I've been simming since FS2000 and I'm currently 19 y/o. Didnt have flying experience other than some turns, and cruising on a 150 long time ago, however I took an introductory flight in a Cessna 172 on july and I may tell you that the instructor thought that I had already some sort of training! I truly went from Cold and Dark to Cold and Dark all by myself with him just sitting there.

 

It was way easier than the Sim as I didnt have to click everything with my mouse or use this joistick.

 

Now, the 737 is a bigger deal. I'm self confident that I can take over it in case of an emergency and land.

Maybe not a good landing, but definitely I could land it. As someone said in this thread, is just a matter of 10-20 mins till you get used to the aircraft feel and the fear goes off :-)

 

 

Just my .02c

 

One thing is a Cessna 172 and another is a B737-800NG... I love your confidence though.

One thing is a Cessna 172 and another is a B737-800NG

 

Is it not true that the main difference would be in the response times for changes in engine power and in direction, and don't the PMDG products teach one how to handle these differences?

 

 

Is it not true that the main difference would be in the response times for changes in engine power and in direction, and don't the PMDG products teach one how to handle these differences?

 

Are you serious or just pulling my leg?

Is it not true that the main difference would be in the response times for changes in engine power and in direction, and don't the PMDG products teach one how to handle these differences?

 

No. PMDG do a great job within the limitations of a 6 year old engine that only provides a vague aproximation to the extremely fluid enviroment that is the atmosphere in which aircraft fly; but no amount of time playing FSX will fully prepare you for real world flying.

 

The reason for this is simply the variation in conditions you can experience in real world flying. For example, during my PPL training I'd completed around 100 RW landings in various light aircraft with no problems, until one day I caught a gust during the flare, which almost caused me to depart the runway. So, that isn't to say you couldn't land a C172 (or a 737 for that manner) having learnt the fundamentals in FSX, but it would require as much luck that you didn't encounter any nasty surprises than as tallent.

Are you serious or just pulling my leg?

I suppose I was reading too much into statements in the FSX Missions but I was not talking about the whole process of flying a Cessna versus a 737, only the handling characteristics during manual approach and landing. I am hoping folks will respond with "No because 1).. 2).. 3) ...".

I'm self confident that I can take over it in case of an emergency and land

 

Self confidence and no experience makes a very dangerous combination - especially when you throw in an emergency on top :blink:

In terms of the original topic i think that anyone who has a lot of hours flying the ngx has a realy solid chance of performing an ils autoland. I fly with a hardware mcp and other gear - this would make the sim practice even more useful. I pretty much always use the proper checklists and approach plates - so these are not foreign concepts. I know how to tune to a useful COM frequency, find someone on the ground who flies an NG for real, and ask them what I might be missing.

 

A normal pax would have around zero percent chance of landing without assistance even with all systems operational. An easy way to test this is to sit them in front of the ngx positioned somewhere near an airport and ask them to land it (cockpit hardware would increase the validity of this test).

 

Some pax might work out how to use the radios and if the right COM frequency is already selected someone could talk them through things. You could simulate this with the ngx - just tell them what someone on the ground could tell them. Try explaining what a cdu is, where it is and what buttons they need to push.

 

I tried this with a couple of people with the pmdg 747 (at christmas 2 years back!). A couple of non pilots with a small amount of default fsx training performed (probably) non-survivable impacts with terrain in the vicinity of the airport. A boeing aeronautical engineer with a PPL managed something close to a landing - most of the pax would probably walk or be carried away. Note that i was in the room, and there was not the stress of the real- world situation - so these results are certainly better than the real-world outcome.

 

Finally, do I think I could manually land a 737 myself now? If you mean no ILS i'd still think we're ok for a very rough landing on autopilot most of the way in using an RNAV approach. I'll disconnect the autopilot and perform the flare. I'm not going to get that right, so we're either floating down the runway a bit or performing a glorified CFIT.

 

Take away the autopilot - and i think it's 80% likely we're walking away - and even then i'm not sure you'll be using the plane any time soon.

 

To pilot a 737 you've got to be 99.9999% sure you can land the plane. So I'm saying that a high-fidelity sim such as the NGX teaches you some very useful things, but of course it doesn't make you into a type-rated ATP.

To a 737 (any, really) pilot you have the be 100% sure you can land it - in fact not even consider alternatives - before you strap yourself in. Otherwise that 0.0001% will nag away. That's the thing with confidence. If you're not absolutely confident you can do it you're likely to wind up with a self-fulfilling prophesy one day, which is never good in an aeroplane.

Well, that's false confidence in the rw pilots then. I'm only saying the real pilot has a one in a million chance of not getting the landing right (as a very rough stat). Hull loss rate for commercial flights is 0.7 per million departures.

 

Whether that false confidence is a good thing or not is an interesting question. Having just finished re-reading the account of the Czar 52 crash at Fairchild AFB - I'm inclined to say no.

Equally, there are cases when things have gone badly wrong - Cactus 1549, QF-32, BA-9 and countless more where bad might have been worse if the crew wasn't confident (real or otherwise) about what they (and the aircraft) were doing. Do things go wrong? Of course. Are there human factors? Absolutely. Where does one draw the line between confidence, recklessness/carelessness and a lack of awareness of ones (or the aircraft, or the crew, or {insert here}) limitations? That's a whole other topic.

 

I do know where you're coming from and figured that 99.9999% was based on an accident rate of some sort. I don't imagine those crews expected anything to go wrong on those days. That's why I think confidence has to be separated from the other things.

 

Mike

I am a big fan of Cactus 1549 - Sully exemplifies the best of the 'confident' approach. Cool as ice, what we'd all hope to be when it's all hitting the fan.

 

Flipside, I was reading the Sukhoi superjet report last night and I think that's the downside of the '100% confident' aporoach. "I'm flying in unfamiliar moutainous terrain with poor visibility and my GPWS has just gone off seven times ...hmmm, let's just turn it off then..."

 

I like to think of medicine and aviation as analogous. You definitely want a confident surgeon, but how confident? Same for pilots - i don't exactly know the answer but it is an interesting question.

• Quote
   

  
  I am a big fan of Cactus 1549 - Sully exemplifies the best of the 'confident' approach. Cool as ice, what we'd all hope to be when it's all hitting the fan.
   
  Flipside, I was reading the Sukhoi superjet report last night and I think that's the downside of the '100% confident' aporoach. "I'm flying in unfamiliar moutainous terrain with poor visibility and my GPWS has just gone off seven times ...hmmm, let's just turn it off then..."
   
  I like to think of medicine and aviation as analogous. You definitely want a confident surgeon, but how confident? Same for pilots - i don't exactly know the answer but it is an interesting question.
  

One certainly does not want misplaced confidence as in AF447

I was reading the Sukhoi superjet report last night and I think that's the downside of the '100% confident' aporoach. "I'm flying in unfamiliar moutainous terrain with poor visibility and my GPWS has just gone off seven times ...hmmm, let's just turn it off then..."

Sometimes these (in retrospect) seemingly easily preventable accidents occur. Two other recent incidents involving basic pilot error include Air France Flight 447 and Colgan Air Flight 3407. Regardless, none of us were in the cockpit at the time of these incidents and did not experience the levels of both direct and indirect stress, so it would be difficult and somewhat insensitive to label either incident as completely stupid.

 

You definitely want a confident surgeon, but how confident? Same for pilots - i don't exactly know the answer but it is an interesting question.

I would want my pilot or surgeon to take calculated, logical risks, only when necessary.

I just read something in a blog that seems applicable in this context. Consider a real world 737 pilot reading this thread and thinking, "I feel like a tax attorney being compared to TurboTax."

 

Hook

Nothing wrong with comparisons. It'd be great if a RW ATP would chip in and tell me why my theory's way off...or if it's pretty close to true. You need an ATP who is at least familiar with concepts of flying with a high-fidelity sim (with full cdu ) and hardware including yoke/pedals/throttle/mcp.

 

A lot of the negativity towards sim being useful rw is based on the idea you're flying the default 737 with a keyboard whilst doing barrel roles - quite different from what we do here.

 

@zowen

 

Were those accidents 'stupid'? Af447 i think is sad, not stupid. The FO's flight control inputs and lack of communication about what he was doing was terrible - the crm was awful - but they were all responding to an emergency situation in the middle of the night. I can see how it happened. Put the same crew there 10 times and they might have worked it out in 9 of them and saved the plane.

 

Colgan air - sloppy, followed by a very unfortunate pitch up command by the captain. I can see how that could happen, though, it was a rapid response to a perceived emergency.

 

The superjet was just pure stupidity. Sorry to the captain but you just killed your crew and pax by deliberately doing something that almost all 21st century pilots would have avoided.

 

Insensitive? Maybe, but the ntsb is pretty good at calling a spade a spade. It's why aviation is so darn safe these days.