About the Author
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Welcome to Beulah Florida, the home of "The Big Dawgs", Beulah Fire and Rescue. I am Charlie Young, a fireline Captain, and a firefighter for 25 years.
A little over a year ago, I became adicted to flying helicopters in MS Flight Simulator. Years ago I flew private fixed wing aircraft, and flew as a passenger very often on various types of helicopters while working offshore in the Gulf of Mexico out of the New Orleans area.
Over the past 8 years, I have set up many landing zones(LZ) for both EMS and fire choppers in my capacity with the fire department.
Add these experiences together, and you might understand the interest in making emergency scene type scenery for Flight SImulator.
Files
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This is the first of a series of many emergency scene related FS scenery files I have written over the past year. After enjoying them myself, I thought maybe others might as well.
You must load the scenery in order. Each file builds on previous files and in the interest of size, the textures in the first sceneries may be used again in subsequent scenery.
I used Airport 2.6 to create the scenes, and they use much of the default textures plus textures I have found on the internet. If you are a scenery creator and have any interesting "api" files, please share!!!!
The Scenery
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The first scenery file is Beulah Florida, home of our fire department. In general, Beulah is located just northwest of the city of Pensacola on the Alabama state line.
The town has many more structures around it than were included in this file, but for simplicity, just the "main drag" was included. As time permits later, I will put together a file of "jpg" files so you can see the real Beulah.
The scenery for Beulah Florida includes "Coastal Airport", a local grass strip home to private aircraft, gliders, and ultralights. (FYI: The default Coastal in FS is so incorrect, I built the town slightly south of its actual position so I could have an accurate version of Coastal Airport.)
The Beulah scenery file also contains several LZs (Landing Zones) set up throughout the community. Each LZ has a fire engine standing by, and usually there is a squad truck and ambulance near the building where the medical call exists.
Due north of town is an accident scene with LZ, as well as a medical scene. The LZ for the medical scene is in the front yard of a large house, which is actually my home. Every LZ in Beulah is a recreation of an actual incident.
Due west of Beulah on the main drag is a pick-up truck on fire with LZ. Northwest of the truck fire is a wooded area with a woods fire.
East of town is the Navy helicopter training field. There are different types of landing areas with which to practice including two asphalt pads, and several grass pads. There is a practice LZ with firetruck, a painted wooden mockup of a downed private aircraft in a clearing, and a hover practice area in an oblong clearing. (The grass pad with the two single landing markers is for the purpose of landing with your skids or wheels astride the marker. This helps with getting over loss of depth perception in FS.)
The only "imaginary" part of Beulah is next to Coastal Airport and is a heliport of grass pads which is the virtual home of the Big Dawgs Air Rescue team. In real life, this is an open field used to store glider trailers.
Finally, there is West Florida Regional Hospital, due west of Beulah by several miles with a landing pad.
There are a total of 17 marked places to land a helicopter in Beulah, the hospital is number 18.
Location
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To find Beulah, you may start at the default "Coastal" airport in FS2000, and 2002. The town is 1/2 mile south. You may also start from Pensacola Regional Airport and fly due west. West Florida Hospital is NNW of Pensacola Regional on a relative heading of 312. You may also use the NDBs below.
NDBs
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Navy Practice field in Beulah has a NDB of 201hz.
West Florida Hospital has an NDB of 420hz.
Installation
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unzip the file into a sub-directory called "BFR" located in the scenery directory in FS2k or in the "Addon Scenery" directory in FS2k2.
When done, if you go into scenery or add on scenery you should see a subdirectory called BFR. in BFR there should be a scenery and texture subdirectory.
Start FS 2K or 2k2 and go to World, Scenery Library and add "Beulah Florida". Supply the path to "BFR" created above.
Once created, any subsequent scenery can be added to the BFR scenery and texture sub-directories, and will be automatically picked up by FS.
Finally, open the sample Scenery "cfg" file and cut and paste the "flatten" commands when using FS 2002 into your own "scenery.cfg" file. No flatten commands are needed for FS2000 for this scenery.
Choppers
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Life Flight type choppers can be found at www.simviation.com. Firefighting helicopters can be found at www.thelz.com.
I fly with realism set at full realism with panel on at all times. I use a Sidewinder joystick.
FS98
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I have some of the various sceneries for FS98 as well, but I did not include as I am sure most everyone is using at least FS2000 now. If you are interested, save the textures in these files in FS98 and email me at cyoungjr@bellsouth.net and I will email the FS98 BGL files. If I get enough email, I will post them on Simviation.
More to Come
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These were my first scenery files. They use default textures in Airport 2.6 mostly, but I think you'll enjoy. You'll see that in my later sceneries, I made use of "api" files by many of the best scenery folks.
Some sceneries to come:
1. Medical call at soccer field with LZ.
2. Small plane crash in woods.
3. Airliner crash in woods.
4. Airliner emergency landing at small airport, overran runway. With LZ.
5. Airliner quarantined at Pensacola NAS due to white power found aboard. With LZ.
6. Large woods fire with fire camp, multiple LZs, static aircraft and a landing strip for fixed wing.
7. House fire with LZ.
8. Medium woods fire with fire camp.
9. Large Heliport with people.
10. Medium Heliport with fuel pumping station with its own LZ.
11. Small heliport on Gulf Coast.
12. Cruise ship fire offshore from #11.
13. Highrise Fire, downtown Pensacola with multiple LZs.
14. Hotel area near Pensacola on beach with LZs.
15. Medical Center area (fictional modeled on Medical Center area in Atlanta) near Pensacola Beach. Has 4 hospitals with landing areas.
16. Fire Port with boats, fire station, ambulance station, and helipads.
17. Santa Rosa air park with many homes that have their own landing pads, fire station with pad. N-S and E-W runways with homes that have their own hangers.
18. Abandoned Navy fixed wing practice field converted into a Coast Guard landing field with Helicopter area.
19. Hot Air Balloon that crashed into trees with LZ.
20. Fair in Milton Florida with medical call and LZ.
21. Helicopter crash at Whiting field with LZ.
22. CYFARM, my fictional farm community with fixed wing strip, and many landing pads.
23. Elberta Al.- small Alabama town main drag with old fashioned main "green" area. Small medical facility with pad.
24. Sacred Heart Hospital with rooftop elevated pad.
25. Baptist Hospital with rooftop landing area.
26. Heliworks, small helicopter trailer and three pads at Pensacola Regional Airport.
27. Default FS2000/2002 Grass strip with helicopter facilities added.
I will be uploading weekly for some time to Simviation, so stay tuned. I also will be uploading a Word document on the basics of Helicopter firefighting operations. I did include a file called "LZ.txt" with this distribution which is our fire department rules for setting up an LZ for Life Flight.
Once you have all the scenery, there will be nearly 85 marked places to land a helicopter.
Tour of Beulah
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If you start on the east end of Beulah and go toward the west down the main drag (Alt. US90 or Nine Mile Road), the structures are as follows:
North Side of the road: 4H Club(pond, arena, and hall), Navy OLF Helicopter field, the north/south road(Beulah Road) up to my home, Johnson's A/C repair, Silver Lake Mobile Home Park, two private residences, approach clearing for Coastal Airport, private residence, Food Barn Restraunt(red building that faces east),two provate residences, Rebel Road(N/S), Posey's Garage, Miss Betty's Beauty Salon, open field, private residence, Beulah Baptist Church, Beulah General Store, Beulah Fire Station, private residence, tree line, Easy Serve Food Store, Bridlewood Dr.(N/S), Southern Erectors, private residence, radio tower.
South Side of the Road(East to West again): Liesure Lakes RV Park, Country Tavern, Beulah Road, open area, Coastal Airport, private residence, private residence, Rebel Road, open area, Sausage Festival* grounds, open areas.
The road that joins Nine Mile Road at an angle is Mobile Highway. The road on the south end of Coastal Airport is Beulah Church Road. Notice Beulah Church and associated buildings where Beulah Church Road(west end) meets Beulah Road. There are a couple of private residences represented on Beulah Church Road as well, one of which has a medical incident(LZ is at south end of Coastal Airport).
* Note: The Beulah Sausage Festival is the big fire department fund raiser every year. It is usually in the middle of March. You can see what's happening by going to www.beulahsausagefestival.com.
Final Note
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My hat is off to all the great scenery makers out there, as I am not one of them. You'll find my scenery to be fun, but I won't win any prizes for design of the textures. I did them for myself. There wasn't anyone out there writing stuff for helicopters, so I wrote my own. If you don't like them, don't use them. If you get some pleasure out of them, let me know.
I guess I don't have to worry about anyone selling them....but in case, don't. They're freeware.
