ARM505

Yeah, this comes up a few times. Testament to the software I suppose, that it makes people feel this way. I actually fly 737's (800's I'm flying now are ZS-ZWA, ZWB, ZWC, ZWP, ZWS, ZWQ, ZWR) Been simming all my life. Depending on the person (ie hand/eye co-ordination, ability to adapt to the new reality and apply the experience they'd gained in FSX because the reality vs the monitor would be quite an overwhelming experience) I'd say it's entirely possible, especially if you decide to go for the autoland option. I'm talking 'they're all dead, help us!' vs 'Routine flying with a safe outcome 99.9999999 times out of 100' type scenarios of course. Flaring for landing would be...interesting....but I reckon you'd survive it. That gear is quite strong really! Reality is a little easier in some small ways actually (better control feel, better ergonomics with switches, better ability to see without restrictions of monitor etc) Now MY question is whether A2A's Mustang gets me back down safely in a real one, given that I'm already a pilot with 1000's of hours in light aircraft (airliners aren't much help there!)

It's amazing the massive difference in opinion that can be experienced by two people reading the exact same thing. Mine, for example, is that the review was indeed biased, quite decidedly so - despite listing the many shortfalls of Flight vs it's predecessors in terms of giving one the experience of flying an aircraft, it then goes on to explain why this is fine, and indeed makes some condescending remarks about 'change', and people not accepting it? (Which, in case somebody may not have noticed, can actually be for the worse too) Why is this not being released on console, an Xbox seems perfectly capable of doing everything that Flight does, and could possibly catch more of it's target market (not meant as a derogatory statement, just fact)? It's just my opinion of course. Hey ho, life goes on. At least we have what we need already.It's funny really. I love flying so much, I made it my career. And yet I'm not even tempted to download the free base package. I beta tested it, so it's not like I haven't seen what they intended. It's not that I'm all rabid about it (I hope my tone comes across as relaxed, and there are plenty of other things that I can play, some excellent choices out there now), but I'll close by saying they've made a game called 'Flight', about a subject that I love, that I (a pilot) don't actually want - isn't that a failure of some kind? All my opinion, but anyway....hopefully it will appeal to somebody.

I'll chip in a few points (having 'lived the dream', as it were):- My family has had to make massive sacrifices too. That sucks. I can handle sacrificing stuff for what I love to do, but it's painful to have to tell my children I'm going away yet again.- My pay is ok, after a long, long time of lower pay and financial sacrifice, and random salaries. My wife has had to carry the can quite a few times. Lucky me that I have a professionally qualified wife!- I've lost two jobs due to the companies folding. Aviation is an incredibly volatile business. Somebody in Asia sneezes, something happens, and aviation takes a dive (SARS, fuel price, world economy, 9/11, Gulf war, any terror attack, bird flu, Euro crisis, you name it, aviation takes a dump. And there goes your job and/or massive increase in the time to command with associated delay in getting a bigger salary, etc etc etc)- My initial qualification was as an engineer, but I had the opportunity to change, so I did. I would have had more money and time at home as an engineer. Nonetheless, I'm happy where I am (eventually!)- If you become an airline pilot, flying at work will almost certainly become 'just a job'. It's hard to get excited about what becomes essentially an airbourne bus. We all like the Ferrari's (fighters, warbirds etc), but that's not actually what we fly day in and out. That's not to say we get all bored. Actually I still find it awesome, the actual flying part at least. Sitting in the cruise is less exciting, but at least I'm airbourne. All the crap on the ground (politics, delays you didn't cause, random cock ups, passengers with no idea of what is actually possible etc) is a giant life-sucking vortex however.- There is no 'glamour' as a pilot anymore. That's ok, it doesn't bother me at all (To be honest, I'd rather wear jeans and a T-shirt, and slip into the cockpit without anybody seeing me so I can get busy flying!) But what it means to me, for example, is that now we get searched for 'dangerous weapons' in the same way as passengers. So, despite the fact that I could kill everyone on board within seconds with my bare hands, and despite the fact that I have a massive axe just behind me, I can't take my penknife through! Retards! Basically, we're not to be trusted anymore. I don't care about the glamour - but at least treat me like I know what I'm doing at an airport!- Company politics, and/or vast quantities of admin. A pain in any job I suppose! I'm lucky in that I don't get 'homework', or have to worry about 'deadlines' though :)- Not that much time off when normal humans are having time off. Weekend event? Enjoy it without me! Family dinner? I'll think of you in the cruise!All in all, I'm happy where I am. After a long, hard slog! Would I recommend it to my children? Not really. Would I stop them doing it? No way, they'll decide for themselves. Do I like it? Yes.My 2c.P.S. As mentioned by many, it's a very difficult comparison - but I reckon doctors are way more hardcore, having studied with a few when I was studying engineering. That is a MOUNTAIN of work! Flying theory just came more naturally to me I guess. But that's just me!

Levels of ATC concern:"You have 25 miles to touchdown" - unconcerned, thinks you know what you're doing, just giving you an idea of what to expect. Nice."Are you happy with your height?" - mildly concerned, thinks you should be checking your energy on the approach."Slow down to XXX (200> at the least) knots" - genuinely concerned, giving you a definite speed to see if you can do it. Final check of your skill/sanity."Go around, maintain runway heading to XXXX', contact approach on XXX.XX" - given up on you, thinks you're clueless.:)

I wish, I wish I could comment...I'll just say that I only fly three aircraft in FSX - the A2A Spit, the A2A P40 (spot the trend?) and the PMDG NGX. I doubt I am Flight's target audience.Flying the FSX demo at least had the reassuring feeling that no matter what MS did, somebody would add in something better. I lack that feeling at the moment.

Comair (South Africa), which includes the British Airways franchise, and the low cost (kulula). B733, B734, B738.

Often if the aircraft is light, it will run away if you don't use brakes. The correct technique is to allow it to accelerate, then brake down to a slow speed, then allow it to accelerate etc etc. Although at normal weights it shouldn't be necessary.

I just did this in the sim - lightning strike, followed by standby bus fail. It was in the B734 sim, but I think the NG is roughly the same - you won't be able to use the A/P. It's quite a crappy failure actually.

And given the number of times toilets go u/s due to equipment failure etc, pretty soon they'll have plenty of flights with NO functioning toilet onboard. Nice. Management =/= operator or user of the actual equipment of course. On a totally, utterly unrelated note, I've just found out that the oxygen masks in the NGX test in the proper way. Wow. Between this and the A2A Spitfire, everything else has been rendered obsolete.

The kulula NG should be a 189 seater as well, for what that's worth. ie A flying salami - thin skin, filled with meat - not a very pleasant analogy, but hey, it's the reality of air transportation nowadays! And yes, modeling pax could then introduce that realistic aspect of when you climb out of the cockpit to go to the toilet, you stare back at 189 people who you know are all now thinking, 'Hey, the pilots going to the toilet now!' Privacy fail.

I'm weird in that my hard drive is big enough to install both of them. Odd, I know :)

Ok, this time I actually had to go and look at our SOP's. On my day off too! It's to minimise the chance of a tailpipe fire/fire during startup being blown towards the aircraft. How relevant this is could be debated, but there we are... The airconditioning points mentioned above are all decent reasons too, surprisingly enough we don't do it very often. Startups are accomplished so fast that it's a whole bunch of extra switch flicking to be done while both crew are supposed to be monitoring the start, or so says our little bible. What we do carry out on hot days, is to quickly switch both packs on as soon as both engines are stable, ie we don't wait for the normal point to do that part of the flow. This works fast enough to keep the cabin cool enough for our purposes.

Ugh, completely correct about the inlets in the wing root of course, brain failure......this is what too much work does!

I'm still here! Just really busy at work :) Also, most questions here are answered pretty well by the collective knowledge actually. It's our company policy (as stated above) to start the downwind engine first - exhaust gases will then be blown away from the pack inlet in the wing root (we hope), and not get that lovely JETA1 smell in the cabin (mmmm!) To be honest, it doesn't really make that much of a difference, and I've never really found any technical reason why one should be started before the other. Some other reasons could include - starting the #1 first since the engineer is normally walking along on the F/O (#2) side, and it minimises his exposure to working in close proximity to a running engine, starting the #1 during a ground air start (since the engineer must walk in and decouple the connection after the #1 start, similar situation), equalising running time on each engine (although airframe hours are the ones that get counted I guess) and.....er....thats about all I can think of. It is our company policy (and indeed might be down in black and white from Boeing somewhere) to NEVER start an engine while passengers are boarding, or even while any main exit or cargo door is open.

Just on and off, they got it right - it takes a loss of power to get it back to 200'.

As the title says. Also, I suck at holding cameras steady, voice acting, and remembering the correct FAJS altitude - I said 5556', it's 5558' dammit! Posted because there was some confusion about this (and indeed my explanation only mentioned one detent, but it's more like two) and somebody asked me to try and catch it on video. Let me know if a) you can actually see/hear what is actually going on, and b ) if there is anything else I can get while I happen to have my video camera with me.

If the entered winds on the descent forecast page disagree with what you're seeing in reality, then the predicted vertical path that the aircraft calculated prior to descent may be unattainable. You'll see this as a consistent deviation from the planned descent speed/Mach no. Is this happening? Or is it just wiggling around? Wiggling around I can't help you with :) You can actually choose between PATH and SPEED for a descent - on aircraft with the 'speed/alt intervene' buttons on the MCP, just push the speed intervene button twice - the 1st time the speed window will become active, the next time it will blank and VNAV SPD will annunciate on the FMA. On aircraft without the speed/alt intervene buttons, just go to the descent page and select 'SPEED' from one of the lower LSK's - the FMA will change from VNAV PATH to VNAV SPEED, and will now fly the FMC planned speeds, not the precomputed path.

It's not quite like that on the real aircraft - the controller essentially has three positions, left, centre and right, spring loaded to centre. Giving it a very quick 'tap' to one or the other will change single digits (ie from 100 -> 101) and giving it a longer twist changes the tens of units (ie from 100 -> 110). Holding the controller to one side will keep changing the tens, but the counting speed will accelerate after a few seconds. We regularly go from as low as 344' (FACT) to a higher value such as 5694' (FAJS), and it's a pain in the real plane too. The absolute best method I've found in FSX is the mousewheel, which is faster and easier than the real plane IMHO.

Just a small point - there is no fast slew in the real plane as somebody asked for above. Surprisingly, it's not actually a rotary controller (inasmuch as it isn't rotated completely around like say, the altitude selector). It's spring loaded to the centre position, and holding it to one side increases/decreases the set value. Weird, isn't it. It does accelerate somewhat though (and cause you to overshoot the desired value), but I'll be honest - I'm not sold on Mr. Boeings new rotary controllers. Although you can use your mouswheel in FSX, it works well. Better than the real plane actually.

Great, here comes another useless mandatory threat briefing......(thanks to Helios for the first one, and the new superfluous warning lights) Not only are these two controls a completely different shape, they have a completely different feel when pressed. The door tends to click to a detent, and you can here the 'click' of the door solenoid. The rudder trim just mushes over to one side against its spring. You'd also have to hold it for quite a while for anything to actually happen, although you'd see the yoke deflecting to stupidly odd positions. Of course, when the A/P did eventually give up the ghost and disconnect, the plane would go absolutely wild since the 737's rudder is ridiculously powerful. So I can see how it happened eventually. I'll admit I'm personally guilty of the good 'ol 'B Hydraulics' vs 'Engine anti-ice' in the -200 though........doh! Turn off engine anti-ice and get surprised by the MC Hyd, MC Flight Controls......doh! What the......! In my defence I did immediately realise what I'd done (moron!), unlike a mate who ran through all the relevant checklists first....

..and yes, it comes on quite often IRL, but normally only briefly. The normal response (note that I didn't say 'correct response') is to reach over and push the button to make it go away. :) But if you've had to do that you've obviously checked out exactly what is happening with your speed/thrust setting. I normally see it on the descent with thrust levers at idle, where a combination of energy/flightpath means the aircraft doesn't end up slowing down despite the automatics thinking that it actually should.

You cannot program the FMC to follow a radial specifically - you can however tell it to fly to from JKF045/50 to JFK (for the sake of your example, I'm assuming that JFK is a VOR, not just a place name here - you can program new FMC waypoints based on practically anything in it's database, not just VOR's of course). Practically speaking, thats the same thing, but technically the aircraft is not tracking the radial - it's just following the great circle track from one FMC waypoint to another. To actually track the radial, you'd need to set your active side nav radio to the correct frequency, get a valid signal, input the desired course to track in the MCP course window, and use VOR/LOC roll mode to then track the radial. Thats after flying to JFK045/50 using the FMC.

I have stuck with what PMDG recommend in the manual - 0.6, but the view will never be able to compare to real life using just one monitor unfortunately. I'm using Track IR as well, but I find myself rapidly flicking through the overhead and centre console views quite often to set things up there, which works fine for me. I have a HOTAS Cougar (not very 737-ish!) but nonetheless I find that the amount of deflection required to obtain a certain rate of movement is close enough to reality that I don't notice any glaring errors, in fact it's very pleasant to hand fly, just like the real aircraft. As PIC007 mentions, a lot of FS aircraft are way too sensitive, especially in pitch (the real full motion simulators actually suffer from the same thing to a very slight degree, that is, sensitivity in pitch IMHO). I think PMDG have got the right feel in this regard. Trim wise, G550 has summed it up accurately.

Just remember the 737 rule - you have to actively make a change for something to happen when it comes to supplying power. For example, you do no actually 'disconnect' ground power by using the ground power switch (unless you want to deliberately unpower the aircraft) - you must 'replace' ground power with something else (ie engine or APU generators). The rule being that 'oncoming power has priority'. So, to give and example, to go from using ground power for powering the buses, to using APU power: The APU must be running (you'll see the blue APU GEN OFF BUS light illuminated indicating the APU gen is available but not powering the buses) - use the APU gen switches to power both buses. This will then 'kick' the ground power off the bus (you don't need to switch it off as well).

Your English is 100% better than my German :) And I think you've explained it well - I'll have to check on the NGX in the sim - for the moment though, the real aircraft wouldn't do that, for what that's worth. I'm assuming that when it has this problem, on final approach in your example above, that the A/T is completely off? ie The A/T switch on the MCP is off? (down position, light off)