Eyes on stalks / "How to make friends and influence Merlins"

[Killratio]

So I decide to take the Spit on a routine flight from EMO Mission to Port Moresby, via Kokoda. Top up all fluids, ready to go.

On startup.....thin trail of white smoke from the exhausts. OK, shut down, go to maintenance..no problems evident.

Startup again..."A new Pope" still. Ah well, the RPM is OK, mags OK, temps OK. There is some open country between here and Kokoda if we need it (OK, that may be overstating the case but there are definitely a couple of patches near Ilimo where I may not be killed outright!!) , even a "road" if we can dodge the PMVs on it!

The shortish flight to Kokoda goes without incident but is a LONG few minutes of watching the gauges like a hawk and waiting for any change in engine sound. I even manage to crack it for a headwind landing at Kokoda! Life is good and if the clouds hold off in this late afternoon, I'll drop down on Naduri to have a cuppa with Andy Ndiki. It's been nearly three years since I've seen him and his father Ovuru, who has since passed away....but that is for later. Time now though for a quick top up of the fuel tanks and a check of the fluids. A little coolant gone, a little oil gone. Hmmm.. in 10-15 minutes engine run, not great. A full check when we hit Moresby! (if??).

Startup again....white smoke. Is there more now?.. or is my imagination compensating for a 10 minute flight over "tiger country" before the mountainous jungle gives way to a few minutes of clearer (if near vertical!) land. There at least there are some difficult strips cut onto razor backs before it plunges back into a further 10 minutes of hell. After that there are the (largely) clearer lowlands down towards PM

....And there is a southerly.....so gliding clear will be nigh on impossible unless I climb to 20,000ft or so, putting further strain on the Merlin. Oh well, "Do you want to live forever?" as Baesell asked Miller.

(..hmmm, on reflection, not the best of thoughts to have...)

So with the radio tuned to AFRS, and "In the Mood" playing through the headphones, off we go. At least there are no Zeros around! White smoke.

Temps pressures OK, gear up. White smoke. Climb to 8000ft, white smoke. just a thin wisp. A look to the left side as we enter the valley, over at the high peak, opposite Isurava, that has frightened many and killed some. Up through the Kokoda Gap with one eye on the instruments and the other watching for the top of Mt Bellamy to pass and signal the first thinning out of the Jungle. And then ,there it is, the most densely populated and "clearest" section of the track. White smoke. Naduri below but sorry Andy, not this time. I need to keep this engine running and keep some altitude.

Temps, pressures, RPM, throttle response, all normalish but not quite normal?...or is it the several thousand square miles of aeroplane killing jungle down there awaiting me, if I press on, that is still playing on my mind and clouding my judgement? White smoke.

As I decide to press on and set course for PM, I look over at the two extinct volcano craters to my left and all I can think of is the P-40 wreck site a moderate 20 minute odd struggle on foot from the old airstrip at Myola. Trees do wonderful things for aircraft...but at least HE survived, banged up but alive, parachuted out at low level after running out of fuel..or was it coolant...?? White smoke. Nearby, just over the ridge from Myola, the wreckage of the 206 that hadn't quite made it, neither did the pilot! Further West, lies the huge hole in the ground where the B-17 "went in" with a full load..and crew. How many aeroplane wrecks have I visited around here??? More white smoke.

Nose pointing towards Imita ridge now, knowing that after that the Goldie River then Owers Corner mark where the jungle gives way to Koitaki cattle station and some chance of survival in the event of engine failure. Just a few more minutes....damned white smoke. But that is fine, because now I have the building afternoon storms to worry about instead.

A few minutes and then there it is, the pass between the two towering peaks, where the track crosses Imita. Almost safe........ well, "-ish". The storms are not directly in my way yet. Maybe life IS good?

And then it happens. The white smoke stops. Never one for looking at the positives, I immediately glance at the temp gauge...am I out of coolant, oil, luck? Nope. All Ok. 75 oil and just on 90 water. Port Moresby just got a LOT closer...

So it went, down to PM and a good landing in the afternoon rainstorm (conditions that reminded me of another good landing by someone I knew, who later made one simple mistake ......but one too many).

What of my beloved Spit? Not a trace of white smoke, a little oil and coolant gone but not an alarming amount and no maintenance hangar issues at all. The old girl was obviously just having a bad day. She didn't have to take it out on me!



It never ceases to amaze me the feelings that this sim can evoke. Flying over all too familiar (and dangerous) terrain in a single engined aircraft. Your mind filling in the actual terrain...hardly noticing the computer graphics. Actually worrying about the aircraft because of Accusim. Feeling, against all reason, an almost totally genuine fear of something going wrong and going down over the jungle. Remembering people. Remembering places and things... happy, sad, tragic, dirty, disease ridden, unbearably hot, unbearably difficult and almost unbearably painful.....just wanting it all to be over and then when it is, desperately looking forward to the next time. Then being back "here" Climbing out of my sim and going to have a shower to wash off the accumulated sweat (and it was only 22C ) with pictures of that poor, sad P-40 still pushing themselves to the fore in my mind.

And finally, having that nagging worry that next time you may not be so lucky with that white smoke or, perhaps even worse, that the flight may be totally uneventful.....................


Darryl

[shortspecialbus]

I like your spitfire stories. Keep posting them

-stefan

[Killratio]

Thanks Stefan,

I'll post when something interesting happens but it doesn't happen all that often, just as in real flying.

Of all the hundreds of hours on the Spitfire that half to three quarters was the most intense. I am not entirely sure I will ever
get back to PNG now ... probably too old and broken... but it is always close to my heart.

The white smoke has me curious. I had one Spitfire a couple of years ago that used to always blow it for the first
10 minutes or so after start up. I never did get to the bottom of it and she is long since laid to rest "somewhere in France".

This flight the other day seems to have been a one off, as she has behaved like a total lady ever since....


best regards

Darryl

[Norforce]

Just great as all ways mate

[Killratio]

Cheers mate, it was a great shame you weren't there flying with me

[Lewis - A2A]

Great read and I've had some great experiences in the sim. Its easy to understand why the movement that computer games can be art is so strong these days, technology is just so awesome!

(disclaimer technology is also a PITA)

cheers,
Lewis

[Killratio]

Cheers Lewis.

Technology is a PITA...... +1

[Styggron]

Hi Killratio

Very nice post. So you never found what the problem was ? The maintenance hangar never reported anything as you said so any ideas ?

[Killratio]

No mate, never did find the problem. If I had to guess I would say that a couple of cylinders away from the temp gauge may have been running a little hot but I don't know. It could be that there was some uneven wear that evened out OR it could be that damned cat smoking pot in there again....I hate cats!

[bmbrzmn101]

Darryl, great read!! And yes , that is an aspect I enjoy from these products. Very similar to some of our real world flight experiences. From not removing a pitot cover, or trying to rush thru the checklists from memory and maybe missing a small step(but usually vital step) helps generate a real feeling of cautiouness at times while preflighting or when they make a new noise you have not heard before. It all adds to the immersion of the event. Plus I don't want to prang my kite, I have begun taking pride in not having to overhaul an aircraft from slopping flying techniques. Keep writing and flying, and in the future maybe more of us will share our own adventures!!

Cheers, Chris

[Styggron]

No mate, never did find the problem. If I had to guess I would say that a couple of cylinders away from the temp gauge may have been running a little hot but I don't know. It could be that there was some uneven wear that evened out OR it could be that damned cat smoking pot in there again....I hate cats!

Why didn't the maintenance hangar report anything though ? I don't like that.

[Killratio]

The maintenace hanger is not a "perfect" instrument. There are many, many conditions that a mechanic will not be able to see until they become more serious/more evident.

The maintenance hanger operates realistically, so far from "not liking" the fact that it can miss early diagnosis, I love it. If everything was flawlessly diagnosed at the very early stages, it would be highly unlikely that you would ever get to see problems, they would just get fixed!

A real life example... The only engine trouble I ever had was with one of our R models. The engine suddenly lost 1400 rpm while we were at 3000ft cruising. It took around 10-15 seconds to start to come back up. Now 800 rpm is not what you want left when you are at 3000 ft over a large swamp, so by the time it came back up I had picked the least likely to kill us bit of ground and set up a curving glide approach to get there. In the end I flew back to the strip when we had got back to 2000 rpm. I flew higher than I usually would and made a glide approach when we got back, just in case.

When I reported it the answer I got from the LAME was "yeh, it does that sometimes".

My point is that it happened to me once, it happened to another guy I knew well once and all up I heard of 7 other occasions on which that engine gave trouble (it was a year old when I had my "partial") in the 10 years before the engine was replaced. 9 times in 10 years, that i got to hear about.

No- one could ever find WHY it did it. So don't let the failure to find put you off, it is just Accusim being ultra realistic. It is designed to do that.

[Styggron]

The maintenace hanger is not a "perfect" instrument. There are many, many conditions that a mechanic will not be able to see until they become more serious/more evident.

The maintenance hanger operates realistically, so far from "not liking" the fact that it can miss early diagnosis, I love it. If everything was flawlessly diagnosed at the very early stages, it would be highly unlikely that you would ever get to see problems, they would just get fixed!

A real life example... The only engine trouble I ever had was with one of our R models. The engine suddenly lost 1400 rpm while we were at 3000ft cruising. It took around 10-15 seconds to start to come back up. Now 800 rpm is not what you want left when you are at 3000 ft over a large swamp, so by the time it came back up I had picked the least likely to kill us bit of ground and set up a curving glide approach to get there. In the end I flew back to the strip when we had got back to 2000 rpm. I flew higher than I usually would and made a glide approach when we got back, just in case.

When I reported it the answer I got from the LAME was "yeh, it does that sometimes".

My point is that it happened to me once, it happened to another guy I knew well once and all up I heard of 7 other occasions on which that engine gave trouble (it was a year old when I had my "partial") in the 10 years before the engine was replaced. 9 times in 10 years, that i got to hear about.

No- one could ever find WHY it did it. So don't let the failure to find put you off, it is just Accusim being ultra realistic. It is designed to do that.

Excellent. Sorry I misunderstood, so long as it is like "real life" then it matches the accu-sim ethos. In that case I think it is UTTERLY brilliant. This is one of the things accu-sim does that you won't necessarily "see" but rather experience like the real thing. You won't necessarily know this either until you fly it a lot and get to know "your" one.

I have an idiosynchracy with the B377. Engine number 2 always stays hotter than the others so I need to treat that one differently. No one else has that that I know of on the B377 just mine. This is why I love my B377 so much. Yes you can fly by the book but you also learn "your" plane. I've never noticed anything in the C172 though, so not sure what is happening there. Never experienced anything that seems out of the ordinary or something only my C172 does. This is another factor why I am not an "instant buy" person with accu-sim. I dig deep first.

My goodness I didn't realise you were a real pilot flying in real life.

Oh also what is the "LAME" ? I gather it is the aircraft mechanic ?

One thing I am interested to know about accu-sim is are these things triggered by events or are they dynamic, by dynamic I mean that not even the programmers can predict what will happen to give the plane being flown its idiosynchracies. They appear to be dynamic so this should mean even Scott cannot tell what will happen. I am sure the team can trigger different things but I wonder how deep accu-sim is. A documentary on how it works would be great. I mean in depth ! No code of course just indepth on how the dynamics happen. I know it is all about how the engine works, the weather, how you treat it etc. But what makes YOUR plane different in the way you maybe need to start it up slightly differently or one engine heats up faster than all others etc.

I am wondering what accu-sim would do on my spitfire that would be an idiosynchracy to just my spitfire. Is there anything you noticed on your Spitfire that is "different" ?

[Killratio]

Yes mate, L.A.M.E. = Licensed Aircraft Maintenance Engineer...

The "different" aircraft will crop up each time you install a new .dat file. So it isn't just a "your download does this" factor. Each time a new part is installed it can change things. So after an engine is repaired, it will potentially behave differently to what it did "last time" it was new.

I've had many different Spitfires over the time. Most are pretty "normal" but I do remember a few "stand outs".

I had one which blew white smoke after engine start for a while EVERY time. Lost her in France on a PRU flight after about 120 hours when the engine failed ... but never anything obvious to cause that in the maintenance hangar. The engine failure was a main bearing..probably random..definitely not a "white smoke" condition.

When first released, I had another that blew a light oil smoke whenever it ran over about 2500rpm.

A third was a bear to start on almost every occasion and seemed to chew up magnetos at the rate of about one every third or fourth flight. It also never seemed to "smoke" but routinely used 125% of the coolant and oil that would be normal. No amount of maintenance seemed to change that. But SHE never gave me a single skipped beat in the air. Lost her in PNG when I clipped a tree going in to Efogi Airstrip.

My favourite old girl would tune up the cylinders to almost perfect compression and she was always about 2-3 mph faster than any other one I have had. She was such a dream that I can't even remember exactly how she finished up. I think I may have lost her on a reinstall of FSX back in the day.

I just love that sort of thing. I try to keep the same aircraft until I have a Category " M (c) " or worse in it, have to land or forced land "on the other side" during a recon flight or it becomes a "dog" that seriously can't be relied on. I have regular maintenance done to the 1940's schedule or as close as accusim hangar will let me. I love your B377 engine story.. THAT is the heart and sole of Accusim!


Accusim magic? Well, obviously a lot is kept "in house" to preserve the mystery and the magic. What it achieves though, is to provide a track of the individual parts of the aircraft (not just the engine but most of the mechanical parts) down to a very low level. So, for example, each cylinder and piston has its own life "profile" which is directly affected by how you treat the engine.
I believe there is not, to make up an example, a "piston life = x" line...it is more like a "Cylinder 1 THIS Piston life = X +/- under normal operating" which is THEN affected by how you handle the engine. The +/- is randomised to an extent so that no two PARTS are routinely alike. The randomising simulates manufacturing tolerances, material quality variartions, luck etc.

So if two people installed a single copy of the .dat file on a fresh install, the two aircraft, identical the first time you turned over the engine, would operate, wear and perform differently according to how good each guy was at managing and flying his aircraft. Also in the mix is a level of random failure (however minute the chance of one). I can remember that SINGLE random main bearing failure in all of the hundreds of hours I've flown the Spitfire (something like 1500 non testing hours now). But some non catastrophic component failures over the time MAY have been as much random as wear related, you can't tell. If a worn part gives out..it might be service life or it may have been a random failure of an already worn part.



One Accusim story I like to tell is that during testing the Watts (Weybridge) equipped Spitfire I was climbing nearly on the money initially but then, as you got higher, the performance was dropping off, if I recall correctly, above 10,000ft. There are readily available test data and documents and I would like to think that I can fly her like a test pilot. So I discussed it with Scott and his reply was only about 20 minutes later. Found it! Some airscrew figure or other was slightly off. New test flight and this time the aircraft came very close to the test figures. Close enough that pilot skill easily accounted for the very small differences. Now Scott did not test the plane, he did not change a "lookup table" to adjust things at different altitudes...he changed the Airscrew performance and THAT made the aircraft performance then match the real thing.


So no, there is no "scripted' sequence that is set in stone, just a set of standard operating consequences, varied by manufacturing quality/tolerances and applied at a very low level to components. Compare that to the Realair Spitfire which WAS revolutionary in its time, where you have "Engine Run at 3000rpm > 300seconds = Engine catches fire..cue visual effects.

best

Darryl

[Killratio]

Darryl, great read!! And yes , that is an aspect I enjoy from these products. Very similar to some of our real world flight experiences. From not removing a pitot cover, or trying to rush thru the checklists from memory and maybe missing a small step(but usually vital step) helps generate a real feeling of cautiouness at times while preflighting or when they make a new noise you have not heard before. It all adds to the immersion of the event. Plus I don't want to prang my kite, I have begun taking pride in not having to overhaul an aircraft from slopping flying techniques. Keep writing and flying, and in the future maybe more of us will share our own adventures!!

Cheers, Chris

Thanks Chris,

I know exactly what you mean!! I have the added incentive to keep my Spitfire healthy as so much of my virtual flying time is spent "over enemy territory" on my PR missions. I "lose" my aircraft if anything happens and I can't get back. I religiously delete any airframe that I lose and so it "costs' me something, particularly if she is a favourite!


Darryl