Flight Simulator and the news

[NGXfanatic 85]

With all the saturation in the MSM of MAS370 and the spotlight on our beloved, yet underground, hobby, I wonder what everyone here thinks of the attention PC simming is receiving?  When I first found out the captain had a fancy simulator at home with the PMDG 777 installed, I was overjoyed.  You know the saying "There is no such thing as bad publicity"? I remember feeling the same excitement when the Wall Street Journal published a profile on PMDG and the release of their 777 last September.  Too often, I am afraid to mention that I spend so much time with FSX and the PMDG addons, for fear that both pilots and non pilots alike see it as a game.   I have always wished our hobby was more widely accepted, can you imagine the quality and breadth of the addons available if flight sim was as popular as the console games?   So hooray, long awaited coverage by the media has arrived!

 

Unfortunately, we all know that the captain's infatuation with setting up a pricey, fancy home simulator setup is mostly seen as odd at best, and suspicious at worst.  I wasn't really into FS during 9/11, but I can imagine there was a witch hunt in the media blaming the extreme ease of use, affordability, and authenticity of the training provided in the comfort of our own homes by means of PC simulation as an aid to the hijackers.  And seeing the photos of Captain Shah's intricate home setup just hours after this disappearance, in the back of my mind I did fear that it could be seen as suspicious.  Why on earth would someone want to replicate their work life at home in his free time?   But I do remember that flying is not like most jobs, it appears to me most pilots feel privileged to be paid to fly for a living, that it's just something in their blood.   I know it is for me, because aviation, with airliners in particular, are my first love, and I feel so fortunate to be able to at least pretend I was performing the job I know was my calling in my life.  I do not imagine that I would avoid thinking of flight when I was off the clock, and I am sure there are many airline pilots IRL who love to practice and play in FSX offline, as quite a few them call AVSIM home along with mere mortals like myself!

 

Anyways, it appears debris has been found and the 24 hour news cycle may move on to the next big story.  I have never seen so much commercial aviation and flight simulator coverage in the MSM ever before, and while at times even I have been exhausted by it, I have learned so much more about aviation technology outside of the cockpit, and have gained a greater appreciation for just how complex the field of commercial aviation is.   Never in my wildest dreams would I believe that I'd be seeing a tutorial on modifying the legs page in a Boeing FMC on CNN in prime time!  There is just something about having intimate, esoteric knowledge of a topic that is so exotic to the general public.   I'm sure everyone outside of our community has a strong passion for their own specialized interests and feel the same way we do when the media spotlight shines on their beloved subjects due to news events.   

 

So, what are your thoughts on the coverage thus far?   Are you likely to voluntarily tell folks you enjoy flight simulator, or keep it on the DL until interest in this story subsides? 

[psolk 3,040]

Great, now we can have 5 topics for the same conversations... My thoughts are we don't need separate threads every time someone wants to ask their own specific question.

 

Seriously, just 3 topics down:http://forum.avsim.net/topic/437053-cnn-mentions-fsx-used-by-malaysian-cpt/

CNN Mentions FSX used by Malaysian Cpt.

 

Man, there goes my perfect record, my first dislike . Well at least here on Avsim that is, my friends and most (ok almost all) of the women i hit on give me thumbs down all the time

[Jude Bradley 659]

what's with the attack mode?
 

[psolk 3,040]

what's with the attack mode?

 

Its not attacking it is asking why we need another topic for something that is already being discussed? Questioning something or someone is not attacking them. Yes, personally I prefer not to have to go to 5 topics to read the same questions/comments. If everyone starts their own topic for their own questions it becomes very difficult to consolidate information and keep track of the comments. All I did was point out the exact same thing was being discussed just 3 topics down.

[FLEX1978 373]

I stopped reading all the other threads, some comments are worse than PPRUNE/CNN & the Daily mail combined....

 

Anyway...

 

 - I know (In real life) a pro basket ball player, whenever he is not playing or training he is on his console playing basket ball games.

 

- In the UK Most of the top footballers play FIFA or PES against each other.

 

- Speak to any top golfer (or golfer with cash) (they have a huge golfing simulator at home)

 

- One of my ex girlfriends brother was a semi pro rally driver, he had a sim setup in his house, also said that is pretty normal amongst other drivers.

 

- All F1 drivers drivers use a simulator at home

 

- Every airline pilot I know personally has at the very least a FMGS/ECAM/FMC trainer at home.  Many now use PMDG and other complex addons, I even know an A320 F/O that loves the FS9 PSS Airbus

 

The main comments I have heard in real life - (Not anonymous youtube morons)   'Why is the captain being hounded?'  'Damn, I wish i had one of those sims in my house!'

 

Flying is both incredibly enjoyable & complex. It should come as no surprise to any sane person that many of us use these tools as an aid to learning, and even less of a surprise that a huge amount of people use these products because 'shock horror!' They love aviation

 

Btw, does Microsoft office admin & Tea boy simulator exist?  Now that would be weird

[Jeff H 63]

Honestly, I think this topic is ok as it's not specific to the situation with flight 370.  A.J., you're right about what happened after 9/11.  There was a lot of talk about how realistic it was and that the hijackers may have practiced on FS.  There were a lot of critics back then, too.  I hate watching coverage of aviation incidents on the news because most of the talking heads know next to nothing about aviation.   And it's so sensationalized.  But I don't think it's just Flight Sim that gets bad press when things like this happen.  I've seen a few kids who have stolen cars and done tons of damage, only to hear in the news that they spend 10 hours a day playing GTA.  It's all just society's natural instinct to find someone or something to blame for things we don't have the answers to or.that we can't yet explain.  The truth is, sometimes bad things just happen, but that explanation doesn't attract viewers or pay the bills.

Cheers,

Jeff

[Christopher Low 5,354]

I think if anything is learned from the reporting of this incident, it should be that using a flight simulator at home is a perfectly normal thing to do if you are interested in aviation. It should not be seen as some kind of suspicious and sinister activity.

[Tushka 0]

I'm going to make this short.

 

But a pilot, who flies commercial airliners for a living. Has a realistic simulator at his home. Is this strange? No! It just means he adores flying and is practicing mainly navigation and unusual procedures. Many pilots do this, both for enjoyment, and for training. Also keep in mind a 777 is a long range jet and you do not get as many landings as a 737, 134 or 320 does.

 

These newspapers are just ridicolous, I never read american media for such reasons. The state media I read in my country is not the most reliable either but it shows mostly true facts as they're not in for the money "to make it interesting".

 

A lot of pilots I know have simulators. Young ones to retired ones. A lot of fans also have it as they're simply not interested in shooting people to death in these other games. I wonder why stupid newspapers like CNN never says people who play call of duty are training to be serial killers?

[psolk 3,040]

. I wonder why stupid newspapers like CNN never says people who play call of duty are training to be serial killers?

 

Oh but they do all the time... Video games create killers...

 

I posted this in another thread but will post it here as well. Not all the reporting from CNN has been negative:

CNN) - Like an over-keen online gamer, there appears nothing in Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah's post on a flight simulator forum that suggests anything more untoward than exaggerated geekiness.

For many in the airline industry, however, the fact that Captain Zaharie had an off-the-shelf -- albeit elaborate -- flight simulator at home is nothing out of the ordinary.

 

"Realistically speaking, having a simulator means absolutely nothing," Julian D'Arcy, the flight operations and training manager at Pacific Simulators, told CNN. "The only reason I can see that the simulator is under investigation is just to see if he happened to fly that route on his simulator history which might point to where it is.

 

"It'd be the same if he just had a Nintendo -- it makes no sense."

Operating for fun

 

He said that while Zaharie's flight simulator might look complex to the uninitiated, its plastic pedals and desktop steering yoke could be bought at any gaming store or electronics shop.

 

"Most pilots would have some version of a Microsoft flight simulator on their home computers -- you can practice instrument flying and systems knowledge, they're great for that, but you can't teach someone to fly a plane from scratch."

 

Pilots, he said, often use flight simulators in their spare time, for their own satisfaction, to improve their flight skills and to contribute to an online community of simulation enthusiasts.

 

"Aviation is one of those things you're born with -- a lot of people do it from when they're little kids. Pilots (operate simulators) for fun and like to the help the community.

 

"I know a lot of pilots, when they get home will take a remote-control helicopter out of their car boot and fly it around their backyard. It's in the blood -- it's not so much a job as a life."

Aviation expert Jim Tilmon says the simulator is a useful tool for pilots: "I didn't read anything into it in the beginning, because some pilots do like to have that to tinker with and if they're going to be flying the next month into an airport they haven't been in before, they can program that and get some experience in doing that and practice.

An airline industry source who regularly flies Boeing aircraft said the flight simulator was unlikely to reveal many clues.

 

"The idea that he was using a home simulator as a means to train himself to hijack the plane is ludicrous," he said. "Plenty of aviation enthusiasts have 'sims' at home.

 

"Pilots don't necessarily have them because they fly all the time -- it might be like a journalist writing an article for fun in his spare time -- but I guess if its your passion maybe that's what you'd do."

 

He said it was unlikely the simulator would be used, as has been speculated, to test run a landing at an undetected airstrip.

 

"Really, if he is an airline pilot like the rest of us, he already has that skillset -- he doesn't need a simulator to practice.

[Captain Kevin 586]

So, what are your thoughts on the coverage thus far?   Are you likely to voluntarily tell folks you enjoy flight simulator, or keep it on the DL until interest in this story subsides? 

If somebody asks me what I do in my free time, sure, I'll tell them. All my friends pretty much know I fly in the simulator anyway, and some of them have told THEIR friends that. I get questions about flying all the time, and I don't have a problem answering them. I don't fly for a living and probably never will.

[BilboBaggins 82]

I think what the larger audience out there doesn't know, and probably never will, and if they did will run away screaming from, is just how incredibly complex, sophisticated, massive and miraculous both real-world and simulated aviation really is.

 

The hobby will always remain a niche hobby, and the recent news exposure and commentary on what might have happened only confirms that for me all the more.  The number of people out there willing to go into deep study on a complex set of a variety of systems taking into account so many factors simultaneously in a real-time, 3D environment, with extensive pre-planning and then post-flight analysis, even.... and who will find that entertaining rather than intimidating..... will always be small.

 

I know so many people who went the "got FSX, yanked the joystick around, nothing really happened, the frame rates suck, back to Call of Duty" route simply because the level of attention required to get past that initial suite of impressions was simply beyond their idea of entertainment.

 

The whole computer games and simulation biz gave up at a certain point -- I'd call it around 2000 -- because they realized they'd make far more money with less stress addressing more mass-market entertainment needs.  Hence, with logical conclusion, Candy Crush and King PLC going IPO at $1billion US. O_o

 

What remains though, is just how profoundly ambitious FSX was, and the current development community is, in pushing the boundaries of simulating real-world phenomena and procedures with some level of adequate complexity.  With all my years of encounter, I still marvel at it, frequently.  Even the little details, programming and animating switches in a 3D cockpit to move right and sound right in the midst of everything else.... never underestimate the amount of thought and care that has gone into all that.  The challenge of creating aircraft models, or scenery design, that balances what is maximally possible in render detail in a 3D engine -- aging or not, that's a red herring -- against memory and processing that is being competed for with so many different, other, real-time systems running alongside is, shall we say, non-trivial.

 

Even us "experts" don't know the long and short of it; there's a reason an aircraft add-on can take years to finalize, and it's not just because a lot of the team is doing it in their spare time since full employment focusing on that work is such a rare thing to hope for, given the size of the audience and the cost involved in the extent of development, and the fact that from a business point of view, it's not something you can usually leave your day-job for.

 

Which for me all boils down to, I wish Aerosoft would release their amazing F-14 already! <G>  I think that's been in development since what, 2011?

[Anthony1968 19]

When I heard the Captain had a flight simulator I thought " OH NO! Here we go, the media will love this!"

 

Look at this for example;

 

http://goo.gl/X47Vy5

 

Like many people I am watching developments in this story with a very keen eye. I have been monitoring aviation stories ( good and bad) for almost 30 yrs now. To me the least relevant aspect of this sorry tale is the fact that the captain has a flight simulator at home. I would be very surprised if a highly experienced pilot would need a simulator to execute any sort of "suspicious activity" with an aircraft. Having said that I believe the final outcome will detail a logical explanation (albeit tragic) for what happened to this flight and the souls on-board.

 

Incidentally this is the first comment I have left on any forum with regards to MH370. But I feel sufficiently motivated to state that the flight sim story is irrelevant in my very limited, non-professional  opinion. 

[ViperPilot 81]

Mention of Flight Sim in the News won't produce a ban, an elevated terror watch, or travel restrictions. Sure, there might be an occasional raised eyebrow or a sarcastic comment from your friends, but that's all. The 'doom and gloom' mentioned in the other Thread is just an enticement for a reaction.

 

Both psolk and Jeff H are right; there's already enough armchair NTSB Investigator action going on in the MH 370 thread to choke a horse, so there's no need to bring that topic here or start another one.

[untoweechja 35]

With all the saturation in the MSM of MAS370 and the spotlight on our beloved, yet underground, hobby, I wonder what everyone here thinks of the attention PC simming is receiving?

 

By choice, I am largely divorced from the mainstream media, especially the major US news sources.  I don't own a television, don't listen to the radio and stick to internet news sources that try to maintain some semblance of objectivity [not always easy].  I've picked up more info regarding MAS370 in this forum than from the 'news' and I can tell I'm not missing much. 

 

I was more concerned after 9/11 than I am now that some kind of governmental constraint would be placed on consumer level flight simulation software, but fortunately that never happened.  When and if the truth is finally known regarding this doomed flight, I will be really surprised if the pilots and crew were doing anything other than what they were trained to do.

[RWFeldman 159]

 

 

stick to internet news sources that try to maintain some semblance of objectivity

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?