Fiat G.18V: Turin to Milan to Venice 1939
Mar 15, 2018 20:02:59 GMT -5
Stromer and lastivka like this
Post by Erik on Mar 15, 2018 20:02:59 GMT -5
Starting with FSAviator's Propliner Flying Tutorial and reading a lot of related stuff I discovered two things about the 1930s: commercial aviation had already developed a lot further than I previously knew, and there are several very good (freeware!) FS9 aircraft available for that era. Among these is the Fiat G.18V by Manuele Villa with FDE by FSAviator. There is ample information about this aircraft and its operation on this very forum here. Although it's not strictly classic but vintage and certainly not Californian, the G.18 was inspired by the DC-2 and the vintage and classic eras of aviation overlap as we know. I hope therefore you agree there is enough in common to justify the following tripreport being on this forum.
It is late in April 1939 and Fiat G.18V of Avio Linee Italiane sits at Torino-Mirafiori airport. This was the Turin airport at the time and the factory airfield of F.I.A.T. who also practically owned ALI. We are scheduled for flight 560, a joint service with Romanian state airline LARES, also code-sharing with Aeroput of Yugoslavia. The route takes us via Milan-Forlanini, Venice-Nicelli and Zagreb-Borongaj to Belgrade-Zemun. Flight 560 is operated Mondays to Saturdays by ALI and LARES, each flying one way all six days.
On the ramp at Mirafiori at 7am. The met office reports 5 km visibility but it's more like 100m on the field. Probably ground fog.
The airport comes to life this chilly morning. A company S.73 is parked next to our Fiat. There are more planes but they hide in the fog. We will be taking 15 passengers to Milan with our crew of three.
Doors closed, preparing for engine start. The pax load just allows us to carry fuel for the first two route legs on this departure, which is a good thing as our turn-around at Milan is short. We made only one allowance for hold & diversion fuel, as we hope to land with that still in the tanks each time.
Total fuel load is 915 kgs (2015 lbs), of which we should have 685 kg left on the ramp in Milan. This leaves 1400 kg for passengers and bags, that we allocate 1350 kg of to 15 times 90 per person in the back. All in all we are just 60 kg below our MGW of 10007 kg (22063 lbs) this morning.
We will be cruising around 2000 m (6500 ft) on this short flight, scheduled to take 40 minutes.
Clearance received, cockpit set up, engines running, flaps set, controls and landing lights checked with the ground engineer. Ready to move.
Aided by airport staff and carefully cross-checking our heading and the strip markings, we line up for a blind departure from 31.
Yes they actually did that in the 1930s, albeit with a 'blind flying line' on the ground as guidance. I'm not sure Mirafiori had one so this flight would probably have had a delayed start in reality. I couldn't resist the challenge though.
Airborne at 140 kmIAS, five minutes ahead of schedule at 07:30 on this very exciting take-off. Just as we lift off, the markings on the centre of the field pass by on our left, indicating we are indeed neatly over the strip. That is a relief as it also means we will miss the big airship hangar at the end of the field, right of this take-off lane. Thanks to the right engine especially for not failing.
Passing 180 kmIAS we raised the flaps, set climb power and reduced cowl flaps to 20%. Left turn to heading 120 inbound TOP ndb. Speed should be at least 220 kmIAS now so I climbed too steeply in the turn (still polishing my turn coordination skills as well).
Nice perceptual overkill as I try to manage the above, tower wants us to contact departure, the aural ID of TOP comes in and we suddenly see the earth through an apparent gap in the fog. OK, let's aviate-navigate-communicate in that order.
In the left turn at 230 m. Nature making a face at me with this complete view of the airport. Temperature just rose above the dewpoint? Nearest to us on the western side is the Fiat factory, the terminal in is the far back. The airship hangar looms on the left.
Half a minute later, we are in the soup again. After take-off checklist please.
Approaching 1700 m in the climb to a bit over 2000 m. Although we have ample power from our Fiat A.80 engines we restrict climb to 2.5 m/s (500 fpm) in our unpressurized airliner, giving a nice speed of 275 kmIAS (nearly 150kts) during the climb. We are on heading 066 inbound LIN ndb after having passed TOP, the route that keeps us clear of the hills of Monferrato. A cloudy April morning over the Po Valley.
In the cruise now at 2200 m, all needles are where they should be. MP is measured in kg force per square cm, called C in this airplane. Cruise power is C=0.75, 1900 rpm, cowls 10%. At our operational ceiling of no less than 5500m (oxygen for all aboard) that equals to full throttle but here we pulled the handles a good bit back. Heading is still set based on plots by our WTO, we are waiting for the LIN signal to home on.
Descent has just started and the Ticino river will soon pass below us. We home on LIN with the radio goniometer visible on the right (top). C was reduced in two steps to 0.55, cowls closed and we maintain cruise IAS. I keep aiming for 2.5 m/s descent, with a maximum of 3.5 m/s (700 fpm), in turbulent air.
We have gone beacon outbound on the ndb runway 35 circling approach runway 12, descending to 600 m. The ceiling is at 450 m broken, 5 km visibility. That should do it as the MDA after FAF (LIN inbound) is 260 m. Speed comes back to 200 kmIAS so we can lower the undercarriage at 500 m above ground and the first stage of flap. With a 90-degree offset into the hold I took an extra oval to better line up for the final approach.
Visual. The old Taliedo airfield is on the left and Forlanini a bit further nearly ahead. Speed 175 kmIAS, flap stage 2 and about to set QFE for the circuit.
Turning to final with the city behind us. Some clouds are hugging the buildings, glad the're not right here!
Sighting the field rather late I overshot the centreline, the landing lane is just visible in the middle of the grass airfield. The concrete further left is a large parking area, the huge new hangar is in the far back.
Luckily, the G.18V is very manoeuvrable at low speed so I manage to line up neatly and land where I should on the strip.
Not much going on here, which should help us in a quick turn-around. Due to the weather we couldn't make the very tight schedule, we're on blocks at 08:22 while scheduled for 08:10. However we have 704 kg fuel left so we don't need to refuel. We go about our paperwork while the ground staff helps a few passengers off and on the plane. We'll try to stick as close to our 08:25 departure with those 16 pax as we can.
Many add-ons were used in FS9 during the above, among which:
- Fiat G.18V by Manuele Villa and others
- Active Sky Evolution for weather, set to 27 April 2017, a day with lots of shower activity in this area
- FSUIPC (free version) obviously, we cannot live without it
- FScene4X for ground textures + several sky, sun/moon and water textures by other authors
- Active Camera 2004, a must in FS9 VC in my experience (and I hugely prefer VC's over panel views)
- SBuilder for FS9, ADE9 and Instant Scenery to build or adapt the airports and surrounding scenery (the Milan hangar is from LIML2004 by ISD)
- AI Flight Planner by Don Grovestine/Stuff4FS and the work of several aircraft builders for the traffic (of which you see little here)
... plus any that I forget now AND the invaluable help by many fellow enthusiasts on this forum and elsewhere.
Thanks for viewing,
Erik
It is late in April 1939 and Fiat G.18V of Avio Linee Italiane sits at Torino-Mirafiori airport. This was the Turin airport at the time and the factory airfield of F.I.A.T. who also practically owned ALI. We are scheduled for flight 560, a joint service with Romanian state airline LARES, also code-sharing with Aeroput of Yugoslavia. The route takes us via Milan-Forlanini, Venice-Nicelli and Zagreb-Borongaj to Belgrade-Zemun. Flight 560 is operated Mondays to Saturdays by ALI and LARES, each flying one way all six days.
On the ramp at Mirafiori at 7am. The met office reports 5 km visibility but it's more like 100m on the field. Probably ground fog.
The airport comes to life this chilly morning. A company S.73 is parked next to our Fiat. There are more planes but they hide in the fog. We will be taking 15 passengers to Milan with our crew of three.
Doors closed, preparing for engine start. The pax load just allows us to carry fuel for the first two route legs on this departure, which is a good thing as our turn-around at Milan is short. We made only one allowance for hold & diversion fuel, as we hope to land with that still in the tanks each time.
Total fuel load is 915 kgs (2015 lbs), of which we should have 685 kg left on the ramp in Milan. This leaves 1400 kg for passengers and bags, that we allocate 1350 kg of to 15 times 90 per person in the back. All in all we are just 60 kg below our MGW of 10007 kg (22063 lbs) this morning.
We will be cruising around 2000 m (6500 ft) on this short flight, scheduled to take 40 minutes.
Clearance received, cockpit set up, engines running, flaps set, controls and landing lights checked with the ground engineer. Ready to move.
Aided by airport staff and carefully cross-checking our heading and the strip markings, we line up for a blind departure from 31.
Yes they actually did that in the 1930s, albeit with a 'blind flying line' on the ground as guidance. I'm not sure Mirafiori had one so this flight would probably have had a delayed start in reality. I couldn't resist the challenge though.
Airborne at 140 kmIAS, five minutes ahead of schedule at 07:30 on this very exciting take-off. Just as we lift off, the markings on the centre of the field pass by on our left, indicating we are indeed neatly over the strip. That is a relief as it also means we will miss the big airship hangar at the end of the field, right of this take-off lane. Thanks to the right engine especially for not failing.
Passing 180 kmIAS we raised the flaps, set climb power and reduced cowl flaps to 20%. Left turn to heading 120 inbound TOP ndb. Speed should be at least 220 kmIAS now so I climbed too steeply in the turn (still polishing my turn coordination skills as well).
Nice perceptual overkill as I try to manage the above, tower wants us to contact departure, the aural ID of TOP comes in and we suddenly see the earth through an apparent gap in the fog. OK, let's aviate-navigate-communicate in that order.
In the left turn at 230 m. Nature making a face at me with this complete view of the airport. Temperature just rose above the dewpoint? Nearest to us on the western side is the Fiat factory, the terminal in is the far back. The airship hangar looms on the left.
Half a minute later, we are in the soup again. After take-off checklist please.
Approaching 1700 m in the climb to a bit over 2000 m. Although we have ample power from our Fiat A.80 engines we restrict climb to 2.5 m/s (500 fpm) in our unpressurized airliner, giving a nice speed of 275 kmIAS (nearly 150kts) during the climb. We are on heading 066 inbound LIN ndb after having passed TOP, the route that keeps us clear of the hills of Monferrato. A cloudy April morning over the Po Valley.
In the cruise now at 2200 m, all needles are where they should be. MP is measured in kg force per square cm, called C in this airplane. Cruise power is C=0.75, 1900 rpm, cowls 10%. At our operational ceiling of no less than 5500m (oxygen for all aboard) that equals to full throttle but here we pulled the handles a good bit back. Heading is still set based on plots by our WTO, we are waiting for the LIN signal to home on.
Descent has just started and the Ticino river will soon pass below us. We home on LIN with the radio goniometer visible on the right (top). C was reduced in two steps to 0.55, cowls closed and we maintain cruise IAS. I keep aiming for 2.5 m/s descent, with a maximum of 3.5 m/s (700 fpm), in turbulent air.
We have gone beacon outbound on the ndb runway 35 circling approach runway 12, descending to 600 m. The ceiling is at 450 m broken, 5 km visibility. That should do it as the MDA after FAF (LIN inbound) is 260 m. Speed comes back to 200 kmIAS so we can lower the undercarriage at 500 m above ground and the first stage of flap. With a 90-degree offset into the hold I took an extra oval to better line up for the final approach.
Visual. The old Taliedo airfield is on the left and Forlanini a bit further nearly ahead. Speed 175 kmIAS, flap stage 2 and about to set QFE for the circuit.
Turning to final with the city behind us. Some clouds are hugging the buildings, glad the're not right here!
Sighting the field rather late I overshot the centreline, the landing lane is just visible in the middle of the grass airfield. The concrete further left is a large parking area, the huge new hangar is in the far back.
Luckily, the G.18V is very manoeuvrable at low speed so I manage to line up neatly and land where I should on the strip.
Not much going on here, which should help us in a quick turn-around. Due to the weather we couldn't make the very tight schedule, we're on blocks at 08:22 while scheduled for 08:10. However we have 704 kg fuel left so we don't need to refuel. We go about our paperwork while the ground staff helps a few passengers off and on the plane. We'll try to stick as close to our 08:25 departure with those 16 pax as we can.
Many add-ons were used in FS9 during the above, among which:
- Fiat G.18V by Manuele Villa and others
- Active Sky Evolution for weather, set to 27 April 2017, a day with lots of shower activity in this area
- FSUIPC (free version) obviously, we cannot live without it
- FScene4X for ground textures + several sky, sun/moon and water textures by other authors
- Active Camera 2004, a must in FS9 VC in my experience (and I hugely prefer VC's over panel views)
- SBuilder for FS9, ADE9 and Instant Scenery to build or adapt the airports and surrounding scenery (the Milan hangar is from LIML2004 by ISD)
- AI Flight Planner by Don Grovestine/Stuff4FS and the work of several aircraft builders for the traffic (of which you see little here)
... plus any that I forget now AND the invaluable help by many fellow enthusiasts on this forum and elsewhere.
Thanks for viewing,
Erik
. I found a nice alternative in the Rechenblatt (Calculation sheet) by Hauke Keitel that I first saw in the FW-200. I regard the wind-corrected heading on that as the one PNF has calculated based on the vintage GPS plots. There are add-ons available to do this even more realistically, i.e. take bearings with the loop antenna yourself, but on short flights the workload would be too high (simulating a three-man crew on your own).
