A challenge for everyone out there. At the beginning of each month use the Great Circle Map Website to create a flight map of all the routes you’ve flown in the last month. To create your detailed flight map enter one route in and hit map. Then scroll down to the bottom of the Great Circle Map created and enter in the rest of your routes in the Map Controls Paths box at the bottom. Let’s see who has utilized IF to it’s full potential! Of course I will be pulling winners from among those that submit their flight maps. There will be three categories that I will be drawing winners from
Most Distance Traveled in the last month
Highest Distance Average on routes
Most Diverse routes
The first two can be found at the bottom of the page for GCM and the last category will be determined by a submitted flight map. The winners from each month will be displayed on the thread and will receive an invite to do a hyper realistic group flight that both challenges one’s airmanship and one’s horizon of the world with me and the other winners on the Expert server.
Of course there are rules.
Valid Flights for the month must be started on the first of the month and before the first of the month.
Flights that end on the first of the month cannot be submitted for two separate months
Flights must originate and end at different airports however return flights in the same session are acceptable.
Monthly winners must be willing to submit all screenshots of their logbook for the month if asked to verify submission.
All flights must be done on Training Server or Expert on Live
All submissions must include a Great Circle Mapper Flight Map with all valid flights from the month shown.
So to get this challenge on the road I give you my flight map from the month of August 2019.
Total Distance traveled in August- 86,133miles
Average distance of each flight- 1,758miles
Do we need to include “flights” not are not intended as a flight from A to B?
eg. flying for a tracking thread, but landing somewhere else in the middle for departure & transition; accidentally doing a landing grind on TS or ES
Main reason asking is because average distance each flight is a stat for comparison.
T&G flights are not permitted to be included (they wont show as and distance anyways just another flight so you would actually lower your average flight distance)
This would count as a flight and should be included, however as stated above you would probably lose average flight distance due to a shorter flight.
TBH I’m not sure this avg distance thing even is a good idea. IF doesn’t log each landing to begin with and you can’t expect everyone to remember every midflight landing.
Then you lose out then. You have plenty of time while your putting in a new flight to log that flight on the map. There really is no excuse. And it takes 3 seconds to end a flight session at the gate then spawn back in at that airport. There isnt an excuse for just being lazy.
This is not about being lazy actually. If I need to divert for any reason I would not leave the session before finishing my flight. Also my VA does not allow that.
I’m just feeling that the Highest Distance Average is pretty dumb. The easiest way to get first place is to find the airports with the furthest distance between them, do one flight, and only fly on casual for the rest of the month. No other category really matters for whether or not every single flight is logged.
I’ll still participate for September. Just not going to log stupid flights and not participate in option 2.
It isnt it is another category for people to choose to fly if they desired. Nothing says you have to submit it for that.
You divert so then you include the airport you divert to in the middle of your flight route. Simple as that. Not doing that only has the excuse of laziness.
The diversity aspect of option 1 drives home about not doing long haul only routes but doing multiple facets of routes in multiple locations. Even those outside IFATC locations on a regular basis.
Why does what your VA allow you to do have anything to do with this? You should be fine flying non VA routes and logging VA routes.
Last but not least I stated here that all flights have to be on TS or Expert. Flying on casual wont get you anywhere.
Sorry if I am sounding rude or anything like that. I am just trying to point out some flaws in the format. I like the general idea very much.
I was just making the point that if category 2 does not exist, then not submitting all flights would not do any good, whereas for category 2, you have to submit all routes you did in the month for it to make sense. And there are bound to be mistakes in remembering what you did in every single flight.
I said casual server as in: You do exactly one flight that is the longest flight possible, and then do the rest of your flights in CS, so that when you calculate the average, you get the highest possible.
About the no casual server thing, the log does not show server so how do you verify it (yes, I know you have to weed out Mach2 flights in a B78X for the longest distance stat)? The log doesn’t even distinguish between crashed flights, flights stopped in midair, and properly completed flights. I even had a flight once where I landed but the destination showed ---- in the log book…
I don’t even want to know how I did in October. I spend so much time with radar training, I hardly flew. Anyway, I’ve finished my map for November. It isn’t terrible, especially considering I had school and radar training for the first half. I put up a total of 42,215 miles. Only about 2000 less than September.
Wasn’t amazing. I had a lot of flying in North America! Especially ATL. I spent lots of time completing ATL regional flights during the last week of November.
Not sure how I’ll do in December. With break I may be able to pass 50,000 miles!
