Arno Gerretsen : Aviation

Criel-sur-Mer

arno — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 14:45:00 GMT

The last few days we were in Normandy, around Criel-sur-Mer. Just a few days away to relax a bit after a busy year and trying to think as little as possible about work or flight simulation. So when it was a nice and sunny day we decided to go for a walk along the coast and over the beautiful cliffs.

And what do you think we stumbled upon during our walk? A nice little airstrip, on top of the cliff and quite close to the coast. I think the airstrip is used by a local flying club, probably with ultralights, but I am not sure about that. We saw one ultralight flying that day as well.

Apart from a few white markers and the little sign (see the photo to the right) there was not much that identified this piece of grass as an airstrip. I think it must be pretty hard to spot something like this from the air, it really blend well into the environment. I found it back on Google Maps though and you can also see the markers there.

For many FS sceneries it is still a challenge to blend that well into the environment. If there was a nice photo scenery of Normandy for FSX (I am not sure if there is actually, I am not so up-to-date with French sceneries), would this not be a fun little airstrip to fly from while exploring the coast? It could be a nice little side project to make if I ever get bored.

Day 9: AvSim FanCon day 2

arno — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 05:46:00 GMT

Today it was much more quiet on the FanCon, it seemed quite some people had already left. But this also had some advantages, for example that we could play a multiplayer Reno airrace mission with a group of developers. Although we could not do the mission in slew mode, it actually went quite well and it certainly was a lot of fun.

After attending a very good presentation by Bill Womack about the possibilities of the new FsX materials (I guess I should ask him to put that explaination on the Wiki as well), we decided to go out and doing something fun in the afternoon. We decided on going to the harbour of Seattle and taking a scenic flight with a floatplane of Kenmore Air. That was a lot of fun. although it was a little bit bumpy due to the strong winds out there. I guess this was a nice present to give myself on my birthday.

This week I also met Misho Katulic for the first time. Certainly among scenery designers he is best known for his TerraBuilder tool, but he also showed us his latest product TerraBuilder:Moon. This interesting addon will transform the FS world as you know it into the moon. So instead of flying around you local airport, so you try out to land on the moon. So I guess all space enthousiasts should check out the website of this new addon.

Day 8: AvSim FanCon day 1

arno — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 18:56:00 GMT

The 2nd and 3d day of the DevCon kept me quite busy, so I did not write a new blog posts about them. But I can tell you that those two days were great as well. Learned a lot and spoken to a lot of interesting people.

Yesterday was the 1st day of the Avsim FanCon and I enjoyed that a lot. There were quite some interesting presentations and I met more people that I know from the AvSim scenery design forums. It is so nice to have a face behind those forum user names now.

I also gave a presentation at the FanCon, about the evolution in scenery design over the last 10 years. Some time ago I realized that it is 10 years ago already that I started to make scenery for Fs5 and since then a lot has changed. So in the presentation I took an look at how the default scenery has changed between Fs5 and FsX. Of course this is quite a lot, in Fs5 we still had a flat, empy world. While in FsX we now have a realistic looking, living, populated world. Comparing screenshots of the same location in all those versions of FS gives a nice overview of the changes.

Besides the default scenery, I also took a look at how my own addon sceneries have evolved over time. It was quite fun to actually dig up the first addon I made for Fs5 again. With the help of a DOS emulator, I even got Fs5 with that addon to run again on my laptop. In the last part of my presentation I took a look at how the scenery design tools have evolved in those 10 years and you can be sure the changes are quite big. Some things have become easier, other things have become more complex now. But one thing is sure, in all those years we have had a lot of fun making addon scenery.

In the evening there was the AvSim Awards Banquet. They had two very interesting speakers, the first was a Boeing test pilot who gave a talk about the Boeing 747 Superfreighter that is used to transport parts of the 787. And the second speaker was Eric Lindbergh Jr. who talked about his own transatlantic flight and the XPrize foundation he is involved in. Both together this made the banquet very interesting.

Day 4: Museum of Flight

arno — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 00:57:00 GMT

Today I went to the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field in Seattle. I have seen quite some aviation musea by now (for example Duxford in the UK, Aviodrome in the Netherlands), but this one also has a very good collection. And also the volunteers working there are very friendly and have great stories to tell you about the aircraft.

Besides all the "usual" pieces that you will find in almost every aviation museum (like a DC-3, Piper Cub, etc) there were also a lot of pieces that made the visit very interesting. For example there was a section about the US air mail history (very interesting for an European like me). And also in the sections about the First and Second World War I spend quite some time. They had a really good mix between talking about the aircraft and about the pilots flying them in those sections. In the Second World War section especially the part about the war in the Pacific interested me, as that part usually gets less attention in Europe.

All those old aircraft with their beautifull piston engines interest me a lot, but in the museum they also had some very interesting modern pieces like a SR-71 and a Concorde. Although I have been in the Concorde at Duxford before, it surprised me again how narrow that cabin actually is. Another interesting piece was the old Air Force One 707, with most of the interior still in place as well.

And being in Seattle (and on Boeing Field) there was a section about the history of Boeing as well of course. That section was in the origional "Red Barn" where the Boeing Company started a long time ago. It was very interesting to see the kind of tools they used back then to make an aircraft. Especially when you compare it to the things I saw yesterday at the assembly line of the 777.

This afternoon I arrived at the Hilton hotel in Bellevue where the actual DevCon and FanConf conferences will be held. The DevCon will be starting tomorrow and I will also have to give my presentation on the first day. So I guess I will do a last dry-run in my hotel room tonight. I must say I am really looking forward to meet all those people I know from the internet in real tomorrow.

Day 3: Boeing Factory

arno — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 22:18:00 GMT

Today I visited the Future of Flight Center and took the Boeing Tour. The center itself has a nice display that explains the history of the Boeing civil aircraft and also shows you something about the materials used, the engines, etc. This all is mixed up with a lot of videos and other interactive displays, they sure know well how to present things. And if they had a change to write down that their aircraft are better than Airbus, they certainly did so on the information panels. The only negative thing for me was that, being an aeronautical engineer, there was not so much new for me to learn there.

After that I took the Boeing Tour, where you get to visit the assembly lines of the 777 and 787. Maybe visit is a bit of a big word, as you are standing on a balcony with a good overview only. Once again the information provided was not very deep (I mean the length of the aircraft I can also lookup myself on the internet), but probably the more technical things I am interesting in would scare away most other visitors. But just seeing how these aircraft are made is very impression, that alone is worth the visit I would say.

After that I decided to try to go to downtown Seattle, to see if there was anything worth seeing there. But unfortunately I never really got there. Once I got near the city center, I tried to find a place to park the car. That did not really work out as I expected (busy traffic, probably some lack of preparation on my side), in the end I got lost and was quite far from the city center again. At that moment I had lost my interest to try again to find a parking place, so I decided to go back to the hotel. I guess I can better use this afternoon to work on the presentation for the AvSim FanConf after all.

The forgotten Douglas

arno — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 09:16:00 GMT

Those who visited the SceneryDesign.org forums in the past might recognise my old avatar in the picture on the left. This aircraft is (one of) my favorite aircraft and as it is a little unknown I was thinking about writing a blog post about it for a while already. So here is that blog post.

For those that have not yet recognised hte aircraft from this little avatar, I am talking about the Douglas DC-5. Ever since I once borrowed the book "De Douglas DC-5" from Piet Kok from the library, I have liked this aircraft a lot. Currently I own the book as well, but I think it is only available in Dutch.

Why has such an book been published in Dutch? This is probably best explained by the fact that only 12 DC-5 aircraft have been build, of which 4 have been used the the KLM, the Dutch airline. Due to the outbrake of the second world war these aircraft have never been used in the Netherlands itself, they have been used in the Dutch West Indies (Curacao) and the Dutch East Indies (Java, Indonesia). The other 8 have been used by the US Navy as R3D. A funny note is that one of the aircraft has been the personal aircraft of William Boeing for a while, before it went to the US Navy as well. At that moment William Boeing was no longer working for the Boeing Company though.

Unlike most other civil Douglas aircraft of that time, the DC-5 was designed by the El Sequndo division of Douglas (this division also build the SBD Dauntless for example). For its time the DC-5 was a quite advanced aircraft, having a nose landing gear for example. It still had a tailwheel as well, but that was mainly mounted to prevent damage in case the pilot was not really used to flying with a nosewheel. The aircraft has been designed as a feeder aircraft to be used on smaller lines, it could carry a maximum of 22 passengers.

So what went wrong for this aircraft? It must be called the forgotten Douglas now because it never really became a success. This is mainly due to the outbrake of the second world war. At the time the DC-5 was still a very new aircraft (first flight 20 february 1939) and some time would be needed to perfect the design. Due to the war this time was not there and it was decided that the DC-3 would become the standard transport aircraft. Besides that the El Sequndo division needed to be produce the Dauntless as well. So after only 12 aircraft had been build, the program was cancelled.

A last funny fact is that the DC-5 flew before the DC-4 as we know it know flew. This is because before the current design of the DC-4, Douglas was also working on a DC-4E. But as this aircraft proved to be too complex, it never went into production.

Vliehors

arno — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 12:51:00 GMT

I am back, hopefully the leakage has been fixed now (I still have the new sealant beneath my fingernails). I can't say that I had much fun trying to fix the shower, now I know for sure that I am not really a do-it-yourselfer.

I can't say that I did not have fun at all this last week, as I visited the shooting range of the Dutch airforce on the island of Vlieland. It was really cool to visit the control tower there and see the aircraft and helicopters fly by really close. We had a great day there, see the two photos below.

We did not only visit the range to watch the aircraft of course, we are also going to model it in the NL2000 scenery. So we took some good photos and notes for that as well. After all the repairing of my shower, I am really looking forward to spend more time on scenery design again this week.

New York

arno — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 03:49:00 GMT

I am already a few days back from my trip to New York and here is a little travel report. Unfortunately I also brought back a bit of flu, so that is why I have not been really active the last days.

Our trip started at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol and luckily we departed from the G-pier, so I had a good look at the recently opened H-pier (I just modeled that one, so I wanted to check if it looked right).

The flight itself was with Delta Airlines in a Boeing 767-300. Luckily I had a window seat on this flight, so I could take a good look at the scenery. I have for example been looking at the sun reflection in the ocean for some while. Really cool how all those different colors blend. I must say that the sun reflections in MSFS don't look that bad, they certainly look better then the ones (or should I say lack of ones) in the image generator we use at work. I guess that is something we can improve in the future.

When we arrived in New York there was an overcast, so unfortunately we could not really enjoy that view from the aircraft. But we had two days left to explore the city, before our course would start. As the city is very big of course, we mainly walked around it to feel the atmosphere. Our hotel was nicely located in Manhattan, so one day we walked to the south till we reached the end of the island. And the other day we went up north to Central Park. And the last day we walked over the bridges into Brooklyn and back again. The view from those bridges was really nice.

I was impressed by the skyline as well. I have read the book "The island at the Center of the World" from Russell Shorto. It is about the first few (Dutch) years of the city of New York (then called New Amsterdam). In it are also some drawings of the skyline back then. The highest building was probably the windmill they had constructed. If you know see all those huge skyscrappers at the same place, it makes it hard to image how it once was.

Now that I am talking about the Dutch origin of the city anyway, did you know that Brooklyn comes from the Dutch town called Breukelen? And similar to that the name Harlem comes from the Dutch city Haarlem? Those are a few things that still remind of the Dutch origin of the city. Another is Wall Street. At the location of this street, the city wall used to be in the Dutch times. But I guess that is enough history for today!

From New York city we drove by car to Binghamton. Our course was given there at the university. At first I had never heard of that place and it did not really make sense why we had to go especially to there for a course on flight simulation.

But it seemed that Edwin Link designed and constructed his first link trainer in that area. At the local airport there is even an model displayed. So this region really has the roots of flight simulation and that makes it easier to understand why exactly that university has collected quite some knowledge on the subject.

The course itself was very interesting. A lot of different aspects of simulation where discussed. It ranged from motion systems, to visual systems, from control loaders to image generators. And of course the aspects of mathematical modelling for the simulation were also touched. In the end it was a really interesting week that provided a lot of information about simulation and all its aspects. I will certainly not become an expert in all, but it should always help to talk better with the colleagues who are.