FSX-MS How do you spend your time on long-haul flights?

[Zigarten 6]

While on long hauls, do you add immersion things? Like radar contact, or VoxATC, anything else that I don't know about that breaks up the silence?  Multi crew?

[neucoas 82]

I did a few long long hauls (JFK-Hong Kong following Cathay Pacific) or CYYZ-Hong Kong (Following Air Canada) in segments/Legs.

Other shorter long hauls ~6 hours I save for Saturday/Sunday early a.m. While in cruise, I do few errands *library/drug store" and then I grab a good read book to consume during the bulk of the time of the flight.

 

Bill

Flightsiming at sunday morning is the best... If you stayed at home the night before!!

[Poppet 710]

Most of my "long hauls" have been in the B377 from A2A. Daytime and I only leave to get drinks, snacks and do the lavatory thing.

 

some of my stratocruiser flights have lasted twelve hours or more.

 

 

Brilliant, love this plane,  so much stuff to do,   12 hours that's impressive 

[Cjr60611 31]

Like others, I used to do long haul overnight flights and sleep through the cruise section.  However, I never could quite finish those flights because something always went wrong while I was out...  Love the PMDG 777 but, don't really use much as I now stick to flights that are less than 3 hours.  Even on those flights I find myself doing other things around the house while in cruise.

[Sesquashtoo 2,846]

We go on autopilot...and then party with the cabin crew.  So far...so good...autopilots are pretty reliable...

[nhagag 26]

I usually use real weather and flight following using UT2. which is interesting to hear airliners traffic change across countries and continents

[el_kab0ng 29]

Cant remember were i seen it,  but there was a chap telling a story about when he does long flights he gets his girlfriend involved by doing roll play,  he would be the pilot and she was the passenger, he would set the flight up and serve her food and drinks and so.  Through out the flight he would get her maybe a cover or pillow to rest. Also setting up an in flight movie lol   I thought that was brilliant. 

 

This sounds more like 'flight attendant simulator' rather than Flight Simulator. 

[fppilot 4,436]

Be realistic. No need to leave the left seat!  Get that painful urge? Just reach for one of these?

 

http://www.sportys.com/pilotshop/travel-john-pack-of-18.html

[Poppet 710]

Very nice Frank.

 

Just make sure a child doesn't mistaken it for a ballon and burst it

This sounds more like 'flight attendant simulator' rather than Flight Simulator.

No no it was P3D I think, pilots obviously can be busy, so sometimes it's a case of, all hands on board.

[Matthew Kane 1,343]

I use Time Compression...

 

Some people may say that Time Compression is not realistic but one person sitting at a PC isn't realistic either. In the real world there are two guys working together in a flight deck and sharing the tasks, just me sitting at a PC in front of Saitek equipment doesn't recreate that environment, therefore I use time compression because I am not missing out on anything anyways. Something to be said about working with a partner in the real world but I never understood why people think that doing a 1 hour to 16 hour flight sitting in front of a home computer is realistic in any way and can pat themselves in the back for that milestone. I can think of 1000 other better things to do with my time.

 

I just focus on flight prep, SID departure, climb to Top Of Climb then save the flight, use time compression to about 50 miles before Top of Descend then save the flight once again. Then check the weather at arrival airport and setup the STAR and Runway and do the approach and landing. I see no reason to do the cruise portion at normal time and besides the scenery and clouds are fake anyways so silly to admire that too. 

[Bob Scott 7,765]

I use a small FSUIPC-based utility I wrote (available here in the library) called Quantum Leap to fast-forward me past the boring cruise phase.  On a 15-hour 777 leg I can get the feel of the heavy jet in the departure and climb to cruise, then zap myself forward in time to a point of my choosing (usually about 200nm short of destination), then plan and fly the descent, approach and landing.  So a long flight turns into a ~1+15 to 1+30 proposition.  And if there's something interesting along the way, I can zap myself forward to that point, fly through the interesting part, then zap myself ahead again to a point from which I can fly the entire arrival.

 

I have already spent entirely too much time in the real thing to want to re-create the boredom of half a day or more at cruise.  A more apt simulation of the joys of long-duration cruise would be to drink three pots of strong coffee, take your wife's vacuum cleaner, turn it on and sit next to it in a marginally comfortable chair, only getting up for bathroom breaks, for 12 hours or so... 

 

Cheers

[el_kab0ng 29]

I use Time Compression...

 

Some people may say that Time Compression is not realistic but one person sitting at a PC isn't realistic either. In the real world there are two guys working together in a flight deck and sharing the tasks, just me sitting at a PC in front of Saitek equipment doesn't recreate that environment, therefore I use time compression because I am not missing out on anything anyways. Something to be said about working with a partner in the real world but I never understood why people think that doing a 1 hour to 16 hour flight sitting in front of a home computer is realistic in any way and can pat themselves in the back for that milestone. I can think of 1000 other better things to do with my time.

 

I just focus on flight prep, SID departure, climb to Top Of Climb then save the flight, use time compression to about 50 miles before Top of Descend then save the flight once again. Then check the weather at arrival airport and setup the STAR and Runway and do the approach and landing. I see no reason to do the cruise portion at normal time and besides the scenery and clouds are fake anyways so silly to admire that too. 

 

I'm right there with you. I've even gotten to the point where I do flight prep and departure and then just shut down the flight, rarely ever finishing these days. The thought of locking up my main PC for 8-10 hours doing ONE thing isn't appealing, either.

 

I'm not trying to pooh-pooh on anyone who feels it's an accomplishment to sit in front of a PC for hours on end watching the autopilot do most of the work, I've just become less excited about long haul than I was when the PMDG 777 first came out.

I use a small FSUIPC-based utility I wrote (available here in the library) called Quantum Leap to fast-forward me past the boring cruise phase.  On a 15-hour 777 leg I can get the feel of the heavy jet in the departure and climb to cruise, then zap myself forward in time to a point of my choosing (usually about 200nm short of destination), then plan and fly the descent, approach and landing.  So a long flight turns into a ~1+15 to 1+30 proposition.  And if there's something interesting along the way, I can zap myself forward to that point, fly through the interesting part, then zap myself ahead again to a point from which I can fly the entire arrival.

 

I have already spent entirely too much time in the real thing to want to re-create the boredom of half a day or more at cruise.  A more apt simulation of the joys of long-duration cruise would be to drink three pots of strong coffee, take your wife's vacuum cleaner, turn it on and sit next to it in a marginally comfortable chair, only getting up for bathroom breaks, for 12 hours or so... 

 

Cheers

 

Do you do these types of flights with any sort of ATC (such as Radar Contact or VOX ATC)? How does the zapping effect them?

[spesimen 135]

 

 

Do you do these types of flights with any sort of ATC (such as Radar Contact or VOX ATC)? How does the zapping effect them?

 

i use quantum leap quite a bit on the long hauls also, it's really a handy little utility. many high fives to bob scott for writing that!! the vasmon utility that came with it is handy also.

 

the trick with using it with ATC is to request a direct-to-waypoint before you use it, and then warp to the waypoint that is before the one you requested...as long as you can cross the direct waypoint as expected, they seem to handle it pretty well.

 

i found that with radar contact i had to do this even with traditional time acceleration or it would occaisonally 'miss' my flying over the waypoints in between if i was doing more than 2x. i'm not sure if voxatc even really notices or cares if you miss a waypoint outside of the sid/star portions of the flight.

 

i have mainly been using pro-atc lately, and i think it will handle it fine also, as it has a direct option as well, although i haven't tested it as i've been mostly doing short sectors in the 737 and q400 lately.

 

basically as long as you ensure that you don't warp closer than where it would start wanting to tell you to descend, they seem to work allright with warping. i usually leave a cushion of 150-200nm or so.

 

cheers

-andy crosby

[skelsey 765]

Genuine question -- and clearly everybody has their own preferences and interests -- but if you use extreme rates of time compression or simply leap from TOC to shortly before TOD -- what is the motivation for performing a 'long-haul' flight at all? Why not just do a shorter flight in its entirety?

 

I ask because to me - skipping the cruise entirely misses some of the biggest differences between long-haul and short-haul. Long-haul is about planning and thinking about contingencies - partially before the flight, but mainly during. On your average short-haul flight, there is usually a convenient airfield in friendly territory within easy reach most if not all of the time. The same is not true of long-haul, where you can spend hours over the middle of nowhere with the nearest airfield that can take your aircraft (you did check whether the runway was wide enough and strong enough?) might be in the order of hours away, and the nearest desirable diversion -- somewhere vaguely near civilisation where you might at least be able to get some steps and some fuel -- could easily be further still. On top of that things like terrain and weather worries may be more significant than on short-haul (though obviously this depends on where you do your short-haul flying -- certainly in Europe the Alps are a mere small region of hillocks compared to the Himalaya or the Andes!). If you had an engine failure, would you be able to stay clear of terrain? What about a decompression? How's the weather doing at destination -- does it bear any resemblance to the forecast you looked at before departure? A lot can change in the space of ten or twelve hours... decisions made early in the flight or even before pushback can have a big effect on your fuel situation and landing performance at destination. How about negotiating the ICTZ? Faced with a wall of red on the weather radar, what are you going to do? If the fire bell goes off now, where are you going?

 

I'm not saying that it's all about staying glued to the screen for ten or twelve hours, and during a flight of that length there are certainly going to be quieter periods and it's good to get away from the screen for a bit. But to me at least, a long-haul flight is like a strategy game -- you're constantly having to assess the situation and come up with new plans, and seemingly small decisions made early in the flight can suddenly appear much more significant later on. Of course, most of the time you're never going to have to put those contingency plans in to action -- but that is exactly the challenge that faces real long-haul pilots. One long-haul Captain I spoke to once told me that he thought the most challenging part of the job was keeping motivated to keep a contingency plan up his sleeve all the time, knowing that it almost certainly won't be needed -- but also knowing that sod's law dictates that the one occasion you haven't thought of something is the one time you'll need it most. Of course, you should still be thinking about these things on short haul to an extent -- but if you're operating over more familiar territory with a greater range of options open to you, a shorter sector and an aircraft likely far from being anywhere near its performance or endurance limits you can get away with a lot more...

 

As I say, just a thought along the lines that long-haul flying is about much more than just watching the autopilot do the work. The autopilot can hold a height and speed and navigate where you tell it to go, but it can't think and strategise. That's what the pilots are for...

[el_kab0ng 29]

There's definitely a variation in the way people use Flight Sim. Some folks go to the extreme and plan things to the nth degree to maintain that sense of realism without ever leaving the ground, but for the majority of us, we just enjoy the simple immersion and try not to take it too seriously.

 

All it takes is a couple of long haul flights that end in a CTD or some other simulator limitation to squash whatever zeal you might have had. Why wait 12 hours (while your computer spends all that time needlessly crunching numbers and sending your GFX card to an early grave) only to find out it was all for naught? I'd rather time compress it and find out sooner so I'm less disappointed when it happens.