Emulating USAF & civilian aerial responses to oil spill

[Ford Friendly]

Just a thought for those who like trying to simulate real world events via flightplanning:

With the oil spill off the mouth of the Mississippi River in the news, the USAF has staged 2 C-130s to Mississippi in preparation for aerial missions to spray chemicals to try to break up/minimize the oil floating atop the water. Assume that other aircraft will follow soon - including possible use of the Hurricane Hunter aircraft for basic weather mission support (at least until the hurricane season really begins to heat up).

Pre-staging some/additional USCG aircraft, both fixed and rotary wing, wouldn't be unreasonable - especially to JRB New Orleans, Keesler and Eglin. East-west missions along the coast searching for "environmental damage" will almost certainly increase - probably best simulated by creating an otherwise-unused afcad or two located 5 miles or so offshore for the helo's to TNG to/from.

Civilian air missions to/from oil platforms in the Gulf have reportedly increased as oil rig inspections have been stepped up. Obviously, most of these missions are helos, time to break out those seldom used AI helos boys!!! (bad joke?)

Probably not something most ppl consider but easily flight-plannable, the Cubans have been rumored to have sent 1 aerial mission a day to the general area of the spill - just to make things real-world interesting.

Like I said, just something for people who like to flightplan to consider playing with.

I apologize for my lack of providing flightplans myself, but I've forgotten where I got all the oil rig scenery I now have on my system - FSShipyards maybe? I know there was a project which had both Gulf of Mexico and North Sea rig scenery for FS9 and it worked pretty well in FSX also - no idea what the name of that project was. There are also a few 1-3 rig scenery packages out there - various places. Adding afcads to these various rigs makes things fun - or did before a head injury some time ago. Now I just fly (and occasionally beg a nephew to come over and see if he can implement an idea or two for me... he's a closet FSimmer as it's "not cool enough" for him. In a number of cases, we de-compiled scenery packages which had rigs inthem, took the mdl files and then made new bgls with new/additional oil platform locations. Unfortunately, without permission and/or my own mdls, the bgls can't be shared. And since my memory/documentation sucks so badly, all I can do is offer up the idea for others to use/implement/share on their own. Again, I apologize.)

Note: I've been up in a friend's Cessna twice in the last couple days and the @#$! slick is definitely something to see - in a "house of horrors" type of way. We went all the way out to the rig's former location and all I can say is "@#$!. This is a big frigging mess."

[Ford Friendly]

Real world update:
Florida has already declared a state of emergency for 6 counties in the Florida Panhandle.
Also, you could obviously add NAS Pensacola as a point of departure for flights ...

[Firebird]

I think that your oil rig scenery maybe from here http://www.fs-odg.com/, the ODG USAEZ Gulf of Mexico demo.

[Ford Friendly]

Sounds familiar and could definitely be the original scenery I installed. Thanks for refreshing my memory and finding the link.

Unfortunately, that's now a bit "dated" - ex., the rig that exploded was a new rig that was drilling, not producing - definitely not in the ODG package if/when I installed it. Others have been built in the real world since that scenery was released. Also, there are some rigs in that package which no longer actually exist due to Hurricanes swamping/over-turning/damaging them. Others, like a few off Corpus Christi, simply weren't part of the package.

In any case, that's definitely a good starting place ---- adding harddecks/afcads for helo landings makes things in the Gulf much more lively.

---added---
Now that I think about it, that's definitely where I got my first oil rigs from & started... However, that package only had 24 rigs and limited itself to the area from Biloxi to Corpus (I think). There are at least 100 in the Gulf between Corpus Christi and Tampa/Key West .... De-compiling this package, using rigs from other ODG packages, FSX itself and FS9, and from a West Coast/California package on avsim (& I think, possibly simouthouse), there's a fair bit of variability possible if you really want to populate the Gulf without worrying about the design accuracy of particular rigs at specific locations. Ultimately, my installed oil rig scenery is a mishmash, literally something I can't trace back to all of the original sources, but something anyone unafraid of decompiling and recompiling bgls can do with a bit of time and effort (excluding people like myself with VERY short term attention spans. I used to be able to select and place rig models in about 15 minutes each. Now it takes me an hour at least if I can complete it at all - my nephew can do it in less than 10 minutes when I impose on him.). As I mentioned before, my "method" and having mixed additional rigs into "original" scenery bgls (maintaining the "original bgl's name") precludes anything approaching sharing - I don't even have a list of all the locations of all the rigs printed out anywhere.

In any case, I was just tossing out an idea for others should they care to take a shot at flightplanning what's going on now - whether to share or just for their own setup(s).

---added---
Fs-freelow has a rig near Mobile, Alabama.... I'm fairly certain that's one I installed in FS9, if not converted to my FSX installation.
gps_oil_platforms_missions.zip - 3 rigs in the Gulf of Mexico for FSX/ avsim.com
Hibernia Offshore Platform V1.2 - FS2004/ avsim
and I've got a group of oil rigs off NAS Oceana, but I don't know if they are FSX or FS9 nor where I got them from. They look too good to be FS9, but I could be wrong. (I definitely deleted the docs from this scenery group of about 10 rigs... (slaps forehead with palm, ow that hurts))

[Ford Friendly]

Probably as definitive an interactive listing of Gulf of Mexico (off the coasts of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas) oil rig names and locations as exists on the Net - broken up by region/district:
http://www.cccarto.com/gulf_platforms.html

They state that 819 oil rigs are still "manned" and operating.

FWIW

[Ford Friendly]

Okay. Last bit of "here you go/for your consideration" linkage for those who might be interested in this idea/thread:

Flightsim.com file
FS2004 Scenery Object--Oil Rig #2
Name: oil_rig2.zip Size: 318,442 Date: 09-09-2008 Downloads: 637
FS2004 Scenery Object--Oil Rig #2. A scenery object for placement using such programs as EZ-Scenery. By Godfrey Tier.

Used along with locations from the previous post's linked-info, you could really make something of the Gulf of Mexico oil rig activity wise. I have. "My sim" has something like 150 rigs in the northern Gulf area --- definitely more interesting than just miles and miles of water.
(It dawns on me that some of you might be more interested in doing something with oil rigs in the Persian Gulf than the Gulf of Mexico, but "that's a different thread/idea".)

Have fun and make of this what you will.

[BadPvtDan]

Too bad the maps don't have the lat and lon of the rigs.

[MIKE JG]

Back to the original topic. This oil spill is getting out of hand. Imagine the entire Gulf of Mexico a nice dark brown color. Imagine how disgusting that would look. Imagine all those pristine beaches on the barrier islands closed because of contamination for many years to come. Imagine whole stretches of coastline that are ruined and will never be the same.

You won't have to imagine those things here in an another week or so!

F U British Petroleum!!!

Thanks for telling the world "we've got it under control" when you very clearly do not!

[MLMC]

HA!
The Gulf of Mexico was a nice dark brown color to start with. Don't know if you've ever been to Galveston, Corpus Christi, or South Padre, but the water near the shore is disgusting. I don't know about what it is like out in the sea, but there are a lot of nasty things in the shoreline water. There are certainly some nice places in Louisiana though. I went fishing outside Houma once on the inland waterways. I sure hope this doesn't get that far, but who knows, because it doesn't seem like anyone does.

Better go buy some Gulf shrimp while I can......

I bet the airspace around there is unreal right now. Especially with the President and his entourage being there.

[RKE]

Looks like NASA sent one of their interesting toys to the Gulf area
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/NASA ... /KPMD/KEFD

[ronniegj]

Can that flight log be correct? Can he really climb that fast? Wow!

Ron

[DeepSea-Two-One]

The U-2 published specs say it can climb initially at up to 15,000 FPM up to 25K.

There is one typical FA glitch in the log - but his climb to FL600 takes 28 min from FL116. The early part of the climb is fast - but once it gets into the high 30s, it slows down.

If you look at the tracks for the other days - 30 min to FL600 is normal. Initial climb rates in the 4-5,000 FPM range are in all the flights. Sustained climb rates above 2,000 FPM to near 40K are in all the tracks.

I found this interesting

http://www.blackbirds.net/u2/u-2mission.html

NASAs info page - http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/rese ... 2perf.html

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/rese ... ltops.html

[jetmax]

www.af.mil has posted several pictures of C-130 operating out of Bay St. Louis [Stennis Intl], MS. If anyone is interested I have modified an AFCAD of KHSA for this.

Cheers

[dworjan]

I just uploaded a replacement for my previous paint of the Air Contractors L-100 Hercules to AVSIM and Flightsim.com. I had painted it on the wrong model. The HTAI L-100-30 model represents the early versions designed from the C-130E. But EI-JIV is a late model L-100-30, which is designed from the C-130H, so she's now properly painted on the HTAI C-130H-30 model, with some paintkit mods.

I post this here because I included as a 'bonus' some flightplans to simulate her planned deployment to Houma, LA to respond to the oil spill. She was placed on alert to go, but it probably won't happen now. Nevertheless, the plans are there for you all to use if you are interested. And for the Americans in the group, they put one more Herc in US skies.

Chris

[RKE]

Speaking of the U-2, I can highly recommend watching James May at the Edge of Space. It's aimed at your average viewer, but it's an interesting insight into this lovely machine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N05NXotFvFs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hoX_tffeN0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2MhQWVsZeU

[ronniegj]

Reggie - thanks for the clarification. Ron