PilotEdge Forums

I spent a little time looking at the drones on the network and had a couple thoughts:

First off all the XC flights look great, but I'm seeing a lack of local type flights (airwork), at least based on my comparisons to live traffic views that I've used, ADS-B (linked to ARTCC radar as well), TIS-B and the similar.

I think part of this may be due to a lack of understanding by sim pilots about what a real training flight may be like. So with that idea in mind, here is an example of what a training flight may consist of:

Take off from an airport and climb to 2000-3000 AGL while heading out to the nearest "empty area" (no cities, airports, airspace), normally within 20 miles of the airport.

Once there fly the airplane as slow as you can without stalling it. Then do a couple of actual stalls and recoveries. When not doing a manuver make random 90-180 degree turns (these are used to look for traffic).

After doing a couple of stalls, do some steep banked (45) 360 degree turns.

After that pretend to have an engine failure and descend down to 500 feet or so before climbing back up to 800-1000' AGL. Once there find a point and do a couple circles around it (while staying the same distance away from the point).

This should all take 30 minutes to an hour. From there climb up to 1500' AGL, head back to your original airport, do 1-4 landings and call it a day. The whole sequence should be about an hour and a half.

Spot on, PG, thx for the post. I have done a couple of air work drones...however, the initial goal has been to get the drones covering as much sky as possible, so that they might be seen by real pilots on the network. Once I have the traffic density where I want it, my goal will be to flesh out some more realistic local operations (I've started this at Compton, there is one local sightseeing flight, a pattern work flight, one air work flight, and one aerobatic flight, all of which are representative of the traffic over the Palo Verde peninsula). There's also an air work drone that leaves out of AVX and does much of what you listed on the SE corner of the island). Socal is looking fantastic in terms of coverage...so I would be very happy to start seeing more of the drones that you described above in some of the traditional training areas, wherever they would be in socal!

Norcal, however, has only just gotten started, and still needs the XC drones to be fleshed out (although I have no problem at all if ppl have an interest in doing some air work as described above, obviously...any and all are welcome).

PG, if you have the time to do some of these, please do.

Thx again, PG, great call.

http://www.scauwg.org/presentations/PracticeAreas3.ppt

That has a map of every socal practice area.

I have few hours free tonight, I'll record a couple of drone flights in Norcal. I'll post a separate thread as I go through them.