Kai Tak from FlyTampa...

[speedbird591]

Thanks for that pointer...That thread contained the solution to my problem and it is completely fixed now.

That's great, Peter. If only all of life's solutions were that simple

I'm still wibbling about what to do with my AI. Being a Libran can make decisions very painful affairs! At least decisions in a virtual world are reversible, so I think I'm going to follow my first instinct and send all the pax stuff back to CLK and leave the cargo carriers using Kai Tak along with a mixture of 70s/80s/90s classic AI - whatever I can find. I'm just off to AI Aardvark to do some window shopping!

All this talk of Hong Kong, and particularly DaveB's tale of misbehaviour , has reminded me of an amusing story. A group of us followed up our Happy Hour drinks at the Excelsior Hotel with a visit to the Kong Lau restaurant in Central - a crew favourite for it's speciality of sizzling garlic prawns. Afterwards we split up to go to nightclubs, nightcaps or whatever, but the FO and I decided to stagger back to Causeway Bay through the Wanchai girlie bar area and grab a few beers on the way. This is far more restrained than Bangkok - hostesses and topless dancers rather than the 'anything goes' culture of Patpong. We weren't looking for women, we were looking for beer with a view! We set ourselves a mission to find the cheapest beer in Wanchai served by a topless barmaid. It involved a lot of hilarious bargaining and posturing with doormen but one was eventually so desperate that he chased us down the street. "OK, OK, you have beer for $12 Hong Kong." Well, it served us right! The bar was dingy and deserted but flushed with victory and expectation we collapsed on to a couple of bar stools. A pale, skinny, po-faced, flat-chested girl wearing jeans and a cardigan came out from behind a screen and slammed a couple of bottles of of Tsing Tsao on the counter and disappeared again, leaving us on our own. When we'd finished our beers we called out for some more and she came back - still wearing the cardigan. "Isn't this a topless bar?" we asked. "Yeah, sure." "So aren't you going to take your cardigan off?", we ventured. "F**k off, Johnny! I no take my top off for $12 a beer!" We collapsed with laughter, stayed for a couple of hours and gave her a good tip for making our evening!

Ian

[sketchy74]

As well as not having a PC fast enough to run Fly Tampa's scenery on FSX! All this talk of Hong Kong is making me jealous I have never been, and more to the point after the best part of 10 years working in the Toy design industry cannot understand why I haven't been as all my products are made there!!

As for old stories I loved my fathers ones about being in and out of Hong Kong on HMS Victorious in the 60's when the US Navy ships came in on R&R from Vietnam. His stories of how under paid they were in comparison to the US Navy was aided by the USN's "Cinderella Leave" policy of being back on board at 12midnight. It made me laugh to hear how the Royal Navy used to sit back and watch the better paid sailors from the US ply the local girls with drinks :drinkers: then dart for the door about 11.45pm to get back, just as the Brits would move in to take full advantage of the local talent after a few drinks they didn't have to buy

[DaveB]

One of the good things about HK was the ease at which you could 'do a runner' from a cab (not that I condone this abuse or have ever willingly taken part in such an action)

The Vietnam tale reminds me of our visit to Satahib.. still an active base for 'Naam' at the time. A cab out into the sticks.. a nice meal followed by one of the merry men faking choking to death towit we rushed him away.. forgetting to pay for the meal

No wonder matelots get a bad name

ATB

DaveB :tab:

[jonesey2k]

[petermcleland]

Just for info...I have modified the "Diversions List" above to now include the 62 WoA files that I have used for diverting traffic to Kai Tak from Chek Li Kok. These three shots reflect this latest situation just at one moment in time.

[speedbird591]

Your Kai Tak is now looking very busy and colourful, Peter. Nice job. I'm still experimenting with a different tack and the airport is presently off limits for modern aircraft - although I'm sharing the airspace with my WoAI traffic at CLK

I'm attempting to stock the airport with a selection of older jets that I'm familiar with from my visits in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Although not an accurate selection, I'm starting to get a period atmosphere. This sort of AI stuff is harder to find as there's no 'one stop shop' and I'm having to pick up suitable a/c from DM flightsim ;-) , Cal Classics, Project AI, AI Aardvark and some repaints from Avsim. I then have to install, try them out and reject those that aren't up to it! It's painstaking work but I'll get there in the end. This is a very early taster:



Ian

[petermcleland]

Ian...I haven't looked at the AFCAD in fine detail yet but I notice that they don't use any airline parking codes, so all parking selection is controlled by:-

a) The randomised sequence in the parking list (ATC searches from the top of the list and allocates the first one it comes to with the right Parking Type and Radius).

b) Parking Type...All passenger aircraft get a Gate...mostly Heavy but a few Medium and two Small the only Ramp parking is Cargo.

c) The Radius...There are 8 Cargo slots of 164 feet and these are the biggest other radii used are 148 feet, 125 feet and 102 feet (only 2 at a Gate Small).

It is very logical to leave the line of heavy gates, on the long thin apron running parallel to the runway, as overflow parking to be used last...This does seem to happen but I can't see why!

I get the feeling that a lot of thought has gone into the control of parking and I certainly like the way it works on my machine. I'm not going to mess with it but with your setup, you may like to allocate Airline Parking codes to get them to park where you want :flying:

[speedbird591]

Ah! I'm glad you mentioned AFCAD, Peter! I have the program and have an idea of how it works - though I've never dabbled. At the moment, I'm quite happy with the random attribution of parking but, if I stick with this idea, I'll definitely need some advice at a later date :roll:

I'm thinking that if I can find enough AI models of a decent quality, I might put the older or inappropriate ones in a static aviation museum somewhere out of the way of the working aircraft. At the moment the priority is to locate, download and install aircraft and then finally put them in some sort of sensible order!

As I'm only interested in seeing the aircraft at HKG, I'm not concerned where they go. Most of them are flying back and forth to Taipei and Manila with long stopovers in HKG, but I've also duplicated some WoAI flightplans (substituting VHHX for VHHH) for the local airlines so mine can hop across to regional airports in China. As I'm unlikely to visit them it won't bother me that they have an odd selection of visitors!

BTW - until I have enough aircraft around, for each model I have approximately two assigned to proper flightplans but additionally one of each is "static". (A few more than that for CX!). I used your idea of writing a simple flightplan of just one flight a week in the middle of the night. I've split them up on different days, but every morning at 0100 one seventh of them fly off to Macau, have a cup of tea and fly back for breakfast! A good time to be fast asleep

Ian

[petermcleland]

OK Ian,

When you get around to wanting them to park in a definite place, let me know your requirements and I'll help you program it

[speedbird591]

Here's an update on my AI restock of KaiTak. I'm trying to recreate a 70s/80s atmosphere and have been trawling the internet for some older paint schemes. Unfortunately the Cal Classics package is 60s but there are one or two later paints around which bring some of them into my frame. What's also handy is that the WoAI packages contain a lot of older aircraft and I found a few older paint schemes to put on my existing WoAI models. Sadly, most of the links to paints of this era are dead but I've managed to find 45 that I rather like. I've now got them all up and running but they are not allowed to fly until the stock check is complete and I can keep tabs on them

The next step is to allocate them to flightplans which will make the airport look a bit bare. I can then either allocate two copies of each model to flightplans or leave a selection as permanent static models. I'll probably do the first, but I'll try out one plan at a time. When that's done, I'll be asking Peter for a tutorial in AFCAD to make them park in sensible places and maybe open an aviation museum for the older Cal Classics which can give an airshow every Saturday afternoon






Ian