AAC goes long haul

Wednesday’s AAC event saw our best pilots navigating the open waters of the Blake Sea, a huge connection of sims creating a massive interconnecting waterway. At the briefing we were given a list of instructions. Our mission was to get from Honah Lee Field to Second Life International Airport (SLIA.)

Our flight plans would require flying through and around 35 sims, changing direction at least 11 times, so it isn’t as straight forward as jumping into a plane and flying in one direction or around one sim.

To compound the difficulty, we were required to use physical flight (PF) aircraft which are notoriously harder to fly. These more closely resemble the flying style of real aircraft as opposed to our standard AAC ships, which use the easier to control hover mode. Hover mode is similar to arcade game style of flying using the familiar up, down, left, right, forward and backward keys or the slightly harder but more satisfying mouse-look mode, where you control your direction by pointing the nose of your plane with the mouse. Physical flight requires you to manage your altitude and your flight speed. For instance, you must reach a certain speed before you can become airborne.

After the briefing we were all given a TP to Honah Lee Field and asked to rez any PF plane we had or use the rezzer Gokyu Ugajin made available to us.

Our first instruction was to taxi our plane on the runway and head north to the next sim raising your speed to at least up to 40% so you can take off, once you had left the airfield sim you then had to fly west into the next sim following the notecard guide you were given at the briefing.

Flying across 35 sims in various directions is a good challenge any pilot, for not only do you have to keep your plane steady, but pay attention to the instructions and hope the game lag wont be enough to send you spinning out of control!

Unfortunately, only two of the members who took part in the event made it all the way to the final destination airport by completing the whole course. Congratulations to Sodak Xeltentat and Snapper Desade! Our other team members had technical difficulties. While game lag can be a problem, crashing into a lighthouse doesn’t help either! Overall, it was a fun challenge and flying through the dinosaur bones at Ahab’s Haunt is a blast!

After a hard day of flying for the GFC Aircorps, it was back to Sovereign Beach for a drink and a chat at the bar for some well deserved R&R, where pilots tell stories of past missions, compare battle scars and play who can drink the next person under the table the fastest.