Thursday 22 November 2012

Graziosa revisited.

The first blog post here at The Whole Damn World was posted on August 19th, 2008. This blog is now 4 years, 3 months, and 2 days old.

That first post just said hello. It explained that I was using google earth quite a lot, and that I was making a blog to share the interesting things I found. Since then, it's broadened out into my general, life blog, sharing the good times and bad, whatever comes along. Still, it's always had, and probably always will have, a focus on the world as seen through this remarkable bit of software. Now, as then, there can be few clearer signs that we're living in an age of marvels than being able to zoom in, in 3 dimensions, on pretty much any point on the planet, and close enough to see, in some places at least, what colour hair someone has.

But you also get, free of charge, a flight simulator that allows you to pilot a plane over that generated landscape. The regular reader is aware of course that my efforts to get to grips with this have also been a sporadic but fairly frequent subject of my posts.

My second ever post dealt with attempting to take off from an island airport, to fly around that island, and to land on the same runway. On that occasion, I crashed. Would I be any better now?

Well I do have a little more knowledge now. For example, at the end of the runway is a number. This marks the bearing (he\ding? - bear with sore head) of the runway. For Graziosa, one end has a bearing of 09, the other has a bearing of 27.  The runway at Liverpool Airport has exactly the same orientation. I thought they should add up to 36, but Manchester Airport's twin parallel runways each have 05 and 23 as their numbers, so I'm barking up the wrong tree a little on this. Still, as the picture below shows, when in flight, you get numbers on the HUD that correspond to that heading.




This time round, I have video capturing software, so if you have 6 minutes and 38 seconds to spare, you can watch it. I've even set it to music. It turns out that I have several tunes of exactly the right length. The love scene from Zabriskie point was as boring as the video, so I went for a bit of classical instead.


As you can see, I managed to land on the runway, although it was a little bouncy. The runway is somewhat obscured by clouds, although the clouds themselves are  a clue to it's whereabouts. Still, a straighter approach would have been better.

Being competent at something doesn't mean never making a mistake. It means when you do make a mistake, you know how to get back in control.

driving lessons in Wallasey? learn to drive in Wirral? driving instructor in Birkenhead?

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