ClearedtoLand

Definitely try AVSIM, I think. They look good.

I'm just wondering whether, when the pilot input the coordinates, he was relying on the computer to inform him if he had made a mistake. Put another way, did the pilot interpret the absence of any obvious warning of error to be a confirmation that his entry was correct? That goes beyond mere CRM and would point towards areas of improvement in crew and computer interaction. I don't have any experience in Airbus automated flight systems, but I once made a similar mistake when setting up the FMC on the 737NGX and the FMC returned a message to alert me to the discrepancy between where I told the plane it was and where its onboard GPS system indicated it really was. I quickly rectified the error. I would be surprised if the Airbus systems don't have a similar function. If it does, then it would be worth looking at the way in which it alerts the crew of an input error. If it doesn't have a similar warning system in place, well ... I would go beyond that and suggest that when it comes to designing aircraft flight computers, it would be worth drawing on the experience of cognitive scientists. It has only been over the last forty years that psychology has started to piece together how badly even a fully functional brain operates, and the obvious risks that this poses for our behaviour. And to put that into perspective, the 747 has been flying for longer than we have understood the way in which our minds find creative ways to malfunction in the name of evolutionary expedience. I would say that with SOP's and experience comes certainty, and with certainty comes a reluctance to question our actions, this is a scientifically proven fact. And though obviously, most pilots get this right most of the time, a recognition of the limitations of the human mind, and the accompanying penchant, for making seemingly incomprehensible mistakes, would help us to design systems that take into consideration very real human limitations like seeing what we want to see, even when what we claim to have seen is not what was actually there, such as one number in a long sequence being out of place. There is no amount of training in procedures or experience in flying which can counteract the mind's tendency for taking short cuts with devastating consequences, but a recognition of this fact about the mind and incorporating it into how flight computers interact with pilots can help us design systems which provide a check on mental inefficiency.

Search the file library here on AVSIM using the search phrase, Alf's UK airfrields. It should return 4 pages of what you are looking for. I only use one of his airfields as it is the one outside the town I live in, and you can certainly get a Cherokee and a Cessna in there. I hope it helps.

Or the occasional premium economy passenger who skips dinner, has four Gin and Tonics and then, while asleep (passed out?) proceeds to punch the fellow next to him twice ... I'm not buying the 747 v3 without a cast iron guarantee from PMDG that this scenario has been modelled. That was not the sort of mile high club I was hoping to join, no matter how exclusive it may be.

As usual, Major, you are spot on. Diego Garcia is on a rolling lease (If I remember correctly) from the UK. The island does have a bit of a controversial history and makes the news here in the UK from time to time, but that is not a subject to be discussed here. I think that if you are going to be based anywhere on US Armed Forces deployment, Diego Garcia has to be one of the most scenic bases. And I think you more than most here knows its strategic value to the US Airforce, as such, one can't just rock up there on a pleasure flight and ask to go sight seeing. For the flight that I did I imagined I was flying some high ranking military officials back to the USA. The scenery I used for my flight had the B 52s parked outside, but it's been a while since I installed it so I don't remember all the details about it. Now I am tempted to go and look for it again. I enjoyed reading your bit of insider history on the island, it's always good to get a glimpse of just how professional and skilled our men and women in uniform are.

For anyone interested in non commercial routes on the 737, you can consider getting a nice scenery file for the US base at Diego Garcia, and use that as a refuelling stop from anywhere in Asia to back to the USA. My longest leg was a BBJ from Diego Garcia to somewhere in West Africa, I can't remember the exact route, but it came in at over 11 hours. Full fuel, pilots, four passengers, and not much in terms of luggage.

That beached plane looks like the end result of one of my landings.

Precisely. That's one of the reasons that I never thought much of the issue myself. There doesn't appear to be an obvious pattern to the cause, it is very infrequent, it doesn't affect anything else in the performance of the aircraft and given the absence of other users reporting a similar issue on here, I don't even think it's a problem caused by PMDG add-ons. Maybe third party liveries.

It happens with either installation method. Off the top of my head, I recall seeing this issue after manually installing quite an old Shenzhen Airlines livery manually, but the Pegasus Airlines and SAA livery were installed through the Operations Center. It is worth pointing out though that I have manually installed a Rwandair livery which did not present this problem. Like Jack, I had large number of liveries installed when I was still using MS FSX, but I have not yet installed them all in FSX SE, and I have not yet experienced this issue in FSX SE. I apologise if I am giving you a bunch of random and unrelated info here, but I am hoping that if I can provide you with enough info, it would help you to eliminate anything that isn't a contributing factor.

I have infrequently experienced this before as well, but I didn't look into it in as much depth as you have, I would load an aircraft, say Pegasus 737 800, call sign Sunturk and reg TC- AAL, do a flight, exit the sim and on the next occasion, this could be half an hour to a few days later, load a different aircraft, say South African Airways call sign Springbok and reg ZS-SJV. When I go to select the SAA aircraft, it would have Sunturk listed as call sign and show TC-AAL as its reg. It happened with other variants as well. At that point I would simply correct those in the UI before proceeding with the flight. I don't recall ever seeing the call sign and reg number listed incorrectly in the aircraft.cfg files, so what causes the confusion, I am not sure, but because it was such an easy work around, I never actually bothered to even look it up (when something doesn't quite work the way it says its going to work, I assume a mistake on my part, in this instance, being careless when installing the livery). Occasionally this would happen after installing a new livery, but as it is not always the case, I'm not sure whether that is related, or whether it would be related to installing a livery that is maybe older, or contains some other error. Kyle asked about add-ons, so I will list a few, but I am not really sure whether any of these would be a contributing factor since I have experienced this before adding some of these to the sim. PMDG 737 NGX (600/700/800/900) PMDG 777 200LR/300ER ** A2A Cessna 172 ** A2A Cessna 182 ** A2A Piper Cherokee ** ASN ** Editvoicepack ** MyTraffic 6 ** Aerosoft Airbus Bundle ** FSUIPC ** The ** after the add-on indicates that I had already experienced this problem prior to installing that particular add-on. And about 90 scenery add-ons ... I'm hoping I don't have to list all of those.

Ron, for some reason I can't quote your post, but that last post of yours just cracked me up. I wish more people had your sense of humour.

I bought Narita a few months ago (no discount for me sadly), and I have no complaints about it, either in terms of visual representation or performance while using primarily the PMDG 777. The other aircraft I use with it is the PMDG 737, and no complaints there either.

Well, aren't you just in luck :smile:. I have spent a few hours tonight downloading and organising liveries for the NGX after moving to FSX SE recently, so I came across the ones you requested, I sent you the links. I hope they are the right ones, as I am currently also working my way through a bottle of red wine, there might be a chance that I sent you links to some pizza place ... in which case I sincerely apologise.

Thanks for sharing, I always look at your scenery with envy. I guess I could get scenery like this, but the best my system would afford me with such detail is to ride around on a bicycle that has no VAS footprint whatsoever.

Awesome bird, what was your cruising altitude and speed?

And there you have a perfect summary of the problem. 20% of Americans think they are in the top 1% income bracket. They can't all be right, 95% of them are wrong and would discover that if they could be bothered to have a think about it. Similarly, nobody goes through life thinking the way they are is the wrong way of being, but hell, they're going to be the wrong way in any case. Whenever someone goes mad at someone else for doing something in a way that differs from their preferred way of doing things, you are essentially saying to that person, the way you behave is the wrong way. It may well be, some ways are better than others, but better does not mean right, nor does it mean the only way. What you describe is such a familiar pattern of human thought that it can almost serve as a template, not thinking through all the different options for behaviour and realising that, as in almost all aspects of life, preference is subjective and not universal. And here is the problem with it, a subjective preference is based not on a logical analysis of all available options, and a careful weighing up of pros and cons, but almost entirely on personality, and one does not choose ones personality, so one did not choose to be the right way, one came to believe that being the way one is, is the right way of being because that is the way one is. Circular logic in so far as one can call it logic. This topic, and all the ones similar to it result from frustration with people who think that their behaviour and thinking is superior to that of others and that they are thus entitled to treat others badly. Of course, in so doing, they actually prove just how similar their thinking is to those they deem inferior to them. But I suspect very much that most people already, quietly, know this.

Hey Jim, that wasn't in response to what you said. It's in response to a post from a different user. I think your comments on the subject were some of the better articulated views on the subject.

You've just performed what we call in the trade a mental short cut, it's the emotion derived from getting annoyed at my lengthy posts (I grant you that bit). The parts of your mind that react emotionally operate faster than the parts of your mind that perform analytic functions and the analytic parts can't actually resume their functions until your emotions have run their course, and the emotional parts of your brain don't think, it's known as the Dual Processing Theory of Mind (or Cognition). What it says, in a nutshell, is that for as long as you are in an emotional state, you are not thinking rationally. So from everything I wrote, all that you took out of it was that it is not concise. Ok, but what about the bit where I wrote that the rational mind shuts down when people get emotional? It would seem to be relevant here, because you don't need cognitive science to tell you that people behave in silly ways when they get angry. You do need cognitive science, though, to understand why, because that also tells you what your best course of action is for dealing with it (nip it in the bud before it has a chance to take off). So what does all of this have to do with wonderful AVSIM? AVSIM, among other things, is a source of support, but that function is undermined by some people who let their emotions dictate their reactions, which in turn ruins it for other users, thus making it not so much a source of support, but some people's personal podium for self aggrandisement. And that brings us to this topic. And that brings me to my contributions. Cognitive psychology shows that people are very bad at understanding how their minds work, it also shows that, depending on the individual, understanding how ones mind functions can help one to develop better behaviour, to be less emotional and more rational. AVSIM certainly would not suffer from people adopting a more rational approach. The content of my posts, well, the scientific bits, are more relevant than you acknowledge. Did I offend you in any other manner or have I covered everything?

Jim, You understood my comment just right, and I think we share the same sentiment about some people's behaviour on the forum. I think that we sometimes go too far in trying to please people who demand that everyone express themselves in a way they deem acceptable, yet we don't actually stop to ask ourselves whether those demands are reasonable. Personally, I think those demands are unreasonable, and I think people deserve to be treated better than that. The problem here is not that everyone does not speak or behave in the same manner, the problem is the expectation that everyone should speak or behave in the same manner or be treated with contempt or as if they are stupid. There is an error in reasoning there that does not justify an attitude of being, as you call it, holier than thou. And unfortunately, they get away with it. I do find it reassuring though that the overwhelming majority of users are not seen to be behaving in this way. But if I may ask, how would you suggest the issue be addressed?

Jim, am I right in thinking that what you are saying is that Rob's proposals will not fully address all the issue of some people responding in a hostile manner to people who do not articulate problems in a way, or the way, preferred by some others? I agree with your comment about things like language barriers being obstacles to people conforming to a standard way of articulating problems, and I do think that in many instances, the hostile replies are without justification. By means of an example, I recall two people responding to someone's question by referring him to the manual, the fact that the way the question was phrased very clearly indicated that the person who posed the question was not proficient in English, and so the reference to the manual was next to useless. What was striking though was that neither of the two respondents recognised that the person was not a native English speaker, nor did they take the time to confirm this by looking at the location given by the person who posed the question, in this case, he was Brazilian, hence a native Portuguese speaker. I think what Rob is going to suggest to AVSIM is a great contribution, but I think it will be of limited to use to those who do not speak English. Too often, a hostile reply is not down to someone not having taken the time to search or phrase a question with sufficient detail, but down to the respondent not bothering to think through the possibilities that may be preventing the person who asked the question from living up to the required standards. That is not a failure on the part of the person asking the question, that is a failure on the part of the respondent. When did asking clarifying questions become a burden too far? I am struggling to understand why so much consideration is given to the expectations of those few who, through failure in reasoning, respond in unnecessary ways to other people on here, while we place the burden for pleasing that minority on those who have transgressed in so far as not being as fluent in English, or as IT literate as those for whom such things are a cause for personal outrage. Do we no longer afford people the privilege of having to decide for themselves how to prioritise their lives? Has it come down to people agreeing, when joining AVSIM or purchasing sim related software, to prioritise their lives according to our demands or face our wrath? By the way, if I have contributed to going off your topic, I apologise.

Dunning-Kruger is indeed alive and kicking, and since that addition to the hymn sheet of cognitive despair, a great many other equally sad findings have been streaming in about how bad we are at reasoning. Whenever I am required to talk about how brilliantly illogical we evolved to be, I always try to reinforce the point that this stuff is hard wired into our brains, and when we behave in a contemptuous manner towards someone for their reasoning errors, we are not all that different from someone getting angry at someone for having only two legs ... We don't choose to be bad at thinking any more than we choose to have asynchronous modular processing of sensory information, we evolved that way. All of us, so we can safely pack away the superiority complexes. And that's before you get to the truly bizarre stuff like the unconscious mind operating wholly outside of conscious control, which mostly is not really a problem, but it does make for scary implications when it offers your conscious mind any old piece of information at its disposal during arguments or discussions which are not going so well for the conscious mind. This results in the individual defending a point of view based on information they have never actually evaluated. Fun stuff really, right up to the point where one realises that ones opinions are based on mental processes which are thoroughly unreliable and that one possesses no internal mechanism for realising when one is being led astray by ones own mind. And, of course, just to add to the mayhem, intelligence does not mitigate any of this, in fact, in a disturbingly large number of cases, higher intelligence aggrevates bad reasoning. If we can accept just how susceptible to error our thinking is, we might develop attitudes to the thoughts and actions of others which are more considered and considerate. We may also find our interactions with others to be less emotional and more constructive. But it is asking a lot. In the end it may be best to simply accept that bad behaviour will surface, and that when it surfaces, to remind ourselves of why it does show up so often. It can take the sting out of such behaviour, and can even add an air of comedy to it. But I have gone way off topic ... Yet again.

Hi Jim, I don't know how much time you have on your hands, but might I make a suggestion, get your hands on a book by Keith Stanovich called What Intelligence Tests Miss, it is one of the best summaries of convergent findings in cognitive science that I have come across ... but far be it from me to spread my own cynicism about human behaviour, however, that book will give you a little insight into why people behave in this way and why there is next to nothing that can be done about it. The same author has written another book about how people can overcome their irrational tendencies, but I am not persuaded by it. I side with the cognitive cynics. As for those who defend the behaviour of those who come down harshly on others, well, a basic fact of the human brain is that once emotions kick in, in particular anger, the parts of the brain that enable rational thought are shut down, and with those, any possibility for rational interaction (think civility). In essence, we are saying that it is ok for those who have read the pinned topics and know their way around the forum to behave thoughtlessly (defined loosely), but thoughtless behaviour (again defined loosely) is not ok on the part of those who have not read pinned topics or know their way around the forum. It all gets very funny when you bring cognitive science into the equation. As for faith in the moderators, if I were a betting man, I would double up on bias and bet against a fair hearing, but not against good intentions though. I know they try hard, and I'm not calling their intentions into question, but merely the tool at their disposal. Or is that just my own bias? Sometimes it's best to remember that the brain is an imperfect information processor, and however justified one may feel oneself in attacking someone else for being lazy, being new, being a Martian, or simply just not being us, we trust our brains at our peril. It's a well known fact that there are parts of our brains which ignore us ... completely, that's your brain sticking two fingers up at you. Next time you get angry at yourself over anything, ask yourself who, exactly, is angry with who there? A bit of modesty, self doubt and patience when it comes to dealing with people is a far better, and justifiable approach than throwing the book, the kitchen sink, and possibly an insult or two at people who are, let us be honest, behaving just like we do, our brains are just very well developed for forgetting our own moments of inadequacy, hence we tend to see ourselves far more favourably than we are in reality. If we want to be honest, it comes down to a simple question, how do we want to be treated when we make a mistake in the eyes of others? Because, rest assured, unless you are evolved from a different species than the rest of us, you are going to make exactly the same mistake as those whom some of us roast on here. I'm going to leave this with one of my favourite findings from cognitive psychology, there is a proven inverse correlation between confidence and being right, as instances of the former go up, so instances of the latter go down. That is worth pondering for a moment. ... did someone mention coffee?

Absolutely agree, freeware developers often go unpraised, but there are some absolutely fantastic freeware add-ons that have made this hobby thoroughly enjoyable. A big thank you to all of them too.

What do you call two lawyers buried up to their necks in sand? Not enough sand. Sorry, psychologist humour. Let them discuss whatever they want to, they're not actually breaking any laws or license agreements, and clarifying the issue might just prevent someone from inadvertently violating a licensing condition in the future. Well, one can hope in any case. Besides, it's too hot to get stressed out, go have a beer, it's probably the best antidote for all of this.

I have it, bought it just over a month ago, and I would highly recommend it. I use it, very frequently, for American Airlines flights from KDFW. Not only is the scenery nicely done, but on my system I get smooth performance without any stutters when flying into it with the PMDG 737. Definitely highly recommended.