I think you are defeating the purpose of the program by not doing all of the steps. It took me a while to get the proper cadence but once I did the PF events happen at the proper place in line with all of the work that I am doing.

Do you use planning software to generate you flight plans and briefing, or do you just pick a couple of airports to plug in as departure and arrival and go? I use Simbrief to generate a flight plan (usually one that I grabbed from a real flight on Flightaware). It spits out payload, fuel on board, SID, STAR, and runway and wind information for both airports. I use GSX. The first thing I do is turn on the battery and GPU and then I load the payload (ZFW). After that, I call fuel and catering before doing anything else. As soon as fueling is done I have to close the doors for the caterers. At that point, I start the FS2Crew preflight. The FO powers up the aircraft (he'll still click the battery and GPU switches even though I already did) and I start my steps (IRSs, flight recorder tests, stall and overspeed tests, cockpit voice recorder test, and then the oxygen test). The FO goes on walk around, and I get the ATIS info and start programming all of the CDU pages. I also set up the EFB charts and performance pages. I barely have any time left once I get everything done. It took me a while to get the timing right. Doing payload, fuel and catering first are the only way I can get everything done in time. My point is, I think you might be skipping a lot of things that would make your flights more consistent and enjoyable. Everyone sims a different way, but you bought FS2Crew to simulate real world procedures and it seems like you don't want to do that. Maybe you hadn't checked out the web sites I mentioned before. I think you might enjoy using them. Combined with FS2Crew, it's a complete package. Give it a try and let us know if you have questions. I think you'll find that you sometimes wished the FO worked slower so you don't feel rushed. 😁 

Edited January 3, 20206 yr by MDFlier

Thanks for letting me know how you are using FS2crew. I most certainly will try it the way you described. Fyi, I just followed the steps given in the tutorial where it says that one can skip fast forward through the preflight procedure by right clicking on the down arrow in the main section of FS2crew. I guess somewhere in that process things went wrong. (Yes, I am using a flight planner, almost forgot to tell you 🙂 )