Chock

Actually, that is a big issue for me; we used to use Chippies to tow gliders at Husband's Bosworth glider centre in Leicestershire, so it would have been fun to replicate that.

Probably. But to be fair these people have a point, after all, you can't imagine how disappointing it is to place your aeroplane in the Pas de Calais, type in 1415 into the GUI, then end up with the sim going to quarter past two, instead of reproducing the weather at the Battle of Agincourt. 🤣 Seriously though, I would say the biggest issue is the ATC. I can live with it as it is, because it's still better than what most flight sims have, but MSFS would be a vastly superior sim if it had ATC procedures which were more like the real world and offered the flexibility this would engender.

If it comes close to being as innovative as its ESP versions, with as good a flight model, it'll be an absolute no-brainer purchase. The ESP version of the A2A Comanche was - and still is - the best GA add-on aeroplane you could get for FSX/P3D, by a country mile. Nothing else comes anywhere near to being as good as it. It's in a league of its own.

The book Thud Ridge (published 1969) by Colonel 'Jack' Broughton offers an interesting narrative of these times and is certainly a book worth a read for anyone who wants a perspective on what it was actually like to fly those strike missions in the F-105. It is somewhat unique in having its combat missions very accurately transcribed as a result of Broughton being interested in hi-fi and stereo equipment, affording him the opportunity to use a small tape machine in the cockpit of his F-105, to record all of the radio transmissions on these strike missions, providing as it did, an extremely accurate means to recall the missions in the book exactly as they occurred, rather than relying purely on memory. The book's descriptions of dealing with SAM launches and MiG interceptions whilst inbound to make strikes on the North of Vietnam, whilst also having to follow all kinds of self-imposed ridiculous engagement rules, makes for an enlightening read. Broughton was a controversial figure for many years as a result of a court martial and investigation into an alleged breach of the rules of engagement and an attempt to cover it up through the destruction of some gun camera evidence (see here for details). It was whilst Broughton was in the Air Force career wilderness as a result of all this, that he found the time to write the book. For many years, his support for two of his officers who allegedly let rip with their cannons on a Soviet cargo ship (which had fired upon them on their ingress) whilst they were egressing the target area, led to a lot of officers with career progression in mind, distancing themselves from him, but it's worth noting that privately, most people who had been at the sharp end of operations had a lot of sympathy for people who shot back at stuff which was officially 'off limits', which is a common theme of the Vietnam War and the accusations that political considerations meant that the troops in Vietnam were often being asked to fight with one hand tied behind their backs. It's interesting to note that eventually, the support of people such as Chuck Yeager - whom the Air Force had mistakenly hoped would be a willing hatchet man in the Court Martial procedure - the usefulness of the content of Broughton's book, and its critical suggestions, eventually led to the Air Force purchasing several thousand copies of Thud Ridge, and placing it on required reading lists for new officers. If anyone has never read that book, I'd recommend doing so, as it offers a unique perspective on the fights in the air, as well as the fights in the halls of command, which pilots had to deal with at the time.

https://www.timetravelair.com/techlibrary/EO 05-45B-1.pdf

I've been using it with the hardware Logitech autopilot and it seems to work okay with that and will follow a GPS route. When I use that hardware AP, selecting NAV, ALT and VSI, the cockpit sim panel controls look like this, so that would be ROLL, ALT and PITCH selected with the AP mode up at the 12 o'clock position and 'GPS' showing on the GPS. It happily followed the SID from the airport along the magenta line with those selected, so I'd be inclined to try the VC switches in those positions:

As far as I'm aware, reducing the range on the ND will reduce the range it will be displaying to you, but not changing overall range, or elevation, of targets it will be considering for collision avoidance messages, since it basically a passive system which works off the transponder as opposed to working like a radar scanner or some such, although I could be wrong about that. Guess I might have to dig my manual out... Well, not much help from the real A320 CEO manual it would seem, here is all I can find from that one, where it basically says the same as what I had suggested, i.e. using the elevation selector to filter stuff out:

Correct, I realised what I originally typed looked confusing because I was writing something about the transponder code as well and the post activated before I'd sorted that out properly when I was loading the image into imgur lol, That's what you get for tabbing around too may windows I guess, so I tweaked my reply. See correct post. The range is a misleading term, it actually refers to above/below/all/immediate threats etc, and is basically automatic, with it dropping stuff which doesn't matter in the background as well unless it considers it a threat. How it does that and the distance it considers is different on various airbus models too, just to make things even more fun. ✈️ As far as international standards go, TCAS is supposed to be reliable out to about 14 miles or so, but more modern systems can read stuff out to about 100 miles.

Use the dial to the right of the clear button. The term 'range' doesn't mean distance, it means 'the range of targets' it will monitor, such as 'only those above you' or 'only those below you' etc. So what it is referring to when asking you to set the 'range', is to put it on the most suitable mode for a climb, or a descent or level flight etc, so it will only consider threats which you are likely to come into conflict with. Setting the range of targets it will monitor may also refer to putting it on standby so you don't get warnings which are of no consequence to you at the time, for example, when taxying about on the airfield, where if you had it on 'all' it would probably be going mental; it is usually why flights on stuff such as flight radar 24 which you may have tracked will probably disappear when they have landed, which can also be a problem for flight sim add-ons which use real world transponder data to generate A.I aeroplanes which then disappear instead of taxying it on your sim's airfield. So be aware that because this is so, it is possible to put your transponder data transmission on standby as a result of some of the possible selections, which would mean ATC would lose you off their scopes as well as the TCAS mode not working. This would probably be an issue for things like VATSIM too I should imagine. More info here if you really want to know all about the TCAS system.

56 First flight sims I had were on the Commodore 64, then I had SubLogic Flight Simulator on the Commodore Amiga (i.e. the start of the FS franchise before it became a Microsoft product). First version of MS Flight Sim I had for PC was FS95, but I also had some version of FS on Apple Macs. Started flying the real things in 1997.

Boeing 247. 🙂

Depends on your sound system really. A big part of the problem is, many people have some sort of 'super-duper bass-enhancing' gamer sound system on their PC because they think it sounds 'awesome', but if a sound engineer knows what he or she is doing, they'll mix the sounds on a game or a sim or a song or whatever, to average at around -12dB and sound good on either studio monitor speakers, or monitor headphones, so that's what you should listen to it on. That's why everyone would be better off using monitor speakers or cans; it's why I always do. It's also why loads of bands get their demo tracks rejected when they send them to producers and A&R people; they mix them using their super-duper enhancing headphones and their mix sounds good on those, but the end user will not have a set of those headphones which made it sound good, they will be listening to it on monitor speakers and it'll sound absolutely cack on those because it wasn't mixed with a suitable response to suit being heard on studio gear with a proper neutral envelope.

That's still actually quite clean compared to most airliners unless they are brand new or have just been repainted. Airliners create the impression of being in super-good nick and being clean because most of us never see them really close up, but the truth is when you get up right next to them when working on them, they're mostly pretty battered and invariably filthy, most of them have plenty of little dents on them with a tiny round white sticker next to it with a number on it which logs the damage and when it occurred. The leading edges of the horizontal stabilisers are nearly always peppered with dents, half the time the fan blades and the spinner on one engine don't match those on the other engine, there are a ton of dead bug splats on the radome, the wheels are always absolutely filthy as is the underside, especially near the APU vents and there is a ton of gloopy residue from de-icing fluid on the undersides of the flap canoes, sometimes the paint lines don't match up on the cowlings or radome if they've had a panel replaced from another aeroplane. The first time I saw an airliner close up, I was really shocked at how battered it was. I had thought they'd all be pristine.

Because the licensing can be - and frequently is - different on Steam versions of third party products. A good example of this was the Steam-enabled version of Active Sky for FSX-SE. This version did not qualify for upgrade discounts on newer versions of Active Sky like you could get when you bought it externally direct from the developer because of the way serial numbers were registered, which is a good example of why cutting out a middleman such as Steam can sometimes be a wise choice if dealing with a product which may be enhanced with TPD stuff, not always sold via Steam exclusively. Another example is that some add-on aeroplanes for FSX-SE found themselves being chopped down and/or modified to suit Steam's tighter licensing agreements, for example, the FSX Virtavia B1 Bomber was available externally from many online stores, or directly through Steam; being unaware at the time of the difference this could make, I bought it for the SE version of FSX via Steam, only to find that it lacked some of the features and paint jobs which were included the package when bought not via Steam as a result of different licencing agreements which had to be a catch-all package for literally every country where Steam can download these things from. One more example would be the Just Flight Douglas DC-3 from some years ag, which later became ludicrously referred to as the 'McDonnell-Douglas DC-3' when sold via Steam because of them being terrified of legal repercussions, as though Boeing would ever bother going after someone, for calling the DC-3 by its original name. All of this stuff is why, even though I have had a Steam account for many years and have literally hundreds of games and applications on it and am usually happy to use it for that kind of thing - there are some other simulators with suffer similar issues as the above; Auran Trainz for example, which is severly hamstrung in its Steam version to the point that I actually bought it again direct from the developer site - I decided right from the off to pre-order MSFS via the MS Store rather than via Steam, and I'm not sorry I did that either because I've not had any issues with it to speak of, in fact, it has actually got better at updating as time has gone on and is now generally faster than it used to be. I like Steam, but it's definitely not the best place to buy MSFS from and sooner or later, people are going to find that out when dealing with TPD add-ons.

Oh I completely agree with you on this score. What do people expect from a simulator which you can buy for twenty quid combined with an A320 which costs fifty quid? That it will somehow be the exact rival of a 15 million quid Level-D simulator, or the real 100 million quid aeroplane? And as for the: 'my toy plane is better than your toy plane, and my flying game is better than yours' nonsense which people frequently indulge in on forums etc, it's embarrassing to witness people descending into this kind of school playground pedantry.

Whilst you can make money off youtube channels, it's not the instant road to riches which many fondly imagine. First up you have to garner an audience to the point where you have 6,000 hours of public viewing time and have to gain at least 1,000 subscribers. This is easier said than done when starting out. Having gained that, you then have to make engaging content - regularly - and this takes a fair bit of time. If you have hopes of making money from that content, it has to have some 'replay value' rather than being something people would only watch a small bit of, just once (which is what happens a lot with review viewing times). With all those boxes ticked, if you had somewhere around a million subscribed people watch one of your videos and you threw a few adverts into it for revenue, that'd get you about 500 quid. Which means you'd have to make three such videos a month which earned that same amount to garner a just about 'livable' - but hardly very fancy - wage of somewhere around 14k per annum after tax. I'm currently too busy at work to make videos for my channel (hopefully that's going to change fairly shortly), but when I do make them, it's not because I want to make money (I wouldn't turn my nose up at it of course), it's because I like doing it and helping people out by providing well-informed information. I strongly suspect this is the majority of youtuber's motivation for doing stuff rather than the desire to make a fortune, which some people can do, but most people do not.

I should imagine it's quite often so people can try stuff out which they have no opportunity to do for real at work, for either practice, curiosity, testing a theory, or just plain fun. I quite often use the fancier flight sim add-ons which replicate the real things well, to test and try things out for my work. Flight sims can be useful for that sort of stuff. And of course where the Airbus A310 is concerned, most A320 pilots are probably never going to have the opportunity to fly one of those things, but now MSFS will afford them the opportunity. Similarly, you and I might be massively interested in history and read every book we can on subjects which engage us, but in spite of all that knowledge we are never going to get the chance to dogfight a Spitfire in a Messerschmitt bf109, whereas we can do that in a flight sim if we like.

A vid of me pushing a Lufthansa A321 off stand 69R at EGCC, followed by some world-class moaning from me and colleague Adam Davidson who was headsetting it. What we were complaining about was the fact that the in-hold cargo roller system was not working and so we had to manually push everything off it, over the immobile rubber rollers which were acting as brakes on the pallets, then push the onload back onto it over those broken rollers. I started working on this flight at about 13.50 and ended up staying back until about 17.00 to push it out. The tug is then driven to stand 4 to drop off the towbar and then to stand five to park up and you can see how bouncy the tug is from the camera shake: Loganair Embraer EMB-145 pushing off stand 16 then doing a 180 to pull onto TRP 5 on taxiway Juliet, headsetted by colleague Martin Tyman, followed by me taking the tug to an Aer Lingus ATR-72 to connect to that for another pushback just prior to me finishing for the day. You can see from these two pushbacks, how it is much easier to see where you are going when pushing bigger aeroplanes with more ground clearance under them, smaller aeroplanes obscure the taxiway line unless you are turning. You can see Martin stretching his back after the disconnect of the tug, and that's from that dodgy Lufthansa A321 flight the day before where we had to push all the pallets in the lower deck hold:

Really great pics

It could theoretically use the battery, but since nobody wants to do that and flatten it, it needs either the APU running, or the FEP or a GPU connected in the nose socket, then this selected on the overhead switches in the cockpit as the power source so it can provide galley power for the cabin electrics, lights, power sockets etc, and will be able to power the hydraulic pumps so there is hydraulic pressure to open the cargo hold doors. If you open the locks on an A320's cargo doors without it being powered, they do drop open a few inches, and if you then operated the hydraulic switch you would find that there is a tiny bit of residual pressure which might open it a few inches more before dissipating, but it wouldn't get it anywhere near fully open. We don't always use the lights in the holds when loading cargo, but of course they'd only work if the things was actually powered up. The fueler needs the fuel info panel to be powered too of course. In fact you can manually pump the cargo doors open on an A320, but this is only used if the regular powered door system is faulty; you have to get a special pump lever out of stowage, and it takes two people to do it anyway (one to work the pump and the other to hold the switch lever on the open setting). The A320 (if it is a ULD-carrying variant, as most are) needs power for the cargo floor roller system too, although sometimes this is busted, which means you have to manually push the cargo cans into position, this is a pain in the neck because any cargo can you load into the aeroplane fills the doorways space and you can't get to the side to go in and push it, so you then have to rock it back and forth a bit to move it so you can then go in and push it. On dedicated cargo A321s with two cargo decks, this would be very hard to do (I know, we had to do this on a Lufthansa one the other day!). The only cargo door on an A320 which does not require power to open it is the bulk hold door, which has a pop out and turn handle, and then you push it in and up. This is an advantage of the B737; it has manually operated cargo doors which function the same as the bulk door on the A320, so you can load a 737 without it being powered up because you can open the cargo doors without power. On the A319, there is no bulk door though, so that one definitely needs the doors powered in order to be able to load it.

Yup, it is a little bit light on the controls and twitchy, but it looks and sounds good. I found it was tolerable if you don't overcontrol it; good fun for not much money.

Yup, they forgot to put it on when they were cleared to push.

As others have noted, it is standard procedure to firewall the throttle upon touchdown in case you bounce over the arrestor wire and have to do a go around for another try. This is why there are typically four arrestor wires, to give you a good chance of trapping one, but if you are doing it super-perfectly, you'll catch the third wire; this is so your mainwheels miss the other wires, but you still have a chance to catch the fourth one. You will always see aeroplanes throttle up on on a carrier landing and then throttle down when they know they are properly caught by the wire. This is also why navy fliers call themselves aviators, because 'aviators are better than pilots' as they say. If you miss the wires, and have to go around, this is called a 'bolter', so the Landing Signals Officer transmits 'bolter, bolter, bolter' to the crew to confirm it. Navy carrier landings are rated from 0-5, and a bolter is rated as 2.5 providing it was reasonably safe but unluckily bounced over the wire.

Have a look at the Wing 42 Boeing 247, which has a lot of realism in regards to systems simulation and is very inexpensive (i.e. you can start the engines realistically and you have to manage them properly to avoid them overheating), so there is 'stuff to do' whilst you fly it. This is a vintage aeroplane of course, and in reality there are no flying examples of 247s these days, but it was literally the first ever modern airliner, the one which inspired the DC-3 amongst other things, and it is a really beautiful aeroplane. It's a real bargain considering what you get for the money, probably the most bang for your bucks out of any add-on aeroplane for MSFS. Thoroughly recommended and quite affordable and useful in Air Hauler so long as you don't mind cruising at a relatively sedate pace.

Great fun movie, notwithstanding the ropey monster effects, but what I want to know is, how did they get the steps off that Tristar in the Langoliers after they had all boarded. Who disconnected the GPU, then removed the chocks and pushed it off the stand, so they could taxi it out to the runway? 🤣 To be fair, you can taxi straight off some remote stands and they could have started it without an FEP and removed the chocks prior to doing that, but there is no way they could have got the steps clear of the aeroplane unless someone climbed up a rope into the aeroplane after doing that, but we won't let facts spoil a fun movie. As you say, it's not uncommon for crews to forget a step on their checks, which is why they do a quick last minute run through of the down to the line checks. Yesterday for example, I was just about to go off shift after a mad day mostly in the bag hall and was asked to stay back another half hour or so in order to do the headset on a Loganair ATR-72. since the ATR does not have an APU and they don't normally want to use the batteries for a start, these have their starboard engine cranked in 'hotel mode' whilst on stand using the power from the FEP/GPU, i.e. with the propeller brake engaged so the prop isn't spinning. After that is started, we disconnect the power and then we push it out as normal. Yesterday I found the headset wasn't working, so I had to revert to using hand signals with the crew, which is no big deal, but they had forgotten to turn the anti-collision beacon on, so I had to tell them, with hand signals, that they hadn't switched that on before I could okay them to crank number two in hotel mode. This sort of thing happens on occasion; it's why we check that stuff too. 🙂