Hello everyone,
I was calculating (manually, not in flight simulator) the heading that I should follow to fly from Cork Airport to Shannon Airport in Ireland. I have a very recent low-air map of Ireland. The heading that I had to maintain according to my protractor was 343°. In flight simulator, however, when I make a flight plan to fly from Cork (EICK, runway 35) to Shannon (EINN) airport, the flight plan and nav log tells me I should maintain heading 350°. This is incorrect. I know it's not an issue with the software as I've recently done a format of my hard drive and reinstalled only Windows XP Pro, the drivers and Flight Sim 2004. Could someone be so kind to try the same thing with his own flight simulator?
Another problem is with the wind: if I set custom weather and I take 20KTS wind coming from 310° then in my nav log from Cork to Shannon, flight simulator still tells me that I have to maintain 350°, instead of the log displaying the wind correction (if I calculate this with protractor and flight computer on the map, taking the speed of the King Air into account, my calculations tell me I should make a 2° wind correction to the left, in other words fly 341° to arrive in Shannon in a little over 10 minutes time). Did anyone else notice flight simulator not taking wind into account? I know that the wind has been set because I can feel crosswind during take-off. I'm doing it correctly I think, I make one wind layer that goes up to 5000FT and I take a BeechCraft King Air to fly the course at 4500FT.
Has anyone else noticed problems like these? I haven't tried it with other maps yet, but I have a low-air map of Belgium too and I'm gonna try that out sometime too.
Thanks,
Bart
First Officer