Missouri Simulator Tour-Dexter to Kennett
Ever since my first solo flight in October I have only been able to get up in the Stoddard County Flyers club plane a couple of times. A combination of bad weather and the busy Christmas season at church conspired to keep me on the ground throughout December. In order to keep my head in the game I have been spending a little more time flying virtually with Microsoft Flight Simulator. This allows me to run checklists and get some practice planning cross country flights. More than anything, however, it is just a lot of fun.
Rather than continuing to buzz around in aimless circles over the virtual Dexter airport, I thought it might be fun to give myself a specific challenge. Growing up in Tipton, Missouri, my grandpa once made an effort to visit and photograph every court house in the state. Whether he ever completed his mission, I do not know, but I have seen some of the pictures he took in the process. My plan is to replicate that journey by landing at the airport nearest every county seat. There are 114 counties in Missouri, so I should have plenty to do for a long time. Because this is a hobby, I am in no particular rush. As often as I can I will share some of the flights here.
The first flight was from my home airport, Dexter, to the seat of Dunklin County, Kennett. The route took me directly over one of my regular real-life airports, Malden. Virtual Air Traffic Control brought me into Kennett from the south so I got a winding approach fix that took me over a bit of northeastern Arkansas.
Malden Air Base was built in 1943 as a primary training base. Towards the end of World War II it was repurposed as a glider pilot base. It was briefly decommissioned before being reopened during Korea to train pilots for the newly independent US Air Force. It is also the reason that the Dexter airport was originally built. Dexter was an outlying field designed to alleviate some of the congestion at the main base. 1960 the base was given to the city of Malden. My wife and I both volunteer at the small museum located on base.
The southernmost three counties of Missouri are known as the Bootheel. Before World War I this area was mostly cypress swamp. In the 1920’s the swamps were drained to make way for farmland. Today agriculture is by far the biggest industry. General aviation in this area consists of flying over miles and miles of irrigated rice and cotton fields while dodging the very large number of crop dusters.
In addition to allowing me to practice checklists and navigation, this flight was also my maiden voyage with Megascenery’s photorealistic Missouri scenery package. Instead of auto generated scenery, Megascenery uses downloaded satellite photos to create a very believable virtual environment. On the downside, because it is a photograph there are no three dimensional trees or buildings like in the default FSX scenery. However, as long as I stay high enough VFR navigation is very realistic. The difference between the two approaches can be seen in the photo above.
In real life I once flew out of the Kennett airport following an air show in 2014. It was fun to be back, even if it was purely electronically. For this simulator flight quite a bit of extra time and distance was added to the trip by the roundabout route given to me by virtual ATC. After approximately 40 minutes of flight time I landed at Kennett without incident. According to Foreflight, KDXE-KTKX is a straight-line distance is 33nm. All in all, this was not a bad way to start my virtual Missouri county seat tour.
The next leg: Kennett to Caruthersville (seat of Dunklin County).
