Post by: EHM-2387 Eric-Jan on June 01, 2016, 11:15:33 am
I'll start off myself:
Pros:
- Something Different
- GA plane (a personal preference)
- Requires more planning in order to do things right, realistically, AND fuel efficient - planning for, and with, weather i more important
- route is not set
Cons:
- route is not set. Is also a con, because everybody flies, or at least can fly, a different route at different times. This makes it more of a solo event. Not much room for flying together online. Or at least: that requires more coordination than practical, so in practice, everybody is on their own on this.
- The fuel economy prize is easily tampered with (fly on with zero fuel; mid-air refuelling)
- flights cannot be followed as easily on the website. The flight dissappears from the recent flights list as soon as landed on an intermediate stop
- The total number of flights is reduced, because these 8 to 20 legs count as one flight (admin thing; it looks as if flight activity has dropped, but in reality it is more positive than reported
- Any error in FL record keeping is only discovered after having flown 45 hours
Plese feel free to share you thoughts, so that we may improve! :D
Post by: EHM-2758 Peter on June 01, 2016, 03:52:28 pm
I totally agree with the remarks Eric-Jan made. Though it seemed almost impossible to fly this one together online, it was great fun. Still I missed the online chatting during those endless, monotonous legs over just water.
Nevertheless after having flown the Alaskan event together, it was indeed something else. In my opinion I certainly encourage this kind of events to take place occasionally. For a change.
Meet you all on Mumble for our next event!
Peter
Post by: EHM-1829 Trevor on June 01, 2016, 07:45:40 pm
A very big thanks to E-J etc for organizing and planning the event. ;)
Congratulations to everyone that finished, I see some unlucky pilots had problems "saving flights" ; that
would have been very frustrating for them, especially after all the planning involved.
That's a good idea regards Solar power Peter, but favourable winds and the Sun to shine all in the
one day at EGPC would be asking too much. ;D
Looking forward to the next one already, hope to see you all on Mumble.
T
Post by: EHM-2758 Peter on June 01, 2016, 10:14:21 pm
Peter ;)
Post by: EHM-1152 Thomas on June 02, 2016, 12:58:54 pm
I will admit that I was a bit confused by the fuel usage in terms of how much less was used on my flight. I thought how can that be?! I then read E-J's thoughts on tampering with fuel usage and don't want anyone to think that is what I did (because I might think that if I was one of you looking at the fuel usage results!). It would be good to understand why there was such a difference. Here are the main points of my flights:
- Used A2A aircraft
- Kept the fuel mixture very low in the cruise (sometimes down to 35%)
- Kept the cruise speed very low
- Always flew very long distance legs (many took around 10 hours)
- Flew to relatively small airfields to keep down the taxi time
- Used much more direct routing once I had crossed the Atlantic, as they are much more open to such flying
- Always considered the weather, particularly wind direction (using ActiveSky)
Is there a difference there with how everyone else was flying? Perhaps it is just the A2A being modelled differently? Or even something to do with how the A2A fuel is added before a flight using their software which maybe isn't picked up in the same way by FL?
Or maybe someone else can suggest a reason?
But I certainly look forward to the next event!
Thomas
Post by: EHM-2387 Eric-Jan on June 02, 2016, 02:54:44 pm
Your approach to planning and route seems pretty much consistent with mine, although I chose to do a few more legs of maximum 5 hours - and use speed accelleration for parts of the cruise section; FL compensates for that nicely up to 4x speed)
I flew at 2250 to 2300 rpm, as low as possible (better range with the same wind conditions), unless higher winds seemed more favourable. Usually, the lower altitude meant less headwind.
Also, I used IvAp's weather engine, which is sometimes way off with ActiveSky, I noticed with the Alaska Event.
So there's plenty of differences that could explain the difference in fuel burn. As it turns out, you had the best combo of them all!
I awarded the medal to the top three, instead of just the number one, because there was such a big difference. So there must have been some discerning factor in there (my bet is still on the A2A consumption model), other than mere planning and execution. And my estimation is that, regarding planning and execution, the number two and three must have performed on a similar level.
I see, by the way, that the awards do not appear in your Avatar, nor in Trevor's, even though I manually awarded them. If they don't appear in 24 hours, I will have to investigate what went wrong there...
Post by: EHM-2387 Eric-Jan on June 13, 2016, 07:54:51 am
I learned from Murray what I should have done differently, and will do so in the future; it's a learning process ;)
All has been corrected, and the awards awarded correctly now.
Enjoy!
Post by: EHM-2387 Eric-Jan on July 12, 2016, 08:02:02 pm
Despite flying alone, I was not aloe there...
Try to meet up on Thursday as well!
Post by: EHM-1997 Alexander on July 13, 2016, 08:58:42 am
There's a Eurobusiness livery for Javier's X-Plane CRJ on the site: http://www.fly-euroharmony.com/site/index.php/fleet/aircraft/A/91 (http://www.fly-euroharmony.com/site/index.php/fleet/aircraft/A/91)
Post by: EHM-2387 Eric-Jan on July 13, 2016, 12:31:53 pm