Morning off - Quick Flight

I've taken this morning off of work. Didn't get a good night's sleep last night, don't know why. Plan was to curl up and try for some sleep for a couple hours. That's what I'll do after putting up this post.

But, before going back to bed, I went and had a peek at Hyperlobby to see who's airborne at this time in the Northern hemisphere. It's a peculiarity of being in Oz that we are up at night when the rest of the techno world is out doing things in the day, and vica versa. Anyway, Norwegian server had 13 flyers up over Fukuoka, so I thought I'd leap at the opportunity of flying with these dudes. That's the advantage of having time off work.

Anyway, I was airborne for a total of about 40 min, flew a tomahawk (not a plane with which I'm very familiar). Never got anywhere near Fukuoka, as there were jap fighters raiding my aerodrome throughout. First flight, as soon as I'd gained 1000 feet I had Statchel on my tail in a zero (?). Led him a merry chase, most of the time without elevator controls. But never got away and he then took out my rudder, killed my pilot and sawed off my wings with his bullets.

Second flight, I took off through the strafing lines of bullets of a raiding zero, much to that pilot's disgust! If he'd looked carefully, he would have seen that his bullets were neatly passing over me. Anyway, I hadn't even got to a thousand feet this time when I had someone on my tail, pouring in the lead. Almost immediately I lost my rudder. Using semi-controlled spins (very dangerous without rudder!) I kept dodging death as he hugged my tail at the same time as circling back towards the runway. Just before I got to my IP (point where I turn for landing approach) I dropped flaps and cut engine. My tormentor overshot me, and was clear in my sights for about half a second. If I'd only had my finger on cannon button rather than (non existant) machine guns I might even have got him. Anyway, by the time he'd looped around, I'd dropped my plane into a crash landing on the field. At least I cheated someone of a kill. Not bad.

Last flight was pretty sad. I got off an up to over 2000 feet and started heading North. Noticed a combat on the deck a mile or two ahead. Couldn't work out who was who. Circled over for a look. Someone else took opportunity to circle onto my tail (point blank). I think it was Wandalen, took out my elevators immediately. Again, I found myself in a dying plane jigging around the sky with streams of deadly tracer whispering by on one side then the other. As I commenced my terminal dive, JTDawg (I think) crept up on Wandalen and exploded him in mid air. I saw it happen as I was looking backwards at the time. Didn't help me though, within seconds my plane was being bracketed with tracer from another zero, this time Statchel's. He must have got me with a bullet because he was credited with my kill when I crashed. What he really did, though, is prevent me from jigging and trying to raise my nose with use of rudder (in vertical bank). I'd lost too much height to bail, and was to steep in the dive to avoid a fatal crash. And that's how my norwegian flights went today.

A more social observation about the experience is that my fellow flyers (most of whom were on teamspeak) came across as they do through the written word, a decent bunch of blokes who flew for fun. They cut no slack but it wasn't personal. Such a nice change from so many of the other online gatherings of pilots. From my perspective these guys are good flyers without exception, there was no easy mark for me to attack or avoid. I'll enjoy taking them down one by one as I get better and earning respect as a pilot. The beauty of it is, they won't mind because they seem to have a similar attitude to the game. Is nice.