A small contingent of members stood shivering on the apron in the breeze of the breaking dawn at Carlisle Airport on July 17th ready for the longest excursion so far attempted by the Club.  The destination was an airport on the west coast of Lake Michigan, USA, Oshkosh, (ICAO code KOSH) to have a virtual presence at one of the world's most spectacular aviation activities.  

With a couple of  members on the apron to wave us off, two of us set off from Carlisle to Wick. Canadian member Al joined us later because of the time difference and took off from Carlisle as Tim & I were getting close to Wick.  That first leg proved to be a taste of what was to come with rather cloudy weather making instrument flight preferable to dragging along in clag at low level. Routing was via Tala, overhead Edinburgh, theMmoray Firth and up Scotland's eastern coast ending in an attempt by some to fly (for the first time) a DME Arc approach to Wick's runway 31.

The next day we set off across the Atlantic. Nature has very conveniently placed lumps of land at intervals of about 400 miles which just happens to be the range of many light aircraft. The first lump of land is the Faroe Islands, but we weren't prepared for the instrument procedure to land on runway 31 at Vagar. We were in IMC all the way again, but only Tim had read the procedure properly, and Peter who was leading descended a little early, and swore that he had left a tyre print on top of the mountain underneath the approach path.

The advantage of Flight Simulator is that you can join in half way round, and on this leg, we had Basil for company.  Al joined us later again.  The rest of us stayed up til 0200 to welcome him in!  He had a spot of bother with the approach and over-shot turning onto final because there was this mountain blocking the ILS signal. 

It was the same, now notorious, mountain which had Peter's tyre print on it, but its presence on the approach track was part of the fun of landing on runway 31.  Now far too high, full flaps and a dive were needed, but he made it with plenty of room to spare. 

Leg 3 took us to Reykjavik in Iceland.  The long water crossing meant that there was no real advantage in staying together as a group, so each member made their own way to Reykjavik in the own time.  So we didn't have to wait for Al this time, and thus got a better night's sleep!

Ross caught us up from Carlisle. 

From Goose Bat our route lay southwest along the St Lawrence River - almost as wide as the English Channel and several hundred miles longer - towards the Great Lakes.. Unfortunately, with a solid undercast, we couldn't see any of it.  Then Peter noticed the FS "Ident" of an aircarft ahead at his level.  It was Harry, who had overtaken him, having caught up with the rest of us.

We were in solid IMC below 6000 feet. There was no DME at Sept Îles on either the VOR or ILS frequencies, so while soft flew an RNAV approach, Peter without GPS, unable to see anything at all out of the window, (and it was getting dark), decided to divert to Baie Comeau, about 100 miles further south.

The final leg was from Grand Rapids to Oshkosh. There were now six of us, having been joined by Harry again and one of our newer members, Chris, an American, who hopped over to Grand Rapids from his "home airport".  We followed the procedures used in the real world to safely get 1500 or more light aircraft on the ground in a couple of days, except that two briefing websites disagreed, so Peter took the Twin Otter into 36 while everyone else chose runway 27. The inbound route followed the railway (railroad) from Ripon to Fisk to enable aircraft to join crosswind for either 27 or 36.

Some of us had downloaded some scenery for FSX which was quite spectacular. We all lined up for a photo call to celebrate our arrival 25 flying hours over 2 weeks, often in the early hours of the morning, and almost 4000 miles from England. It felt as real as it gets