The Ferry Challenge Feedback Thread

[EHM-2387 Eric-Jan]

This thread is for the feedback you might want to give Management, regarding the recent Ferry Challenge Event.

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! 

[EHM-2758 Peter]

First of all congratulations to the three of you, who made this trip so fuel-efficiently. Next time I'll try a solar driven engine to win this challenge  , provided of course that I learn to master the use of Flight Logger.

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

[EHM-1829 Trevor]

       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.

       Looking forward to the next one already, hope to see you all on Mumble.
      T

[EHM-2758 Peter]

There are many ways to skin a cat, Trevor or as we over here in Holland use the proverb: there are many roads that lead to Rome or should I say ... to Dunn. B.t.w. it was a really nice, sunny day over here today.

Peter

[EHM-1152 Thomas]

The event was great fun as a chance to get 'back to basics' with flying and I would also like to give my thanks for its organisation.

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

[EHM-2387 Eric-Jan]

Reading your report, Thomas, I suspect the A2A wil have a different (more realistic, probably) fuel consumption model than the default FSX one that I flew (and on which those rough calculations were based).
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...

[EHM-2387 Eric-Jan]

The awards were awarded OK, but I made a mistake in setting them up in the first place, so they would not appear in your forum avatars.
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!

[EHM-2387 Eric-Jan]

Just finished the short hop to RJAA in a little over an hour

Despite flying alone, I was not aloe there...

Details

 

Try to meet up on Thursday as well!

[EHM-1997 Alexander]

Naughty E-J 

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

[EHM-2387 Eric-Jan]

I know; I just installed it after the flight yesterday