This month we explore an area not visited yet in the Series… Northern Colorado! This area is barren and desolate with a few small towns sprinkled in for good measure. The region is booming with mineral and gas deposits so the landscape is littered with mines and wells, and every once in a while, a large industrial processing plant. And there’s enough hills/mountains to miss to keep pilots paying attention.
Bush League Basics:
- Everyone is welcomed! Whether you’re an expert or beginner with flying simulators, radio communications, or navigation, etc., you’re invited! We’re a friendly bunch and enjoy learning from each other.
- All of the scenery elements and recommended aircraft are based on X-Plane 12 or MSFS 2020.
- You can fly whatever aircraft you’d like, however, you might want to try something that can handle high elevations.
- Most of the pilots enjoy navigating via pilotage, i.e. “looking out the window” and comparing it to the sectional chart, so please refer to a sectional if need be. Proper use of a VOR is probably a good thing on this trip.
- We encourage you to join the VATSIM network and use the CTAF frequency of 122.9 to announce positions at airports/airstrips without a CTAF frequency. If an airport/airstrip has a CTAF frequency listed on the sectional, please use that.
- We’ll also use the Downwindsim Discord voice channel for the pre-event briefing and during the flight for non-ATC related chit-chat.
- As always, the main goal of these flights is to have fun. The event is intended to be VFR, so you are free to configure your weather and time of day as you see fit.
Flight Information:
The event takes place on Monday, February 3 at 8:00pm ET or 0100z (Feb. 4). There will be no preflight briefing but I should be hanging around the airport as we get started to answer any questions. The plan is to depart Grand Junction, Colorado (KGJT), also home to the down-base-wind technique (ask Slanty for an explanation), and then make your way over to a small private strip named Juniper. It’s about 20nm northeast of Grand Junction. Look around while you’re there and you’ll find more to do!
X-Plane 12 Scenery Installation:
* Custom Bush League airport sceneries for X-Plane 12 are available at this link:
2025-02 BL64 Northern Colorado X-Plane 12 Scenery.zip
* Pre-cooked Ortho tiles are also needed for X-Plane 12:
zOrtho4XP_+39-109.zip and zOrtho4XP_+39-110.zip
* X-World scenery (free) and Global Forests v2 ($15) are highly recommended additions for the XP12 world. The custom scenery files above have been designed with these addons in mind.
DIRECTIONS: Unzip all files and place them in your “Custom Scenery” folder. Overwrite any pre-existing file versions.
MSFS 2020 Scenery Installation:
* Customized MSFS sceneries from DWS are available here:
2025-02 BL64 Northern Colorado MSFS Scenery.zip
DIRECTIONS: Unzip all files and place them in your “Community” folder.
Where’s the map?
There is no map this month… everything’s on the sectional… well, mostly.
If you get stuck or have a question, drop a message on the DownwindSim Discord bush-flying text channel. We look forward to seeing you on Monday.
Oh… I had a message from the technicians maintaining the some of the local VORs… it seems there might be a small variance on some of the radial alignments, less than five degrees they tell me. The DME portion of the stations seems to be spot on.