Virtual Flyovers - Canada

In addition to SFG, one of the other things I do in retirement is flight simulation.  I took a flight in my simulator around Castlegar, BC.  Kelejan, does the slideshow below look anything like where you live or is what I am seeing purely fiction?

Slideshow

https://s87.photobucket.com/user/vifc313/slideshow/Miscellaneous/Castlegar

Trolley driver that was amazing.  Many thanks.  Even better than the Wikipedia description.

I enjoyed the flight, and I didn't even get air sick! Beautiful area.

trolleydriver wrote:In addition to SFG, one of the other things I do in retirement is flight simulation.  I took a flight in my simulator around Castlegar, BC.  Kelejan, does the slideshow below look anything like where you live or is what I am seeing purely fiction?

Slideshow

https://s87.photobucket.com/user/vifc313/slideshow/Miscellaneous/Castlegar

Thanks TD.  How can I slow down the pictures?  ETA Just found the slow button.  Yes, that is where I have lived since 1979.  Just a small town in the Southern Interior of British Columbia.

I nearly missed your post at the bottom of page 2 and only caught it  because Rosina and sanderson mentioned it.  Can you  post any more views or do you have to go where the plane takes you.

I have posted the link on my FaceBook page so that my family in England will know what sort of place I live in.  Most of my family live in big cities, London and Hull etc so have no idea of my area although my sister has visited.

Kelajan, I have complete control of the plane, where I fly and the type of plane I use. I can certainly post more screen shots.  Maybe I'll take a helicopter flight next time.  I expect the general landscape (e.g., mountains, rivers, airport location) as well as the major highways in the area should be fairly accurate (at least as far as general location).  However, it is quite doubtful that the secondary roads and the buildings will be accurate in any way.  Please let me know if that is the case or not. 

British Columbia is one of my favourite places to fly with the simulator. I especially like "bush flying" in small planes through the mountains and along the river valleys.  Some of the airports in that area can be a challenge for take-offs and landings. Lately, I have been flying more in the Boston area on a multiplayer system called VATSIM where we have real people taking on the roles of air traffic controllers.  That type of flying can be challenging as well since you have to follow the real world rules for visual and instrument flying.

I'll post more photos and if anyone else would like to see their area as it appears in Flight Simulator X please let me know.

We can even do float planes:



And how about Buffalo Airways out of the North West Territories:


Or Bob Hoover (famous test pilot air show pilot) doing an air show at Reno Nevada:

oooh TD. Can you fly over Kauai?  What an incredible thing!

I showed this to husband. He has a model airplane (still in one piece) and also laptop simulator program.

Really nice flight sim pictures!

I dabbled only just slightly in flight sims decades ago, when the graphics were primitive and kept flickering in and out all the time -- everything from the ground below to mountains would spontaneously disappear while you were flying.

My favorites were more arcade-like, like the Comanche helicopter sim, or even took place in space, like Descent. I remember getting the original Falcon sim and it came with a fat binder full of instructions. Getting through that successfully would be like teaching yourself a complex and highly technical college course on material you knew nothing about. Just a huge and frustrating project. The less challenging stuff was more fun because I could do it successfully almost immediately and it didn't break my brain.

Nice hobby. Hope you have fun with it. These days, I understand, it's very possible to learn a great deal about flying (or driving race cars, for instance) without every having been in a plane(or car).

Kelejan ... ouch on that horrible plane crash.  I updated your slideshow with an early morning flight out of Castlegar to the north then back down the Columbia River to Trail BC.  There is a second leg along the Kootenay River to Castlegar for the landing.

https://s87.photobucket.com/user/vifc313/slideshow/Miscellaneous/Castlegar

Kauairosina ... sorry about the colours.  The simulator is not a perfect representation. I'll have to try some photoreal scenery if I can find some to load into the sim.

If there are more flights to post I will do so on another topic/thread.

Thanks for the extra pics, TD.  Glad you landed us safely and how clever to switch planes in mid-flight. Good landing at the airport, it is a tricky one at times and so far I do not think we have all the bells and whistles.

When we first came to Canada, we flew from Calgary and passed over Castlegar and landed at Penticton and then bussed back a four-hour journey to Castlegar.

Even now when ever a plane passes overhead I make sure that it is not in line with me so that if it falls out of the sky I know which way to run.  After that accident they changed the flight rules so that a plane did not fly towards a crowd but parallel.

That airshow crash that happened in England the other week, the plane was flying parallel to the airshow crowd but landed on a motorway instead.

The flyovers of Castlegar are now in this topic.

sanderson wrote:The flyovers of Castlegar are now in this topic.

Thanks sanderson.

Very cool, TD. Thanks!