FRIDAY: Sister City Flights - week 28 - San Francisco - ZEPPELINS, BLIMPS & BIPLANES!

[Storm]

Join me for a slow sight-seeing waft over San Francisco at just 50 knots. San Francisco became became Thessaloniki's sister city in 1990.

Start	1st stop	2nd stop	Last stop
KHWD	KCCR	CA35	KSFO
Hayward Executive	Buchanan Field, Concord	Marin Ranch, San Rafael	San Francisco International

Flight plans: https://is.gd/StormsFlightPlans (both .PLN and .FMS files available).
Or look at the end of our discord channel #group-flight-info on the day of the flight.

Cruise: 50 knots indicated (57.5 mph, 92.5 km/h).

Aircraft: Airships are encouraged (zeppelins and blimps)! Biplanes, especially vintage biplanes, are also encouraged. Failing that, bring your ultralight.

HELP! I don't have an airship but would love to download one. Please see the following post.

Scenery: Default secenery is OK. X-Plane pilots! I encourage you to install this beautifully detailed San Francisco area scenery. You'll need the MisterX library and the Autogate plugin is recommended too.

Platform: JoinFS version 1.4.3 or later.
Hub: MSFlights AU if available, FSVintageAir if not.
Simulators: All welcome: FS9, FSX boxed, FSX steam edition, Prepar3D, X-Plane.

[Storm]

HELP! I don't have an airship but would love to download one.

FSX: There are two freeware airships in Storm's Hangar. Both have 3D cockpits. Look for them in the "Lighter than air" section.
* Goodyear K-Class blimp (unfinished - I last worked on this three years ago). Flies well if a little ponderously, and the model and textures are very nice. Problems: Main cockpit viewpoint currently central behind pilots, there is no autopilot and it does not work in Direct X 10 preview. And allow a lot of space to take-off and land!
* Zeppelin NT. This is a very popular airship in our community. Easy to fly. Includes a truck with a mooring tower (cosmetic only). Download everything in the folder, including the startup chart (which you should follow meticulously!). I've also included an easy to install mod to replace the payware FSMap with the default Garmin GPS 500.

XP11: As far as I know, there are five freeware airships available at x-plane.org. None has a 3D cockpit:
* Goodyear Aerospace GZ-20 N3A. Not recommended, for two reasons. Although it's the most recent coversion from an old model XP7.3!), it's too twitchy to fly when trying to get the pitch attitude right. Also, it is too slow for our flight!
* Skyship 600. This is not bad. Easy to control. Will just about do the 50 kts needed for our flight.
* DLZ-129 Hindenburg. I haven't tried this. It's enormous, far too big for our flight (not approproate for our stop at San Rafael).
* DLZ-127 Graf Zeppelin. I haven't tried this. Like the Hindenburg, it's enormous, and at around 800 ft long it's far too big for our flight.
* Polar Express Airship. This is a fictional steampunk-looking dual-hull airship based on the 2004 movie The Polar Express. And it is very easy to fly! Expect to find me in this during our flight.

Hints for XP11 pilots:
* None of these XP11 airships are stable on the ground and will keel over and damage an engine if you do nothing before take-off. However, they usually have a lever on the 2D dash that affects bouyancy. Therefore you need to raise this lever just a little immediately when you first get in the airship.
* I recommend you create a User Profile for "Airships" and assign two spare buttons to Blimp lift up a bit and Blimp lift down a bit. I used the otherwise redundant flap control buttons. Using these is an easy way to adjust the bouyancy lever.
* If you have a quadrant, you may also wish to reassign the Prop lever to Thrust Vector as some of these airships have pivoting engines.

[Prdude62]

Here are pictures of this cool flight......http://imgbox.com/g/10y7BAbqyR

[Storm]

23 screenshots from our San Francisco flight, flying the Polar Express airship (from the 2004 movie) in X-Plane 11.11.