need these libraries:

It also benefits from Airport Environment HD, as do all X-Plane airports.

This scenery is good for XP 10 and 11. The attached screen caps are with my own orthophoto tile underneath and World2XP America / HD Mesh 3, but note that this scenery has no embedded ortho images.

This scenery is freeware and may get it here at the .org. Thanks for looking and happy flying.

1U7 2

HD Clouds For xEnviro (X-Plane)

If you’re using xEnviro you should know about some freeware xEnviro HD cloud sets that have recently hit the .org. The download includes two sets of clouds (I prefer Set 1), and each comes in three levels of definition (1, 2, and 4K). Screen grabs from the post at the org are below (these are not my own grabs), but I flew with Set 1 / 4K resolution today and they looked great and very much like this. My frame rate hit was maybe 4-5FPS, the same or lower than what I get with default XP clouds. These are fantastic clouds – dare I say every bit as good as REX but free? – and it’s a great example of what the X-Plane user community can come up with. Get them here.

ec1

xc3

xc2

Place-To-Place Update

As I noted here, I’ve started flying a Piper Saratoga place-to-place in the sim. The first leg was KSLC to 1U7 Bear Lake Co. Yesterday I continued the journey with a flight to KWYS Yellowstone (via the Jackson Hole VOR and on PilotEdge), and today went on KSUN Friedman which is the local strip for Sun Valley, ID. My goal is to continue making my way up to Spokane to enjoy the PilotEdge expansion field of KGEG. I’ll see what seems interesting from there.

For the Yellowstone leg I built custom scenery for 1U7 and KWYS both, as the in-game and .org offerings were pretty meager. I’ll upload them to the .org in the next day or two and post them here as well so you can have them if you’d like them. I also shot video of the entire 1U7-KWYS flight, and I’ll be uploading it soon as well.

Finally, I thought it would be cool to take screen caps of the virtual Saratoga at each stop along the way. I missed KSLC and 1U7, but here are the rest.

Piper Saratoga_11
The Saratoga @ Friedman / Sun Valley
Piper Saratoga_10
The Saratoga @ Yellowstone

New Things Brewing At FSXTimes

Regular readers know I am a loyal and happy customer of Tom Tsui and the custom gauges he makes for Saitek FIPs. His store now offers over 170 FIP gauges that cover nearly 30 aircraft, including planes for FSX, P3D, and X-Plane, as well as RealAir and the always finicky A2A.

Tom charges about $10 a gauge, and less for package purchases, and I think they are excellent and worth every penny. And things keep getting better. Tom has recently updated the store and installation guide, and perhaps most exciting, he’s now working on a PFD. This is a pic of the beta, and it already looks fantastic. I’ll be getting this one for sure.

pre_pfd[1]