GV Test Flight

Any guesses?

flightaware.com/live/flight/GLF3 … /KATW/KATW

Just showing off again I guess, but would take a lot to top this one,

flightaware.com/live/flight/GLF1 … /KATW/KATW

Cold soak cabin checkout (no rattles on a new $50m jet!).

:laughing:

That’s great!

Did they have smoke coming out to spell ‘GV’?? :laughing:

That it, by far, the coolest thing I’ve seen all day. Kudo’s to that flight crew, whoever they are (as well as you for finding that). Awesome!

inb4Cessna

induringCessna, I guess:

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/N750CX/history/20080307/1745Z/KICT/KICT

Thanks!

Man, I forgot about that one! That tops the GV I think.

Yeah - badass as well! Okay - I’m a civil designer and have spent several years surveying but am just a student pilot as far as aviation goes. One aspect of surveying is entering points from a CAD file into data collectors to be staked out in the field and vice-versa (retrieving points from collector and mapping in CAD). How hard is it to plan a flight like that - to get a path like that, and is recognizable on that large of a scale? Essentially, this is the same thing, on a much larger scale and I would imagine much more difficult to plan/map out. On the other hand, I could see where this, depending on the type of aircraft, could be as similar as playing with an etch-a-sketch too…

My flight paths look like a hockey stick…

It took me about a half an hour to plan my proposed “Big W” flight using my Garmin MapSource software. I typed a 200-point W in MS Word and printed it out on paper, then cut the W out as a template. I held the W up to my computer screen showing the GPS software and marked the waypoints at all the corners. That took about 15 minutes or so. Then I had to do a little tweaking to get the demensions to come out to where there was an airport about halfway through the trip so I can refuel and qualify the flight time as cross country. The additional tweaking took about another 15 minutes or so.

Being that this will be a VFR flight, I won’t have to contend with ATC considerations like having to fly on airways to established fixes or navaids. It also means it won’t be trackable on here FlightAware either, but I’ll have the tracks stored on my GPS.

Thanks for the insight needle. A couple of questions - first, and just out of curiosity, what’s the “W” for? Second, you bring up a good point with the airways - how do Gulfstream pilot’s get around that if they’re just up there testing and “scribbling” in the sky - with a flight plan, I would think that you couldn’t be that general, as far as just flying around burning fuel. Like I said earlier though, I’m just a student pilot, so I don’t have any experience in filling out flight plans and the detail needed/involved. One other thing - I notice when I check into FA that it always posts a statement at the bottom “Tracking XXXX Aircraft (XXX VFR)” - that’s had me intrigued for a while now. How are some flights/aircraft able to be tracked while under VFR? The logistics in that don’t exactly make sense to me. Thanks again for your explanation earlier.

jam

Gett’in more flight hours? :laughing: :laughing:

The W is my last name initial (first letter in my last name, “last initial” or whatever ya wanna call it).

As for ATC routing, there are several ways to list a given point in a route:
Find the nearest established fix to a desired change in course.
Lat/Lon coordinates as discussed HERE
VOR/Radial/Distance as discussed HERE

They may have contacted the FAA to help coordinate the flight in advance.

Thanks Needle - I appreciate yours, as well as all the other members, with all of the help learning this stuff. Hopefully one of these days, we can set up a FA members fly-in somewhere, so I can meet and thank all of y’all in person.

HAHA I can see the fist fights now.

I got $10 that Allen takes frank in the 5th by KO

HAHAHAHA! You know what - I’ve thought about something like that for quite a while now - as far as having some kind of fly-in. The very next thought was exactly what you just said. Forget the $100 hamburger - it’d be the $100 boxing match!

I’ll show up in my C-17… 8)