| DC-3 Airways Virtual Airline | |
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Operation Market Garden 20201st flight - Saturday Feb 1st 2020 19:00z |
A Brief History |
 Operation Market Garden, conducted 17-25 September 1944, was an Allied military operation that was fought in the Netherlands and Germany towards the end of World War 2. Led by Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, it was generally considered a failed operation, although the "Market" phase was the largest airborne operation conducted
up to that point in the war. There is a vast amount of information regarding the operation available, including a study by LTC Jennifer B. Fox dated 8 April 1994 of the operation conducted as a thesis for her course work as student at the Air War College, Department of the Air Force. |
DC-3 Airways Recreation
This will be perhaps the 4th Market Garden event, the first having been staged with 2 other organisations back in October 2002 with 31 participants covering all 3 airborne divisions in their drop zones near Arnhem, Nijmegen and Eindhoven. September 2019 saw the 75th anniversary of the operation and many events were held across the Netherlands to commemorate the event, with mass paratroop drops, moving commemorations and parades and various historical convoys, one of which I was privileged to be a part of thanks to Piet DCA2480 in his WW2 Dodge weapons carrier. In the packages offered, we have provided the historical routes, waypoints and drop zones. Included also are short range NDB's to simulate the Eureka beacons that were used in September 1944 to indicate waypoints. Flak effects have also been placed accurately based on 1944 maps of flak concentrations and the eye witness accounts of aircrew, so the location and desity of the flak is as accurate as we could make it. The drop zones have the coloured smoke markers placed by the pathfinders that arrived some 10 to 15 minutes before the main paratroop serials arrived. Our event in 2020 focuses on just the 82nd airborne and just 2 of the airfields that they used. We will be using RAF Balderton and RAF Cottesmore to deposit our airborne troops on drop zones 'O' and 'N', located to the south and south west of Nijmegen. All we ask of participants is to fly in formation with their assigned flight leader, maintain the airspeed and altitude assigned for the mission and try to drop their paratroopers on the correct DZ. Therefore we request that participants try to utilise a C47 with a military livery and have the necessary package installed and tested to include the effects for the paratroopers and the necessary changes to their aircraft.cfg within the smoke section, details of which will be included in the installation instructions. There is a re-worked C47 package from Aeroworx for X-Plane since we last did a WW2 event. |
Recommended AircraftFor FSX and P3D, we suggest Manfred Jahn's C-47, any version. Whiskey 7 is highly recommended. For X-Plane, we highly recommend downloading Aeroworx' C-47, which is freeware or the V-Sky Labs C-47 (payware). Both are excellent aircraft. |
Recommended/required Add-onsMarket Garden Distribution Files (all sims) Market Garden X-Plane Specific Files The package is of a small size and includes small scenery, effects and sound files to be installed and activated within your software program. For FSX users there are additional FSRecorder files if requested that will add fomations of Ai traffic and effects that will hugely add to the immersion factor. Should anyone have any difficulties in installing or activating the package, a couple of sessions will be held in early January to assist and test things out. The following are very useful sites to get a better understanding of the sequence of events of this operation. Battle of Arnhem - Both sides of the lines - Market Garden 1944 Operation Market Garden, 17-27 September 1944 Lessons Learned from Operation Market Garden Glen Broome |