Flight Simulators Archives - Golf Hotel Whiskey

How a non-pilot can land an aircraft

We have just posted a story (Can a simulator pilot with no real flying experience fly a perfect pattern?) about how a flight simulator “pilot,” or rather someone with extensive flight simulator experience and no real flying experience, confounded an airline pilot by flying a perfect pattern and landing on the first try in a real aircraft. But how could a non-pilot land an aircraft in an emergency situation?

Blogger, software engineer and pilot Eduardo Mourão attempted to answer that question on his blog by first writing that history shows someone with X years of flight simulator experience “will probably die:”

Probably not because it is difficult but because you don’t know what you don’t know. Flight simulators distort important aspects of landing airplanes: your awesome 200 degrees/3D vision, the muscle mechanics of flying and the notion of distance. In fact, flight simulators are harder than the real thing.

On the other hand, Eduardo was quick to concede that “many in the flight school I teach landed without the need for intervention in their first flight” – just like the guy we wrote about in the previous post (Note: There have been a few real life incidents where passengers were forced to take control of a general aviation aircraft after a pilot became incapacitated and with help of ATC, they were able to safely land). Eduardo also landed an aircraft for the first time when he was just 11 years old.

With that in mind, he went into considerable detail about the following steps a non-pilot needs to take in an emergency situation:

Stay calm, take control
Inform the situation
Flying straight and airspeed
Making turns
Approaching
Landing

Near the end of the post, Eduardo pointed out that playing 10 minutes with a flying simulator will make someone more comfortable maintaining an aircraft in the air, but it won’t help on a landing with the biggest mistake most first timers do is to come in too slow and too low.

Nevertheless and if you fly regularly with family members as passengers, having them play around on a flight simulator might be a good idea to get them comfortable with the basics of flying should they ever need to take over the controls in the event you are incapacitated.

Can a simulator pilot with no real flying experience fly a perfect pattern?

Steve, the blogger behind a mile of runway will take you anywhere, has posted a story and video about how an airline pilot named Steve Satre (who is also a blogger and the author of two of the “greatest aviation threads in internet history”: Two Plus Two and FlyerTalk) met a guy named Tyler with a huge amount of flight simulator experience who wanted to see if that type of experience could turn him into a real pilot in a real aircraft – on the first try. Of course, there were some rules in the experiment e.g. Steve could not say anything unless Tyler was endangering their safety or the aircraft and then he would have to relinquish control.

You can read an introduction to the whole story here on Steve Satre’s blog along with a detailed follow-up post about the flight itself. Tyler has also put together a lengthy 14 minute long video where he begins by talking, talking and talking some more for the first several minutes of it with the airport action starting at the six minute mark or so:

To spoil things a little bit, Steve already had his mind made up in the very beginning about how the experiment would end:

There was no doubt in my mind that I’d have to take over the plane, but I wanted to see just how well he could do on his first time in a plane.

However, Steve ended up writing that he had to congratulate Tyler because he had just made a “mockery of my entire life” while the later acknowledged that the real airplane is “a whole lot different than flying the simulation software, but it obviously gave him the basics.”

Where to find flight simulators in Britain

A big hat-tip to Sean of Loveplanes.co.uk for posting a list of where you can find commercial flight simulators in Britain. According to Sean, a full motion Boeing 737 simulator experience starting at 1 hour for £690 is available at Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Southampton.

However and if that is beyond your budget or you’d rather spend that kind of money flying a real aircraft, Sean wrote that Virgin Experience Days offers a Boeing 737 flight simulator experience starting at £24.50 for 15 minutes at Shepards Bush, London. However, a quick search of the website (type in “flight simulators”) reveals a whole range of options and prices. Other options noted by Sean include:

Virtual Aerospace (Boeing 737) starting at 30 Minutes for £99 at Sywell Aerodrome, Northhampton.
iPilot (Boeing 737) from 15 minutes for £49 at Westfield shopping centre, London.
Solo Aviation (Airbus A320, Boeing 737-300, Boeing 737-700, Boeing 737-800 & Boeing 747) starting from £45 for 15 minutes and full motion from £165 for 15 minutes at Gatwick, Southampton and Bournemouth.
Real Simulation (Boeing 737) for 20 minutes from £149 at Harrogate.
747 Simulator (Boeing 747) for 1 hour from £65 at Coventry

A quick search of the Internet reveals possible Groupon deals for some of the above offerings along with Virtual Aviation which operates Airbus and Boeing flight simulators at several UK locations for what looks like to be more advance training:

Their price list would be the following:

With that in mind, we would like to ask any readers whether we have left out any good places where there are flight simulators available and whether you have visited some of the above flight simulators. Feel free to let us know in the comments section.

What IFR flight simulator software should you buy?

A pilot named George has recently posted a question on on Ask a CFI about what the best flight simulator software to buy for home computer use:

My set up now is CH ruder CH yoke CH avionics panel windows XP.
Looking for software to practice IFR
Don’t care about the big airplanes just single engine steam gages user friendly.

Carl Tyler responded by writing that he personally uses Microsoft Flight Simulator (FSX) because it supported all his plugin accessories right out of the box e.g. rudders, radio panel etc. He had also tried XPlane but he didn’t like the user interface while trying to get it to work with his pedals and other accessories was “way too difficult.” Of course, Microsoft has ceased development on the Microsoft Flight Simulator but Carl still thinks its a great piece of software and perfect for practicing those IFR approaches.

A quick Internet search reveals a few other sources for commentary about flight simulators for IFR practice, including a Best IFR Sim software thread from the Pilots of America Message Board and another webpage entitled Using Flight Sims for IFR Practice which appears to date from over a decade ago but made the interesting observation that:

In real IFR flying, radios must be retuned in real time. Sometimes there isn’t a lot of spare time to do this. You can’t pull over and stop while you twiddle knobs. (But you may be able to activate an autopilot, which is almost as good.) Very high end sims have radios that work just like the radio stack in a real airplane.

Finally, another good and very comprehensive source for information about flight simulator software is AVSIM Community Forums which calls itself the largest repository of flight sim information available as it has over 2 million messages and over 200 forums.

Flight simulators: Useless for practicing landings?

Paul Bertorelli has recently written an interesting post (Johnny Can Read, But He Can’t Land) for AVWeb covering landings that brought up some interesting points about the use of flight simulators to practice landings and whether they do a good or bad job of simulating one. Paul began by writing that landing an aircraft may not be particularly difficult but doing it well consistently isn’t easy either and year after year, this inconsistency gets reflected in the NTSB accident database. He also noted the greater use of flight simulators as a primary teaching tool.

However and for landings, Paul is not so sure how useful flight simulators are because:

Of all the tasks in flying, landing requires the most refined motor skills and hand-eye coordination in reaction to a stream of subtle cues. Some LSAs require more of that rather than less.

Paul then went on to mention that when he was at Oshkosh last summer, Jerry Gregoire put him into Redbird’s J-3 simulator which got the flight dynamics mostly right but it did not bounce on the runway the way a real Cub aircraft would.

And without the bounce dynamic built in, Paul concluded that you don’t have a flight simulator but rather just a video game because not all bounces are the same as the “small ones you get on a three-pointer can be ignored, but the 10-footers with roll excursions have to be dealt with aggressively.”

He also added that:

What separates an acceptable landing from one that’s bound for the ditches are often subtle cues related to seat-of-the-pants sensing of acceleration, turning and slipping moments. You feel these in your butt or see them through the windshield and you respond with the appropriate control input. Sometimes that’s gentle and subtle, sometimes not. But the airplane moving in three dimensions helps you discern the difference.

Flight simulators may get close to that but Paul concluded that they don’t yet nail it just yet.

Hence, we want to see what you our readers think about flight simulators in general along with simulated landings: In other words, do flight simulators do a good job of simulating landings just yet? Moreover, did flight simulators help you become a better general aviation pilot while training?

Pilot builds a Boeing 737 simulator in his garage

While most aviation enthusiasts don’t go beyond having Microsoft Flight simulator on their computer, the tecca blog has reported that James Price of Pleasanton, California who is an air traffic controller at Oakland International Airport and a private pilot, has spent 12 years to build a fully functioning Boeing 737 flight simulator in his garage that even uses an actual commercial jet cockpit and nose section.

Price also went a step further and designed and programmed his own simulation software with lifelike visuals that project onto a massive wrap-around screen. The visuals even interface with the simulator’s instruments, knobs, and switches plus 90% of the original instruments from his Lufthansa 737 cockpit are fully functional.

The only thing missing from Price’s simulator is the motion. However, he could always put his simulator on hydraulics as his next decade long project.

No word on whether Price is married nor what his wife thinks of the simulator taking up no doubt a large position of the garage!