Original Post - Westbound in the SF50

I've been having so much fun with X-Plane flight simulator, that I created this blog in August 2019 to share the story of my adventures, while flying the Cirrus Vision SF-50 personal jet around the world, westbound.

A little background: I bought Laminar Research's X-Plane flight simulator version 9, at the same time I bought my last desktop computer (10 years ago), and after trying it, I realized I was going to need a "gaming" computer to run it, since it dragged that brand new blazingly fast machine down to a slow crawl.

Interestingly enough, Laminar put out a teaser version of X-Plane 9 for the iPhone, which I had just purchased. It was quite limited in capability, with only the phone itself as the input device (picture me holding the phone, and leaning to my side, to turn the airplane), but it was smooth and fast, and had its fun moments. Since then, they released an X-Plane 10 app, which was cooler in some ways, but less capable in others, so I never got that excited about it.

In January 2018, Microsoft had their final push to upgrade to Windows 10, so I went for it, and while everything else seemed to work fine, my trusty go-to flight sim, Microsoft Flight Simulator X, started crashing unexpectedly, which is very traumatic for someone who's emotionally attached to the idea that they're actually flying an airplane at the time. I was devastated. I looked online, and saw people getting excited about the new version 11 release of X-Plane, and bought it, hoping it would be better optimized than version 9, but I wasn't surprised to find that it also bogged down, and was completely unusable on my desktop computer. It's hard to land an airplane, when the view out the window only changes once every few seconds.

In the Spring of 2018, I ran across an affordable ASUS "gaming" laptop at Costco, and went for it, but quickly found it didn't have the features that the sales associate claimed. Before I took it back, I loaded X-Plane 11, and found it worked so well, I was back to feeling like I was really in an airplane! Fast-forward most of the year, to the end of 2018, and Costco once again had an even better ASUS gaming laptop for a reasonable price, and I decided to try again. So far, so good, with no thoughts of taking this one back.

Since then, I've tried to plan and fly one flight a day, when I feel like I have the extra time. X-Plane has several built-in aircraft models, but I like the Cirrus Vision SF-50 the best. It's small enough to get into and out of smallish airports like Palo Alto, but it's pretty fast at cruise.

It also has a very modern Garmin G1000 instrument panel with a highly capable autopilot, which makes it very fun. You might think the all-graphic panel is strictly for simulation, but the actual plane looks like that, too!

If the real plane flies anything like this simulated model, I *need* to win $5M in the lottery, so I could afford to buy this $2M aircraft and maintain it for awhile. Wherever I arrive somewhere, I save the situation, and plan a flight to another destination within range of the plane I'm flying, which *seems* to be about 700 nautical miles for the SF50. I try to choose somewhere I've been, or a place where someone I know lives, or someplace that just sounds interesting.

Before I started this blog, my last big virtual adventure left from Denver, went up to Douglas, Wyoming, then East to Minneapolis, then Quebec, then circled up around through northeastern Canada, back down through Newfoundland to the US East Coast, down to Florida and the Bahamas, then Key West, followed the Gulf Coast to New Orleans, down to Cancun, Mexico City, Puerto Vallarta, to San Diego, and finally back to Denver.

Updated 8/18/19: My latest  trip is -- around the Western continental US, then to Alaska, Asia, and beyond! So far, my trip left Centennial airport in the Denver area, flew to Aspen, then Telluride, Santa Barbara, Klamath Falls, and Olympia. After this... who knows? Alaska? Russia? Japan? China? Time will tell...

This is the original post, called "Westbound in the SF50", which I've now separated into individual flight legs, and posted them in this new blog. To follow my virtual flying adventure, on this page, and subsequent pages, look for the link at the bottom of this post, below the comment input, that says "Newer Post," and click on that, to get to the next leg of the trip. Keep going, until you get to the most recent post. I hope you enjoy this blog!

Updated 10/13/2019: I'm capturing my round-the-world-westbound trip route on a world map using TripHappy.com, but they have a limit on the number of stops, so I had to break it up into the first part of the flight and the last part of the flight. Updated 11/8/2019: I created the image to the right by manually stitching the two TripHappy itinerary screenshots. It's just an image, which is fun to look at, but if you want to get more information about each city where I stopped, follow the two TripHappy links above.