creating a round-trip flight

[Dodgey Geezer]

Yippee - my copy of FS2002 has arrived, and I now have it all installed and working.

I've already crashed my trusty Cessna into a volcano in Hawaii, into Kogarah Bay just south of Sydney Airport, and actually managed a 'reasonable' landing on the Isle of Wight (I saw someone on this site say that a 'good' landing is one that you walk away from... well that kinda sums up my one 'good' landing so far.

The Isle of Wight raises a question, that I've no doubt has been asked somewhere, but I can't find it - I wanted to create a flight plan starting at Sandown airfield, flying all around the Isle of Wight (what's happened to The Needles - by the way - they look more like a sandbar than imposing cliffs...) and landing back at Sandown again.  I put Sandown in as my start and destination, but there was no 'route' for me to drag to the additional waypoints I wanted.  I tried specifying a different airfield as my destination, which allowed me to create my route, but when I then changed the destination back to Sandown, I lost the route I had mapped out.  So I ended up flying all around the Island, landing at another nearby airfield, and catching a Bus back to Sandown!  Can anyone tell me what I have missed in the route planning part of the manual?

Thanks,
DG

[ozzy72]

Hi DG, well you can't make a flight to and from the same airfield in 2k2 without making a route with waypoints, not possible on the IOW I would have thought.
There is a Needles add-on scenery available, I think it is at flightsim under UK Lighthouses, we don't have this scenery for some reason...

Ozzy

[Dodgey Geezer]

Hi Ozzy,
 So can you give me some help on how to add waypoints?  According to the help text, I have to set a start and end point, then 'drag' the routeline between them to my waypoints.  I can do that if I have a route between different airstrips - but if the start and finish are at the same place, there is no routeline to drag.  The help text also mentions a second method of clicking on the route, which is supposed to present a 'facilities' list of nearby waypoints, from which you should be able to select waypoints to be added into the route... I can't make this one work for me - even when I do have a route line to click on.  Is there another way of doing it that I haven't seen?

btw - there are several waypoints available over the Isle of Wight, as it is under the major entry/exit routes from both Heathrow and Gatwick to many european locations, as well as a route along the southern coast, so there are lots of intersections points, as well as nav beacons and vfr points (such as The Needles and St. Catherine's Point), and of course, Bembridge, which is the other airfield I had to catch the bus back from ;-)

Although I have been living in Sydney for a year now (and will obviously be doing plenty of local virtual flying here), I have over 40 years of UK history, so obviously want to do some flying back there too.  Any scenery available for either location would be great... I'll have a look at the flightsim site to see if I can find the package you mentioned.

Cheers,
DG

[RAFAIR100]

Hi DG,

I had the same problem using Edinburgh as my start and finish points.      My solution was to select another airfield close to Edinburgh as my destination point (say Dundee).       Then plan the route to come through Edinburgh as the last waypoint before destination.   Having saved the file, open it in notepad, delete the final waypoint (Dundee) and make the necessary corrections to the start of the file in terms of start and destination airfields.    Sounds complicated.   It isn't - AND it works.

[Dodgey Geezer]

Ah - many thanks for that.  I guessed there might be a degree of 'manual intervention' required.  I just had a look at the .PLN file - I see what you mean - doesn't look too difficult at all.  I'll give it a go.

Cheers,
DG