I was wondering how many people fly with the failure settings on? And if so, do you use the P3D failure settings or those that come with a cockpit, like the PMDG 737-- where you can set random failures and service failures.

I leave it off because I fly jetliners and frequently leave the PC while cruising to do other stuff. It would be annoying to come back only to find I had crashed for some reason. I would like to use it more as it adds a vulnerability to the sim and makes you check your instruments more for potential issues.

I would love to use this for GA flying provided there was a %age Probability factor added. Otherwise its  a useless feature IMO.

 

To know something is going to go wrong...then solution is, don't take that plane.

Since air sim began, there have been a long line of failure simulation addons, but I finally gave up on failure simulation  for one fundamental reason.

 

Given  time it takes to prepare a flight, I would hate to cut it short  cause of some random failure.

 

Gate preparations for tube liner flight could take about half hour if not more, only to finally take-off, and then  issues, what a waste. 

 

I like the failure simulations that don't really  have a chance of ending the flight, Fscaptain is good for this, I only use its less severe failure options. like icing effects etc.

 

But would hate failure simulation to end a flight that took ages to setup, and that is why I think failure hard to swallow.

 

fast forward to a sim like elite dangerous where you don't have to work so hard to setup flight, don't mind complete failures there

This is why %age / Probability parameter matters... Say you set up your failure probability to .05% and fly... for the most part it will not fail...but sufficient anxiety that it could fail makes it "as real as it gets".

 

This small addition is a low hanging fruit  I am surprised P3D hasn't thought of adding this. 

The vast majority of pilots I've known over the years including very experienced - rather hardcore flight simmers, actually prefer to fly without systems failing.  We've tried to convey this to the developers with whom we work, and some agree and others decide to move forward with developing abnormal conditions in their model (which ads a significant amount of code, reduced performance, and significant development time).

 

It's a given that people who stay with flight simulation need to see their experience evolve.  Having taught higher level and study level simulators for quite a few years, I steer them in the direction of flying on VATSIM. It truly is the best thing anyone can do for themselves in our hobby and it sure seems as if people agree as the number of people flying on the network (already a very solid number) continues to increase.

 

Today we have a number of shared cockpit airliners, and there are more in development. Shared Cockpit not only ads yet another dimension to flight simulation, but allows people to significantly compress time frames when learning both higher level simulations and even how to fly on VATSIM.

 

Finally, moving to non-emergency (flight ending) failures in shared cockpit is pretty nice, so long as one already has an advanced level of knowledge of the aircraft and aircraft systems.  The Majestic Dash 8 Q400 Professional does this very, very well.

 

Happy Flights my Friends!