My May Theme Flight to Middle Earth pictures

[Wayne Pierce]

This months theme flight was real for me in 2009.
I flew to Australia for a vacation and then to New Zealand While staying with a friend in New south Wales, Warnervale, this happened.

"The 2009 Australian dust storm, also known as the Eastern Australian dust storm, was a dust storm that swept across the Australian states of New South Wales and Queensland from 22 to 24 September 2009. The capital, Canberra, experienced the dust storm on 22 September,and on 23 September the storm reached Sydney and Brisbane. Some of the thousands of tons of dirt and soil lifted in the dust storm were dumped in Sydney Harbour and the Tasman Sea. On 23 September, the dust plume measured more than 500 kilometres (310 mi) in width and 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) in length and covered dozens of towns and cities in two states.By 24 September, analysis using MODIS at NASA measured the distance from the northern edge at Cape York to the southern edge of the plume to be 3,450 km. While the cloud was visible from space, on the ground the intense red-orange colour and drop in temperature drew comparisons with nuclear winter, Armageddon, and the planet Mars."

The dust cloud stretched all the way to New Zealand. Our plane was delayed in Sydney for 4 hours because of it. Which then put us into Wellington at 1:00AM. My friends wife was really pissed at ME for delaying the flight and was mad at me the whole time I was there. Oh well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Aust ... dust_storm

Here are my theme flight pictures


Pushed back at YSSY.


A long taxit to the end of 34L.


Take off.


Turning around to head EAST over Sydney.


The only ocean shot I will bore you with.


Land fall on New Zealand.


Descending via the arrival.


Turning to final


Landing.


At the gate.

Thanks for reading and looking. P3DV4.5 with Flightbeam NZWN, Fly Tampa YSSY, ORBX New Zealand scenery. REX weather Environmental Force, OPUS weather generation

[Michael Blakely]

I like the heavy cloud cover as you're turning for final approach to NZWN.

[Wayne Pierce]

Yeah, the be at altitude there at UMAGA is 3,000' the cloud layer was 3,500 .

[Theodore Martin]

Well.....I flew the Theme Flight and thought I took pictures, however I can't find them. They did not appear in my normal simulator picture folder (the one I used for the pictures I posted of my previous theme flight). The only way I can explain this is I guess I pressed the wrong key on the keyboard. Anyway I don't have my pictures to share, so I will go a little off topic. I was in Cabo San Lucas last week and did a little diving, so I'll post a couple of those shots.

Due to the high waves and strong currents they were experiencing at the time, the water is murky and not as clear as normal.

Me in about 40ft. of water

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There was not a lot of marine live to view due to the water being warmer than normal and the strong waves, but we did run into a large school of fish....

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Star Fish

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[Michael Blakely]

Ted,

Those look great! You're lucky to have nice weather down in Cabo. It's been cold and rainy in San Diego for a month now, but it's not reaching that far south.