This weekend I flew a short flight from Port Angeles to Roberts Field in Redmond Oregon in the FSD Piper Seneca V (KCLM-KRDM). I wanted to practice a Dme Arc approach into Redmond. The weather was mostly clear and calm for this nighttime flight. There was a snow shower at takeoff around Port Angeles, but takeoff and cruise was uneventful. On descent, I discovered that this routine flight was about to get interesting. I hadn't noticed during cruise, but both my airspeed indicator and vertical speed indicator both had failed sometime during the flight. All I had to go on was my artificial horizon and the altimeter. I installed FS Reliability Factor a while back, but had yet to have a failure (except for the few I caused on purpose). Instead of one failure, I had to deal with two. Descent into the airport was not too difficult; the only real concern was an overspeed condition. It wasn't as hard to hold a reasonable descent rate just by watching the horizon and the altimeter. The hard part was keeping an eye on my navigation. I was too worried about my descent rate to take my eyes off the altimiter! Final approach was where things got more difficult. It was very hard to judge how fast I was coming on for landing. My biggest concern was getting into a stall over the runway. All I saw was darkness out the window, so I had no feel for my airspeed. Fortunately the runway had an ILS which helped me to manage a fairly constant descent rate. All throughout the approach I was high and fast. My biggest fear was of course ending up too low and too slow. The runway a KRDM was 7000+ feet, so the Seneca had plenty of room to land in spite of my high and probably way too fast approach! Touchdown was relatively smooth. I think it was more luck than anything else. The long runway helped considerably as well. My point of this is to show one way to make Flightsimming more interesting and exciting. I just recently started simulating random failures, and even before anything went wrong it has made flying much more interesting. Now flying over those mountains at night in a single engine plane makes me think a little more about safety and that dreaded "what if". Many of you may already be doing this, but if not I would recommend trying to simulate failures with either a freeware or payware program. Personally I use FS Reliability Factor, but there are many others out there as well. (I'm not trying to push any particular product, there are lots out there that I haven't even tried). http://members.rogers.com/swsupport/ReliabilityFactor/

After I had trouble getting my copy of Alert! Pro to work in FS9, I went to Reliablility Factor and am pleased so far...

Does anyone have a recommendation for a freeware program that does random failures?