Well, I'm sure there are many of us that would like to have a go at driving the real thing, so I thought you might be amused by this one. One of the things me and my wife do for a living is produce artwork for various things, and today my wife, Maxine, was working on the artwork for the Boeing 757 Standard Operating Procedures Pilot's Manual for Thomas Cook Boeing 757s.Anyway, she asked me something about the picture for the cover which they had supplied: 'That's not a 757 is it? Isn't that an Airbus A330?' she enquired.I had a look and said: 'Yup, it is indeed an A330'. I then went on to point out some of the things you could look at to identify it as not a Boeing, even though it looks a bit like a 767, including of course the fact that it has Airbus A330 painted on the side near the front.'Oh my god, how sad is that? Your hobby has rubbed off on me so badly I can tell things like that.' says my wife.Incidentally, this is largely due to the fact that I have often forced here to come flying with me and dragged her to airshows etc.Anyway, back to the problem. I agreed with her that it would be rather foolish to have a picture of an Airbus on a B757 manual, and pointed out that it could even be dangerous, as the pilots would notice the mistake and then have reduced confidence in the information contained in the manual and be less inclined to take it seriously. So I said, hang on, email them and tell them I have a solution.So off to my computer I went, fired up FSX, loaded up the Captain Sim Boeing 757 in Thomas Cook colours, loaded up real world weather at EGCD, taxied it out to the runway and took off, merrily taking screengrabs along the way. I stuck them all on a USB drive and put them on my wife's Apple Mac so that she could tart them up in Photoshop and use them for the cover of the real 757 manual.I have done this a few times before with other airlines too incidentally, so, since we are being paid for producing that artwork, now my claims to fame include that I have been the Pilot in Command of a B757 for Thomas Cook airlines on a 'commercial' flight!Al

:-)A fun read Al!

Funny, Al!I am however, somewhat astonished that one as regularly articulate as yourself would commit such an obvious grammatical error:"...me and my wife..." :(

Yeah, I noticed that after I read it, but didn't bother to correct it. Just for you, feel free to insert 'my wife and I' or 'both I, and my wife' LOLI don't normally police stuff I write on the forums as closely as I would with 'proper writing', as I regard 'hangar chat' as just like a real chat.Al

I don't normally police stuff I write on the forums as closely as I would with 'proper writing', as I regard 'hangar chat' as just like a real chat.

Neither do I, Al...I have however noticed that the casual "styles" of writing posts on BBS message bases, emails and now web forums over several decades has adversely affected my ability to conduct more traditional business correspondence...Have you ever found yourself trying to insert "emoticons" in a formal letter? Now there's a clever way to give yourself a :( ...

Actually, I did address that very problem some time ago with a company I regularly work for. Amongst other things, that business is the 'front' company which markets my copywriting course, which is a course that involves a bit about writing for the web and emails.They asked me to present a chopped down version of the course to their staff to address all that 'C U L8R M8' type of stuff, so their staff would not use it on formal communications. Essentially I told them such communications must be treated in the same manner as a regular business letter unless they have a familiar relationship with the client and know for sure that it is acceptable.Little things like that can be the difference between winning and losing a contract when dealing with older people who had a much stricter grammatical education, so I also tell them to avoid starting sentences with conjunctions and stuff like that, even though it is actually grammatically acceptable to do so in spite of having been taught otherwise in schools some years ago. But it can also work the other way around too, when communicating with younger people.Basically that is the crux of all decent writing - you 'talk' to your prospective audience in their own language.Al

wow yah i hate that. Recently i had to write a 4 page report on a country for my spanish class( in english) it was worth 20 percent of my final mark and i failed due to the fact that I used u instead of you and things like that :(

wow yah i hate that. Recently i had to write a 4 page report on a country for my spanish class( in english) it was worth 20 percent of my final mark and i failed due to the fact that I used u instead of you and things like that :(

It is a very, very bad habit to develop. As you've now seen, it will come back to bite you eventually. I don't wish to sound like a snob, but quite frankly I seldom bother to even read posts containing "texting shortcuts" as a matter of preference. :( Back when I owned my own businesses, I'd nearly always place employment applications in the circular file if they demonstrated such poor writing practices. After all, if the prospective employee is careless and sloppy with the application, it is like they'd be sloppy and careless at work as well. :(