Weekend at EGSS

Hi folks!

I had another great weekend at Virtual Stansted again so expect some screenshots. Some interesting things have been happened since my last post. There is the FlightGear Fall Festival  starting November the 5th (2016) which sounds like its far off but its already being planned out to be a great event.

The event will be held in the U.K, so that means that the whole of Europe will be a frenzy of activity with ATCs and pilots aplenty. I can say that I will be at EGSS for the event and will be controlling from REDFA down to my doorstep. So when the event comes around come and pay me a visit.

I am working on adding some scenery for Stansted so it is ready for the event. I'm a complete newbie when it comes to doing that so its yet another learning curve. I will initially start with the gates and jetways and if I can find an object large enough the terminal building.

A note about routes, if you are coming to Stansted grab a copy of the airport plate from my description in mumble (mumble.allfex.org) and have a look at the routes. The SIDs are easy and the best STAR to use would be something in ABBOT.

Before I get into my (brief) weekend log I would like to mention that I have an unusual week ahead of me, and should REALLY give me something to write about (if I have any luck with pictures!). I'm not going to jump the gun by shouting off what it is (some of you I know already know) but its bloody brilliant and you really should subscribe so you don't miss it.

Saturday
Was a nice night, some familiar faces came by and went off to Ireland which was cool, which you can see below in the screenshots. What I tried here was bunching up the outbound flights more so it was more efficient. I find now that if I just let the pilots contact me when they are ready I don't make them feel rushed and I have a little more time myself.

In this situation what happened was everyone filed their flight plan before they did anything else, everyone was pretty much chilling out and agreeing where to go. The pilots decided their destination and I had a succession of  flight plans to set up, then it was a matter of getting them there. I just about had holding points S1, S3, R1 and R3 filled up and as soon as the currently departing AC was positive climb the next one was lining up. It was all running just like its supposed to! it was very cool!

Here are some pics of that:
 

 

One of my visitors on Saturday was flying Donald Trumps aircraft, he kindly sent me some screenshots and said I can post them, so here they are.

Sunday was REALLY quiet.

There isn't much more I can say really, yet here is a picture of something happening on Sunday.

FlightGear Spring Festival - We love Japan!

Hi everyone!

This is my first post after the FlightGear Spring Festival, and it was SO much fun! I hope everyone else had as much fun as I did and I would like to say thank you to everyone that joined in.

Festival time at RJGG

I was stationed at RJGG with ElGaton running centre, the airport was really nice looking (from the pilots perspective). This was my best experience with having a centre operating over me. We had quite a few people come by and the region was fairly busy, I would call this festival a success.

I met a lot of new people and spoke to members of the FlightGear community that I wouldn't normally see which was great. Trying out a new airport was really interesting and I started out with "this is really hard" but by the second night and some more documents (Thanks ElGaton) it hit the floor running and started to appreciate the way things are done over there.

Here are a couple of pictures of RJGG airport that t-urbo took for me. (you can click these)

  

The DME approach for the airport was really difficult for many pilots, its a circle! it was also a challenge for me as ATC to vector someone round a circle, the area has very few fixes, only 4 VORs and a couple of DME. But I gave it a go and I was really impressed with my progress, ill post some pictures of it here. Big kudos go out to pilot BA_007 for flying this SO well and actually got the "feel" for what I was vectoring and I don't think he had the DME route available to him at the time (I could be wrong).

There are a number of pictures here all showing a time separation of about 2 minutes, observe the contact trails showing how well he tracked the approach.

    

So "Pilot of the Day" went to ...

Busy busy!

We had quite an active service in my area of Japan which was cool, here is a screen of the tower activity on Sunday night.



And we also had lots and lots of people flying, it was fantastic!

The Troll

Yep there was a troll being a pain, spamming and all that rubbish. But like all trolls they had a poor attention span and soon left. To critique their griefing I would say it was unimaginative and lacked the real pazazz that really gets people going. Spamming swear words and lame ass 'insults' don't really cut it I would rate this troll at a 2/10 which rates them as "Slightly less than annoying", sorry pal.

The end

Well, the event came to an end, and on mumble all the centres came round and thanked everyone for coming which was really nice I thought. And on this note I hope you enjoyed my brief summary of the event and the pictures. Until next time happy flying, and I hope to see you at my usual haunt of London Stansted (EGSS).