Good morning

This is not a critic message! I am convinced that X-Plane 12 is an excellent program. But how comes that there  are so many steps described in several videos and checklists that I absolutely do not consider to follow and the planes just take off and land perfect ILS or RNAV ?

Are those steps  just add-ons to "pretend" to make the flights more realistic? For instance, I use LNM for my flight plans instead of Simbrief, which is an excellent program, I use Navigraph for all the charts and my checklist is a very basic one extracted from a video on YouTube.

All goes all the time perfectly!

Thank you for your expertise

JP Reuland

In many things in our lives we have checklists. They serve a purpose - minimize the risk of forgetting something at the worst moment to do it, making sure that the correct steps of a complex process are correctly followed.

In Aviation this is fundamental because most of the time, contrarily to when you're experiencing the pleasure of a sim session, all by yourself, with no other aircraft or crew elements to interact with you, no responsibility for human lives other than those of your family / pets you're not paying attention to while simming (and that can be a problem!...), you're not exposed to the real threats of failing a memory item!  Nothing catastrophic can result other than crashing your sim aircraft.

IRL even the simplest types of aircraft and the way they're operated have to follow rules and procedures, and checklists / memory items are mandatory. I do it every time I go flying a glider, have it in a checklist card, and in some gliders the main memory items are even printed and stick to the instrument panel, and I follow them one by one at the right time. For instance when entering downwind, I announce it in the radio frequency in use for coordination at the aerodrome, and even if the glider has no retracting gear I do include the "gear down" item. It has saved me from landing with the undercarriage up, as I've seen happening to some fellow glider pilots and not only, and in more stressful situations or when flying distracted by other factors that shouldn't probably be present (or you shouldn't be flying at that time for some good reason...), it can make a whole lot of a difference. 

Now, just imagine flying in crowded skies, having to interact with ATC, manage your aircraft systems, sometime very complex, and fly the thing... Or having to do all of that in cooperation with someone in the cockpit. If there weren't rules and checklists it could easily become a total mess...

There are many rules in Aviation that can look like "pure bureaucracy", but, if you think about it, you'll always find a good reason for them to be there!

In simming it also brings that "sensation of being in control of a real aircraft, in the real World", and following those checklists, rules, procedures, turns the overall experience more rewarding for some. You're actually pretending you're doing it for real - it's a game, and when we play games that we're sometimes addicted to, we want to do it as immersively as possible 🙂

 

Edited April 23, 20233 yr by jcomm

Very nicely put Sir! But still, my point is why despite not following all the various steps of those checklists, in this "game" I still land perfectly the planes following perhaps only 60% of the checks? 🙂

Regards

JP Reuland 77 years old

 

1 hour ago, Jean Paul Reuland said:

Very nicely put Sir! But still, my point is why despite not following all the various steps of those checklists, in this "game" I still land perfectly the planes following perhaps only 60% of the checks? 🙂

Regards

JP Reuland 77 years old having 🙂

 

Because you're Senior!  There are no more secrets, well ... almost none..., for a 77  yo grown up 🙂

OTOH it's also because you have a fresh brain, something I, now approaching 59, can't even by far consider having 🙂

Jokes apart, if you:

.) know your aircraft & systems well enough to go through all of the required steps for each of the flight phases;

.) are not distracted by a worth of tasks, like interacting with ATC, other crew members, etc...

.) do not run into malfunctions / emergencies...

then in most situations you can fly your aircraft from cold&dark to park with or without shutdown at the destination without going through all of those procedures / SOPs... 

This is perfectly doable, specially in simpler aircraft, and I myself do it most of the time when I load one flightsim for a short hop before diner, allowing me to be an Airbus / Boeing / turboprop pilot for a short while without having to go through those "fastidious" processes... But it's not the same...

Another instance of pleasure in life where we can do it all without following checklists and preparation comes to mind, but I don't think I should mention it in this context 🙂

Edited April 23, 20233 yr by jcomm

Most pilots could operate their aircrat without checklists and complete flights successfully. However, checklists are there to make sure every item is actualy completed.

There are many aircraft in XP12 that allow the user to set up realistic failures.  Not completing a checklist may be the catalyst for a failure, but a checklist will help in solving failures.

Sure, you can set up an aircraft never to fail and play a game, or you could set realistic conditions, use checklists and use a simulator.

10 hours ago, Jean Paul Reuland said:

Very nicely put Sir! But still, my point is why despite not following all the various steps of those checklists, in this "game" I still land perfectly the planes following perhaps only 60% of the checks? 🙂

Regards

JP Reuland 77 years old

 

depends on the nature of the item really, a lot of real world checklist items are of the "check this isnt failed" variety, e.g. oil temp isnt to hot or lights are working, unless you are in an sim aircraft with maintenance simulated they will always be working, but they still go in to get in the habit of following the rw list.

others are more flight critical, like checking your flaps are set properly, make that kind of mistake and

happens. 

If they had been practising checklists and flight proceedure with xplane all those people could still be alive... would have been much better to make that mistake in xplane first tbh.

Thank you for your reply. Very interesting video as well!

JP Reuland

I finally understood Jean's point in his Original Post !

Jean was not referring to RW operations but rather to the simulated ones and why in the simulation "world" almost no matter what we do, most simulators and addons will still provide uneventful flights ... like for instance if we forget to close the doors or cargo bays ...

Of course more sophisticated addons of all the general purpose sims I have used can indeed turn the virtual pilot's life a bit trickier. The best weather modelling engines can also do their job in replicating  really adverse weather conditions and the underlaying simulator can simulate the corresponding effects sometimes to a very believable level of detail, but even dedicated simulation platforms like Aerowinx can fail to reproduce some aspects of a not so well handled aircraft...

I believe that the latest version of the main general purpose civil simulators, Prepar3d, X-Plane and MFS, specially when coupled with the best addons, can better portray some of these situations, but it's not always as tricky as doing it IRL, well, and in some cases it appears trickier indeed and IRL we can deal more easily with some of these aspects ...

Nothing's stopping you from doing the bare minimum to operate a virtual aircraft, but on the real thing, the bare minimum gets you a spot on a cemetary more quickly than you may think.

Besides, there's something gratifying if a checkmark turns green after a flicking a switch on a well designed checklist for Xchecklist.

Thank you all for your patience and advises. May I make an ultimate request on this post? What would be the most accurate checklist to follow for the Zibo 737-800 and Cessna 172 1000? But adapted for X-Plane 12 or MSFS. No walkings around the plane and check water in fuel!!! 🙂

Thank you

JP Reuland

2 hours ago, Jean Paul Reuland said:

Thank you all for your patience and advises. May I make an ultimate request on this post? What would be the most accurate checklist to follow for the Zibo 737-800 and Cessna 172 1000? But adapted for X-Plane 12 or MSFS. No walkings around the plane and check water in fuel!!! 🙂

Thank you

JP Reuland

Jean,

for the Zibo I followed this link:

Alternative download links, Zibo install guide & training checklist - ZIBO B738-800 modified - X-Plane.Org Forum

where in #3 you have a link for the Zibo 738 checklists.

For the 172 / 1000 I don't have nothing handy right now 😕

This Skymatix checklist is very complex too! Thank you for the link.

Have a great day

JP Reuland

18 hours ago, Jean Paul Reuland said:

Zibo 737-800

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/85926-checklists-for-zibos-737-800x/

 

2 hours ago, Bjoern said:

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/85926-checklists-for-zibos-737-800x/

 

Thank you

JP Reuland

Yes some items are just there for immersion or for pilots to practice real life checklists. It really depends on how in depth the aircraft is simulated and whether you have failures enabled.

Some aircraft even simulate defects due to aging so things might fail randomly.