Rally 51, The Sancho Memorial
=============================Melo and I decided to honour Sancho on Rally 51 by doing a fly-by of his home town in variants of his favourite aircraft, the Lockheed Super Constellation. Melo flew a TWA Super G and I selected a TWA Starliner, one of my favourite aircraft too.
Some time ago we'd tried a multi-player session with two PRXI Spitfires, but failed to connect, so we were a little apprehensive about doing it this time. Accordingly we decided to try a practice session the day before the Rally, operating out of Geneva, which gave us both ample runway room. The Starliner in particular takes up MILES of runway to get off the ground, and Geneva has over 12000 ft available. My Starliner was an FS98 design, but after a bit of panel rebuilding she flew just fine in FS02, and at the appointed time I set up my MP session, emailed Melo with the numbers and set off for Berne.
I'd drawn up an FSNav flight plan that had a holding pattern over the Fribourg VOR beacon and passed overhead Berne. I'd just completed one circuit of the pattern when I saw Melo's Super Connie arrive on the FSNav map view!
My wife must have wondered what was going on when I let out a loud shout of joy! We'd actually done it on the first try! Melo couldn't see me on his FSNav map, but he tracked me in the pattern from the main FS02 window and flew in to join up.
After a couple of circuits and with me dropping one notch of flap to slow down, Melo flew up on my port side and passed slowly by while we tried to formate on each other. This turned out to be pretty difficult and we made two passes o'head Berne in a somewhat loose formation in Sancho's honour, the eight Turbo-Compounds producing a great soundtrack down below.
As the ground was pretty well snowed over (real world weather of course...) it was difficult to spot each other from above with the fuselage tops painted white as well, so I suggested we head for some green fields out to the west. This proved succesfull and with me in the lead flying straight and level, Melo made a superb pass down my starboard side and then gently dived away ahead. I was firing off screen shots like a machine gun and the best of that series are attached.
We then decided to land at Basle, which had a much longer runway than Berne, albeit with a hefty crosswind. I turned for the approach and descended below Melo while still maintaining loose contact, and in the process shot one of the best screen shots of the session.
There's just something about those triple tails and looooong wings that gets to you. I can see what Sancho meant when he said the Super Connie was almost too elegant for an aircraft.
With Melo in trail I made for the runway, not quite getting on the centre line, but brought her down nicely on the numbers. I didn't tell Melo until afterward, but it was one of the best landings I've ever done!
After a short panic at the runway exit when all four of my engines shut-down (FS02 shuts off the fuel on this model with the throttles closed completely) which caused Melo to nearly run into my tail, we both taxied to the fuel stand and took the final screenshot.
As you can see, the MP aircraft don't show props or landing gear on the ground, which is a bit wierd, but in the air it looks just fine. We didn't care too much, we'd succeeded beyond our wildest dreams and were well chuffed with ourselves. It all looked good for the following day when we planned a stream take-off from Geneva, flying low over Berne and then scraping into the short runway there.
As it turned out, that didn't happen of course, as my PC decided to smoke itself on the Saturday evening and I wasn't able to make the Rally at all. I'm happy to say that Melo did the fly-by in the Super G anyway, and I was there in spirit, and I guess I'll do the flight as soon as I've reloaded all my FS add-ons, maybe during this week.
I'm really glad we did the practice flight as otherwise we would not have managed to honour Sancho in a way we think he would have appreciated.
Sancho, we'll miss you.
Regards
Kit
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