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Polar routes

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EHM-1001 Robert:
Hi mates,

I have seen a map of routes between Western Europe and Far East. Most of these routes go near the poles. I know we have many similar routes. Do you use to fly over the pole ? It is said that is a challenging task for a pilot.

EHM-1242 Stef:
Hi Robert,

Made a couple of flights near/over the pole. It's nice when you see how much time one saves! Last one was from ESSA to PANC (EHM-C469), which came up to 87 degrees North (i believe). Flew it with the PMDG B744F, which displayed some unusual navigational behaviour though, which i dont know whether it is caused by FS9.1 or by the PMDG model.

Considering that on those latitudes the FS earth model has been stretched greatly longitudinally (in FS the world is flat. MS discovered first in 2007 that the earth is round... ;D ) strange courselines were displayed in the navigation display, with all kinds of 'hooks' and curves in it:





Why should courseline 'drift of' (note that there is no waypoint!) north?? This happened in all sorts of varieties :[

Flying in VNAV was an absolute no-go and had to take her in HDG mode manually for some 3 hours to keep her on course. First when approaching the northern Alaska coastline i could slowly consider using VNAV again.

And, what you can also see in above (hopefully! First time posting embedded images...) is a phenomenon i am experiencing more often with the PMDG 744: that the aircraft just refuses to hold it's course. See how she is in a left bank where the path to follow is clearly 1,45 (XTC on FMC) miles to the right..? When it happens (does not happen always, say roughly every 2nd or 3rd flight) it normally is on East-West courses, and when about 3 to 4 hours into the flight (although have seen it also happen already after 1 hour into the flight)... Very frustrating and spoiling my fun in flying the PMDG 744 because one is always waiting for it to happen (and mostly it does somewhere)! :[

Am i the only one where the aircraft shows this kind of behaviour??? Checked the forums at PMDG but could not find anything in this respect there...

Na good, so much to flying the poles.

Oh, one more thing: in the MS world the global warming has already been thoroughly completed! Instead of ice and snow (which i wanted to see) there is just a giant expanse of OPEN OCEAN up there! :o

Aloha,
Stef
EHM-1242

EHM-2155 Mariano:
Hum does that still happen with Direct - GPS routes in flight planner?

EHM-1001 Robert:
Well,

it is strange a bit and in other hand "usual" !? I remember I have had some similar bugs with the PMDG. But in my case it was a bit more simple: it just turns in the wrong direction sometimes...and after 30-40 degrees of "mistake" it recognizes the trouble and turn back to the normal course. I remember it happened sometimes, but unfortunately I do not believe the FMC, and many cases fly it without LNAV mode. Also for SID and STAR I used to turn off FMC and fly her manually following the magenta line ;D

Anyway, nice discovery about the poles. If I remember I have not flown a timetable flight yet there. I just made a testflight with the MD17...who knows why...but I saw ice ! A continous ice shelf was panning across a longitude. It was quite unreal but at least it was ice. More funny was the compass...I followed the route in FSNAV and the airplane icon was many times pointing 40 degrees off the course ;D

Also I remember when I travelled from Paris to Seoul and back. Trajectory was shown on those small monitors onboard. The plane went high in a big curve from Korea to North-Europe, but the curve did not went higher than the coastline of Russia. That time I did not understood the curve...now I do not understand the curve being not so high ;D

EHM-1465 Dominic:
I can't say I've done much polar flying but I think these anomalies are realsitic ones, aren't they?

That's why the big jets have MAG / TRUE switches for the heading control since at polar latitudes the earth's magnetic fields interfere with accurate use of magnetic compasses causing track errors...

I don't know whether PMDG's rendition of this effect is accurate but seeing as their aircraft are generally very good I wouldn't be surprised if it was ;)

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