You bet I am! I mean, for me the culmination on every airliner flight is the moment when the plane "catch" the ILS signal, and starts to dance a walzer with a glideslope. Sexy moment, on every single flight! Many many flights behind me in FSX, and every time when I catch the ILS, I'm like this...

 

 

... no kiddin' guys, pure happines, joy and culmination of simming satisfaction (what a sentence LOL).

And that annoying morse code beeps after "catching" the ILS, are my heart rate meter. :lol: And honestly, in 30% of flights I forgot to switch to Approach mode because I enjoy to watch the plane dancing with a glideslope, bugger.

 

I will never forget my noob days of simming, not long ago, when I even didn't know for ILS, localizers, glideslope and stuff, so I found myself landing completely manually at Vienna at 1mi visibility. Oh man, that was a nightmare, like driving a car at 60mph in a thick fog, crazy. What enlightment it was when I learned the ILS stuff, wow! The moment when I first saw the plane lining up for a final, my reaction was "coooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool", like Bart SImpson, but way more excited. :lol:

So I will stop now my childish post, and I will ask you what is for you most exciting moment on EVERY flight, EXCEPT THE LANDING?

Well... 

 

I have to say I'm on the opposite side of this. For last 2 hours I was flying from EPKK to LGSK, studied approach plates, discovered that there is no ILS on LGSK, so set up NDB and right VOR, baro DH and did everything by the book. I was performing full manual landing watching PAPI lights and.... retarded to early, panicked, tailstriked and smashed to the ground killing 150 passengers on my Airbus A320. 

 

I guess to me most exciting moment will always be NDB approach to short runway like SkiathosX And I will be practicing this flight a lot I guess. For my defence I need to say I'm flying Airbus for 3 days. Hope in 737 NGX it will be better

That's why I said "except the landings", because I know that the landing can be the most exciting part in any flight, it depends on runway and approach. But in the same time, it is the most stressful moment on some flight, and it can kill the excitement in a blink of an eye if you are not prepared.

Your ILS catch is same as my preparations for ndb approach basically this is most exciting to me - dialing in stuff, checking if Everything is set Up properly and so on. Landing itself is just brutal and gives me heart attack not excitement Especially in places like this

I need to do more of these... I remember doing my first NDB approach  in the soup and finding the lights of the runway in front of me, It was a a Joy I'll never forget.

 

I stopped doing these and finding simming actually boring.

 

Thanks for this post.. I need to read up on my instrument approaches and start doing these... Eye candy goes only so far..but these flying in the soup makes it far more interesting. 

I Follow Roads...

I Follow Roads...

 

Me too... when driving a car.

 

So, how to follow roads when you are on final approach to St. Marteen or Skiathos? Million dollar question. :lol:

Me too... when driving a car.

 

So, how to follow roads when you are on final approach to St. Marteen or Skiathos? Million dollar question. :lol:

I know you are just having fun, but it's really simple if you want a real answer. You look out the window and find the airport. It's how any pilot first learns how to fly.

 

Now that was probably more serious than you wanted, so back to your fun. ;-)

VFR landings are just fine for me, but even in VFR conditions, being on an ILS slope gives me peace of mind.  Flying blind and blindly following the ILS gives me the willies because I just know that FSX wants to kill my virtual pilot life and will do anything, including ILS-ing me into the ground, to achieve that devious goal.

For me it's pushing the Q400's condition levers to MAX and listening to those mighty turboprops roar.

Some of my first flights in 737ngx was insane!

I mostly came in too high too fast.

One time I was using the spoilers to kill it, but wasn't enough. Reversed, full brakes, full spoilers. Ran out of runway and smashed into some poles. I guess all survived with only minor injuries, but there was a lot of screaming yes.

 

So my moments are when the approach feels right.

Thought I'd share my ILS experience.  As a maintenance engineer for Qantas Link I was coming back from Canberra in the jump seat of a Dash8 300 having taken measurements for a later prop balance.  We were on the glide slope for Rwy 07 at Kingsford Smith Sydney and at about 300 feet the aircraft did a sudden lurching dive of only about 50 feet but it was quite violent.  The aircraft immediatly reconnected with the ILS and continued down the glide slope as per normal.  The autopilot hadn't disconnected and for a few moments the crew couldn't figure out the cause.  Then we looked down the end of the runway and saw the cause.  A fuel tanker going down a perimeter road had driven across the beam from the antenna and blocked the signal causing the Dash8 to do a monumental hiccup.  No time to be frightened it was over in a couple of seconds but a very interesting occurance.

I have a RW weather site http://maps.avnwx.com/ that I go to and try to find the worst weather with the highest winds. Especially with the turbulence in ASN there is nothing better than popping out at 100' after fighting it (no AP) all the way down and seeing the lights.

I had one pretty scary situation at FL340, missed another A320 by 200ft at most, we were at the same height. Flew through his contrails with a huge pheeeew. After that I checked realism settings, and saw that contact with another planes was disabled, luckily.

Also I had pretty scary landing on Santorini with A321, without ILS. At that time I wasn't used to the bloody FBW. I was too high so I pulled down, and because of FBW plane reacted slowly so I pulled down even harder. The plane started to dive couple of seconds later, it was something like -3000ft/m. Pulled up hard right after, then down again, it was completely uncontrolled final approach. I hate FBW on PA A320/321, seems too radical.

The click as the MD-11 auto-throttle takes over.