My first experience with Shared Cockpit!

[Andreas Stangenes 1,628]

I thought I would write a little post about my very first experience with shared cockpit in p3d v3.2.3. I don't have any friends in real life that enjoy flight simulation (well I do have one, but he hasn't gotten himself a pc yet, and is "fresh meat" in the flight sim miljeu). I made a couple of posts both here and on twitter requesting people to fly with. I got a few replies, and one of us hooked up this afternoon for a test.

 

He was a nice Italian man who spoke English quite well, and we met up on Teamspeak which was his preferred medium. If it was up to me, we would have used Skype or some other desktop-sharing-capable medium. We talked abit about ourselves and our passion for aviation and experience with simming, and decided upon the technical side on how we were going to do the shared cockpit connection. There are basically two ways: You either do the port forwarding method in your router, or you use a VPN program like Hamachi. He had done his research, and recommended that we tried the port forwarding first since it's concidered the safer of the two options.

After about an hour and several router and pc reboots I finally got it to work.

 

We logged into Prepar3d, selected a cute little airbus a320 in Airbus standard colors, and loaded the cold and dark state. After turning on the battery we connected to eachother sucessfully on the very first try He as a master, and I as the "slave" hihi.

We had talked earlier in the session that we would only do the technical stuff today, and we wouldn't have time to fly. After 30 minutes of oh'ing and ah'ing and confirming that when I flick this switch, it works on your side, we couldn't resist a short flight after all. We planned a flight from LIRQ to LIMC in Italy.

Even though I was "just" the co-pilot, and had a BLAST! Of course, we stumbled upon eachothers flows and routines etc because neither of us had really studied the multi crew cockpit resource management flows beforehand. In addition to this, neither of us were all that well versed in the airbus - both of us being Boeing men We had a stall warning on take off, and fiddling with the CDU on cruise we were at FL260 at 15 nm from the destination airport. After entering a holding to loose some altitude, we went for the FAF, but since we hadn't found the correct STAR for the approach, we were both behind the aircraft. It was such a funny moment when I called "Go around!" when discovering that the gear wasn't down a few hundred feet above minimums I had been too busy trying to lower the flaps and monitoring our descent (we had flaps up when crossing the FAF and were high and fast).

After a switft go around we made another try, and this time we were at flaps 3 when turning base, and did the landing checklist at around 2000 feet - confirming gear was down, three greens.

 

You wouldn't think both of us had many years of experience with flight simming by the way we handled that flight, but oh my God was it fun I feel like a new door in flight simming has openened up to me, and the discovery of it is as major as when I first discovered Vatsim! Maybe even more so.

I can't wait to do this again. We made an appointment again on wednesday, and I'm still trying to find more people to fly with to share this increadible realistic (or not) experience with

[DaveCT2003 1,820]

Excellent post!

 

Thank you for sharing this with us!

[737_800 434]

I genuinely enjoyed your post. I want to fly with shared cockpit either, but have no aircraft that supports it except Majestic Dash 8. However, I have to little experience with this aircraft. It's really time that the PMDG 737NG supports shared cockpit. Can you image how great it would be to fly the NGX in a shared cockpit? That would add the last pièce de resistance in combination with flying on VATSIM.

 

I do really hope that PMDG didn't forget this feature to implement into their past and future products.

 

 

 

[krazyk 157]

That was a great read. I do fly the Aerosoft Airbus X and Majestic Q400 Pro in P3D along with a few friends every now and then. It, as you stated, is an immensely enjoyable feature and adds that final bit of salt to taste towards the immersion factor.  For this reason, PMDG has fallen down on my list while Aerosoft moved up and Majestic topped the list, purely for the excellent multi-crew capabilities they offer.

 

Hopefully, DeskPilot will pick up this lack of feature from PMDG and give us NG/777 owners some multi-crew capability in P3D. I am well versed with both Aerosoft and Q400 operations, so if you would like to organize some kind of multi-crew flights, I'd be more than happy to tag along.

[Andreas Stangenes 1,628]

Thank you for your kind feedback! I agree that a shared cockpit feature on a pmdg product would be great, and I really hope that more addons with CFD come along. Me and Fabrizio tried the Q400 yesterday, and it connected right out of the box. He had some pc problems though, and we didn't really get to try it a whole lot before he crashed.

 

Since my initial post here and on reddit/flightsim I have found a few people interested in CFD, and have sucessfully done cfd sessions with 3 other people. Please contact me if you want to do a cfd with me, and we will take it from there I have contacted you on pm, Karan, and awaiting your reply.

[ErichB 3,636]

I recently did my first shared cockpit ever (on the A320), and it certainly was the next best thing to actually doing it for real. Amazing.

[SKEWR 364]

Good posts in here. Maybe I'm getting the itch to so shared cockpit again since life has settled down for me a bit. Recently I've been back into the PMDG 737 and especially the MD11 so I'd love to fly those with a CPT/FO.

 

Question: Is shared cockpit just the Q400 and the Aerosoft airbus? 

[Richard Sennett 2,499]

Good posts in here. Maybe I'm getting the itch to so shared cockpit again since life has settled down for me a bit. Recently I've been back into the PMDG 737 and especially the MD11 so I'd love to fly those with a CPT/FO.

 

Question: Is shared cockpit just the Q400 and the Aerosoft airbus? 

 

Yes but there is a new shared cockpit software out there here but looks like only for FSX presently and not sure how good it is

 

http://secure.simmarket.com/desk-pilot-professional-fsx.phtml

[OSJJ1985 134]

I have to agree there. The first time I did connectee flight deck I was thrilled and couldn't stop thinking about it for days. Shared Cockpit + plus VATSIM really is only topped by the real thing. I, too hope PMDG will add this feature. I think nowadays it should be as crucial as an FMC for a payware product

[DaveCT2003 1,820]

Richard,

 

So far as I know, it's still uses a binded keyboard button to operate systems rather than a networked Virtual Cockpit as native shared cockpit aircraft have (Majestic Dash 8 Q400, Aerosoft Airbus A320, Leonardo Maddog MD-80, and a few other airliners - and more in development).

 

I'm happy to see anything new for Shared Cockpit, but for me I just wouldn't enjoy using the keyboard instead of using the Virtual Cockpit. Others may feel different, and again I'm happy to see anything new for the Shared Cockpit genre.