Flyboy

My ambition originally was to be an astronomer and was a physics major before discovering flying. I’ve seen many many satellites before and this was not like any satellite I’ve ever seen before. If you watch the video above you seem them equally orbit about a point within about 5 degrees relative angle (the angular diameter of the moon is 30 arcseconds or 0.5 degrees). Satellites travel a straight line as they orbit earth, whether in a polar orbit or something else (equatoria, stationary, etc.). I’ve never seen any in 40 years of sky watching do this. Was near New Mexico at 37,000 feet and about an hour before sunrise. Venus was nearby and partial moon higher in the sky.

My friend in Japan just reported back to me that they have been seeing them over there also and are suspecting Musk's low orbit Starlink satellites but I'm not so sure. I don't see how even in low orbit they can move that way.

I have since shared this with my pilot friends and most of them have seen this too but can’t explain it.

As a pilot one of the frequent questions I've been asked over the years is if I’ve seen a UFO. Well, I can finally say yes after the other night flying from Phoenix to Baltimore. The lights were in the Eastern sky near Venus. There was at least three of them and they seemed to orbit each other in a circle. Their luminosity would slowly change from barely or not visible to nearly as bright as Venus. They were definitely very high in the sky, so maybe that was because of reflections from sun like a satellite. But these were not normal satellites. Satellites travel in a straight line as they orbit the earth but these were on a tight (maybe 5 degrees angular) orbit. This article pretty much describes what we saw but it says here the pilots reported them around the Big Dipper but the ones we saw were in the SE sky near Scorpius. My First Officer had seem them before and heard another crew report them to ATC and the controller said they had many reports about them but didn’t know what they were. https://www.cpr.org/2023/08/25/strange-lights-in-the-sky-reported-by-pilots-around-eastern-colorado-thursday/

I'm in the process of creating a new "nearly real" training map using Kutaisi for Blue and Vaziani for Red. It will have low clouds so you can't see the ground easily and have to use instrument references for SA and do an instrument approach on return (but with 2 nm vis so can do nonprecision with F-5 and Mig-19), no labels and no ref on map. I want to put in enemy spawned AI like on your BFMACM maps and have been studying your triggers plus watching youtube vids. I also want to set up a practice "sparring" maps where one side defends and the other attacks where we can divide up into sides and do internal practice battles. Mouce and I are also thinking that having smoke pods on the Mig-21 can be useful not only for training but for helping find each other. It's better than wasting flares and is negligible weight.

Wow this is great stuff! Thanks for the detailed info

So I'm finally trying to get more serious about learning triggers and am stuck for the moment with adding sounds for the messages to coalition. I looked online and watched one video so far which led me to download Audacity, but where is the best place to get some of the sound files that would be appropriate for DCS? Can I use text to speech computer voice? @Klaiber where did you come up with some of your sounds like "Engaging bandit?"

And they are still trying to perfect it.

https://www.military.com/video/operations-and-strategy/covert-operations/how-to-catch-a-falling-spy-satellite/3841223113001

Early in my career I knew pilots who did this and it was fascinating how they could catch the pictures taken from satellites on re-entry. This is how they got the pictures for the Cuban missile crisis. Back in the day when we only had wired telephones pay phone booths!

New open beta update today so maybe changes things?

I would have loved to do mission editing for WW1 but I saw right away that the learning curve was going to be way too steep and even experienced editors get very frustrated. I enjoy the DCS editor even though I still have a lot to learn.

I was surprised the controller was as calm as he was. I’ve heard this controllers at JFK be a lot more nasty than that.

South American contractor goes off runway during landing.

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2023/09/putin-should-be-ashamed-russias-last-aircraft-carrier-is-a-floating-dumpster-fire/

Was going through some old files and had the covers of these clipped

Ok so I had to share this because it was super cute and fun. Our nonprofit did a special “Where’s Romeo?” event where we took our mini Romeo to Tractor Supply. The winner who found him first and said the code word Popsicle got a gift certificate from the manager.

I recently used this video to tweak settings for both msfs and DCS and it seems to be working. Went from 40 to 60 fps in DCS and msfs is running much smoother. Here's some other recommendations from Hawg for msfs. The tree mod really helps make it more realistic and not so "zombie apocalypse." Put these in the Community folder: https://flightsim.to/file/40530/forest-enhancement-mod https://flightsim.to/file/26186/powerlines-and-solar-farms https://flightsim.to/file/16674/we-love-vfr-region-2 https://flightsim.to/file/28286/unknown-s-runway-lights https://flightsim.to/file/8614/airports-lights This is also worth looking into as a fun business strategy option to msfs https://www.neofly.net/

One of my favorites also. Had to read the first on for sci fi class in college then years later got around to reading the whole series and it surprised me. My other favorite series at the Patrick O’Brien series (Master and Commander is first book and title of movie they made with Russell Crowe). my other is Sharpe’s Rifles (Sean Bean got his start playing the role in the series).