P-3 Search

I decided to go on a real-time simulated flight to hunt for MH370 in the current search area, on a USN P-3C (wanted to fly as RAAF, but unfortunately wasn't able to find a repaint for this lovely aircraft - the KBT P-3C by Daisuke Yamamoto, made for FS9 but also works in FSX). Here are the results!


We begin our journey from RAAF Pearce Base, near Perth, where the search efforts are focused. Boarding the aircraft shortly before 9am (local time).


Ready to start. We won't be the first aircraft on station today, and expect to arrive on patrol at around 1pm.


Powering up the engines.


Taxiing out from the ramp.


Takeoff!


Climbing into the sky with a full load of fuel - aircraft is a little heavy.


Leaving Perth behind...


...and heading into the open ocean


A 4-hour trip to our distant search quadrant awaits us.

The media seem to often refer to the location as being "near the Australian coast". Here is how "near" it actually is:




Arriving in the search area, we find that it's a bit cloudy down below


Descending into snow/rain squalls to get below the clouds and begin our search.
Normally, the P-3 shuts down one or two engines while searching (to save fuel and improve loiter time); unfortunately feathering a prop in FS doesn't stop it from spinning (at least graphically - the physics effect seems to be correct), but as you can see from the instruments, I've done just that while preparing for our search.


For the first part of the search, conditions are not very good. There are squalls in the area and we drop down to 1500ft to get a better view.


However, soon afterwards, the squalls clear up...


And we get our first sighting!




It's the Norwegian freighter (car carrier) MV Saint Petersburg, the first ship to arrive in the search area.


Compare to the real picture:




With the visibility improved, we climb up to 5000ft and continue our search.


However, no other sightings besides the St. Petersburg are made - just miles of endless ocean, far away from any land.


After almost 3 hours in the search area, we start getting low on fuel, so I get all our engines back online, climb over the clouds, and head back to Perth at almost 30000ft.


Soon, the sun begins setting already.


Sunset over a very remote part of the ocean.




We make our way back towards Perth in the dark.


Lined up on final to Pearce, more than 11 hours after we took off from the same runway.


Taxiing back to the ramp...


And that completes our flight for today. The real crew would be ready to fly againt he next morning.

Hope you enjoyed it!

Nice writeup. How exactly did you set up the waypoints in the GPS?

-Jenrick

That is a good looking airplane!

Thanks!



I looked up the coordinates of the locations for those debris sightings on Wikipedia, set up a search square around them (also by coordinates), and plugged them into simroutes to generate an FS flight plan: http://www.simroutes.com/fb2/ParseRoute.aspx

Works well! You can set up any kind of waypoints you need with this and export it as an FS9/FSX plan.

Ah, I was trying to do it within FSX, which is a huge pain in the butt to do (you can, but it's totally not worth it).

-Jenrick

That has to rank up there as one of the best freeware planes ever.

I was watching the Australian news conference just a bit ago and it was a full on P-3 love fest!

That's tough, though. 4 hours out, 2 hours onsta, 4 hours back. The guy was praising the maintenance crews and I have to agree that they're doing a terrific job. You're talking a lot of P-3s to get 12-18 hours of recon on a daily basis and it is tough to get P-3s flying repeatedly for very long.