I lifted off from Dunedin into nice weather, and headed across to the peninsula to see what the city looked like. Crossing downtown Dunedin I decided to see how my low level fighter jet flying was, so I reduced altitude and speed so I was at 400 ft at roughtly 400 knots heading down the harbour. Then I turned left and headed inland...
Yeehaw! This is FUN! I would have lost my (non existant) pilots license several times over, but heading up riverbeds at just over treetop level and trying to stay under the surrounding hills is a great way to spend an evening. I was trying to find the clutha and head upriver to lake Wanaka, but I was flying by the seat of my pants and took a wrong river valley somewhere. If I had the time, I would have really enjoyed the scenery, it looked fantastic!
I was now thoroughly lost, and heading out of the foothills and into the Southern Alps proper. I think I must have headed up through the hills around the Lindis Pass region, because I missed both Lake Wanaka, and the MacKenzie basin. I did manage to stay east of the Main Divide, and started seeing some familiar tops. Heading towards the most familiar one, I broke out of the valleys next to Mount Cook, made a hard right and headed down the Tasman Glacier. I decided to see if I could manage to land this beast of a plane at Mount Cook Airfield, so I made a power decent to something like 1000 foot AGL, brought back the throttle to bring the speed down to something like 150 knots and made a sharp 180 degree turn over the lake to head back towards the airfield.
Unfortuately, I'd badly misjudged the distance, and was way too high too fast before I managed to line up with the runway. I sort of slammed the plane down on the strip 3/4 of the way down the field, blew off the end of the tarmac while still travelling at something like 100 knots and slid to a stop sideways after ripping off the undercarriage. The rest of the plane looked to be more or less in one piece, so since I could concievably have walked away from that, I'll call that a landing, albeit not a particularly sucessful one
Sadly, since a crash will reset the flight, I couldn't use the flight replay to catch some screenshots
They would have been spectacular!