Pacific Air

I have been flying online again, about three hours over past two days. I've been playing IL 46 mainly offline, trying to get my skills up a bit (lots of landing practice, getting better).

Last night I thoroughly enjoyed myself flying over the Libyan desert on the 'Internode' server. I think this server is physically located in Adelaide. I think this because my 'ping rate' was down to '20', which is less than one quarter of my previous lowest ping rate (90). [Ping rate is better low than high, it measures roughly the lag/delay experienced in the connection between you and the server, too high a ping rate (eg over 500) and you increase the risk of the dreaded 'lag' effect]. In any event, there were three other flyers over the desert during my visit and all were from Australia (Adelaide, Canberra, Melbourne and Brisbane).

I enjoyed the experience of flying with fellow aussies. Their humour was one that meant I didn't need to make the irony obvious for it to be recognised, and I understood their wit. It's funny how on the web we can obtain so much 'emotional data' through the sparse words we get to type in. Not that I don't like flying in the company of folk from all over the planet, it was just unusual and nice to be able to be amongst my own. Though, with the names two of them had ('Thor'and 'Krakenwolf') I could have thought I was 'flying Norwegian' (if I ignored the desert (!)).

Speaking of which, I went onto the Norwegian Pacific Server this evening for about an hour. It was nice to fly over familiar territory (Palau etc). I was the third person to fly on the Pacific server in its resurrected state. Therefore I am third on the statistics for both bombers and fighters on the server's Stat Page (see Norwegian link on sidebar to right of screen).

In the Norwegian session, I was shot down by AAA three times, including once when I managed to get back to airfield with only half my tail and no rudder (crashing in flames never-the-less), and another when I successfully bailed out over the ocean only to be mercilessly gunned down in my raft by ship based AA guns. Deadly!

Even though my ping rate here is usually around 300, I have no troubles. And I like the oddball company of flyers who regularly visit the site and servers. Thus is international cooperation made.

And now that I can fly in the clean air of the pacific again, I'm sure I'll return more often...