Flight Sim meets Archaeology

[Paul Elliott]

After years of wanting to, I've jumped into flight simulator with a top of the range PC. Loving it. But couldn't resist touring Hadrian's Wall in my Piper Archer II. I'm using photo scenery over the UK, so its like flying over the real thing. Here I approach Housesteads, the cliff facing north is quite dramatic.



A little earlier I flew over Chesters fort, close to the North Tyne river.



Didn't get as far as Birdoswald, I touched down at Carlisle airport, but it will be interesting to see the south facing escarpment at that site.

[Flavivs Aetivs]

What flight simulator is that?

[Paul Elliott]

Flight Simulator X (2006), using Playsim's VFR Photo Scenery for Britain and Scotland.

[Flavivs Aetivs]

Cool, I think my friend Alex has that game. I might have to borrow it from him.

[mcbishop]

Didn't get as far as Birdoswald, I touched down at Carlisle airport, but it will be interesting to see the south facing escarpment at that site.

A flight sim has one major advantage over the real thing: a pause button. The disadvantage is that the view stays the same every time, whereas every real flight reveals something new. However, before I undertook my flight along the Wall in 2010 I made sure I was really familiar with the view from the air by using Google Earth (which has a built-in flight simulator, of course). Once you're up there, you must be able to recognise what you're looking at PDQ!

Birdoswald from the air looks a bit like this ;-)
[img width=400]http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6130/5942710482_75c75eab63_z.jpg[/img]

Mike Bishop

[Flavivs Aetivs]

Yeah Google Earth has one (I found that it was pretty crappy though). I like gunning it in the F-16 and seeing how close I can get to the ground in a moutain range before the bad texture overlay on the models causes me to crash in midair.