Antipodeslonghaul

Different scenario, but was thinking of the BA 777 that lost both engines on final at Heathrow, and in a brilliant move they partially retracted the flaps, but of course left the gear down and basically just managed to clear the fence and put it down in the grass. If you're going down anyway, the gear would absorb some of the impact. But in this case they just didn't seem to have any options to find an open area. Aside from birds, perhaps sucking in some sort of debris. Thinking of fuel contamination as a possibility as mentioned here, I was wondering about other flights getting fuel from the same source.

Like the US Airways flight that made it to the Hudson River. Hitting the birds just between V1 and VR, or at 1000' or 2000' agl and so on, rather not at all of course, but if so the higher the better. Hitting them just at takeoff and losing both engines, plus being in a crowded area. It's a really horrible thought. I just checked, the US Airways flight back then apparenty hit the large flock of geese around 2800'.

That's a great one! "And ahhh Speedbird___, you can go ahead and reach out to Gander Oceanic now at ___. No really, don't worry, reach out to them. You're not alone out there. In fact that's why you need to reach out to them, they'll take good care of you."

Sounds very promising. Again I'm getting that itch to switch. I'm still shuffling back and forth between PMDG 777's and 747's in FSX, and the BBJ1 in MSFS 2020. I'm still somehow attached to the "feel" of FSX and its simplicity, like not having to worry about when I'll be able to get back to the computer. The pause at TOD is really just that, plain and simple. On the other hand I'm attached to the looks of MSFS. 2020 is amazing enough for me. If 2024 boosts the looks and the flight feeling even more, then it's hard for me to resist. Managed a successful long haul flight from Rio de Janeiro to Fort Lauderdale in MSFS 2020 in the BBJ yesterday. The scenery on final into 10R with the sun setting behind me, the aircraft shadow in front of me with the glittering light and these like fish ponds right before the runway looked so incredible, I'm still savoring the memory of the experience today. I think it'd be even more amazing in the 777 in 24. Hope PMDG and Asobo get the regular pause at TOD sorted out in 24. It's kind of like a mosquito that keeps coming back with its high pitched buzz. You can live with it, but at times it can get really nagging. Like you meticulously plan a 777-200er flight in MSFS24, say from Frankfurt to Chicago. You're really curious about the winds and the route you picked and watching it all unfold. It's your day off, so plenty of opportunities to pop back into the cockpit periodically, watching Iceland off your starboard, and later the Labrador coast before you. You're occasionally taking a peek at an almost identical flight on Flightradar24 on your phone when you're away from the computer. But as you approach the Great Lakes you gotta make dinner or something similar, sorry no way around it, sometimes annoying real life obligations. And before you know it, boom, your real life counterpart has landed and what you were expecting was going to be exactly 8 hours and 33 minutes has now become 9 hours and 22 minutes on your elapsed time or something like that, and it's just a minor first world nuisance, get over it, but somehow, that's one thing I can't.

Since a couple of months I've just been shutting down 2020 by exiting fullscreen and clicking the the little x at the top right of the window after landing. No going back to the main menu or anything, just I'm outta here, see you tomorrow! Had zero trouble with that, it'd fully shut down, and none of those do you want to start in safe mode pop ups upon starting the next time. Since yesterday though I've had a few ctd's. Not sure what's going on, but seems it could be connected to the FSLTL AI traffic generator. Anyway, one addon I like that seems easy and good for my low end system is the MSI Afterburner together with the Riva Tuner. I'll manually set lower framerates in cruise and higher ones on takeoffs and landings. Works very well for me, and I just set the little GPU temp display, easy to keep an eye on it.

I've never really been interested in terminal interiors in a sim, but I guess I could become so. A long time ago I had a flight out of the Tom Bradley terminal at LAX where you had to take a bus out to remote stands way out near the western edge of the airport. The fumes mixed with the seabreeze, pure bliss for me! A weird sort of hangar like bus terminal in the middle of the night, beforehand I had no idea even existed. At Frankfurt once I did an internship and I had to process some passengers stranded in some strange remote section of the older terminal. A bit like in the movie with Tom Hanks. They were in transit from somewhere like Indonesia to Cameroon. Cancelled flights, expired visas, all sorts of mishaps. They were barricaded behind a sort of fortress made out of tables and lounge chairs, for days, weeks? I guess it's somehow cool if the terminal scenery gets so sophisticated, you can go explore all sorts of strange hidden corners where you might get stuck someday.

That Hong Kong - London flight the long way around was cool! 1989 apparently saw the first London - Sydney nonstop demonstration flight in a 747-400 (20 hours 9 min, eastbound). https://www.airwaysmag.com/legacy-posts/qantas-longest-nonstop-deliv-flight#:~:text=DALLAS — Today in Aviation%2C a,20 hours and nine minutes. I guess these ultra long-hauls have been technically possible for a long time, just not economical. Where there's a will there's a way. Perhaps one could have modified a 707 or DC8 circa 1960, extra fuel tanks, just a few first class private cabins. I think with London - Sydney it's the economics. If changing in Dubai or Singapore for example only adds one or two hours to the total trip, it barely seems worth the effort flying it nonstop, but I'm sure it is a matter of prestige.

Go offline (no internet), try and load game, and then go back online if you get in. A long shot, but might get you in.

To me, I don't know anyone else personally who's into flight simming. So I kind of see these forums as a place to hang out with friends and just shoot the breeze about whatever might pop into my mind about, well just about anything to do with flight simming. Kind of like, you type something random you just happen to be thinking about, and by writing it, it helps you visualize it so you might get a clearer picture, and then you hope for some friendly neighborly feedback, so you might get an even clearer picture. But sometimes it seems a bit more like hanging out with the gang of hoodlums smoking in the alleyway behind the school instead of the “good kids” reading books, playing chess, or actually studying during their break. Nerds! “Hey guys, what do you think of my new waterproof Casio digital watch? It has like six different time zones.” “Ha! He's asking us what we think! Let's throw him in the fountain, see how waterproof his watch really is! What time is it in Australia dork? Wanna take a trip down under?” ...Well ok, that might be exaggerated, but kind of feels like it a bit sometimes. But anyway, I still haven't even come close to buying or even trying 2024 yet, so I can't really get enough of these types of threads. I guess waiting for more clear signals where it seems unequivocally hands down better than 2020. But whether it ever gets there or not doesn't matter, I still like reading about what other people think on here, coming from any side. I just finished a stint going back to FSX Steam, yet again, a bunch of flights in the PMDG 747-400. Dang, it is cool to fly that one for sure! It just “feels” awesome! Now I just switched back to 2020. It'll be really cool to see how the 747's develop in 2024. There's still something about that “feeling” for me in FSX vs. 2020, it bugs me in 2020 that I seem to be getting all these weird random yawing moments on final recently and generally all these weird seemingly random motions that just don't “feel” right, well to me at least. But the amazing scenery in 2020 always pulls me back. Which kid wouldn't go for better graphics, and that doesn't change as one gets older, so I guess just always got to compromise in some way or another. Anyway, looking forward to anyone's continuing random feedback as 2024 progresses.

This is just a wild guess, but we're not quite there yet in any of the sims nor addons such as Active Sky. Like you describe, I've felt that, bumpy over land on a hot day and smoothing out over water. But I hope I'm wrong, maybe such conditions are being reproduced in a sim. I haven't flown general aviation planes in a sim in a long time. But your post makes me curious to get back in a smaller plane in the sim. I suppose people with good laptops and internet on the go might be able to test such things, going up in a small plane, landing at an airfield perhaps with picnic tables in the shade, and then checking the conditions they were just in in real life, how they compare. I'd be up for trying that.

From: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipodes ------ A hypothetically almost perfect antipodal flight would be Tangier Ibn Battouta Airport, Morocco (IATA: TNG), to Whangarei Aerodrome, New Zealand (IATA: WRE), whose designated locators are 10,800 nautical miles (12,428 mi; 20,002 km) apart,[35] almost the maximum possible distance. However, with only a length of 3,599 ft (1,097 m), Whangarei's runway is too short to accommodate any current (as of 2015) commercial jet airliner, especially one with the required range. Traveling between them would currently need at least two plane changes. --------- When I first got the 777-200LR in FSX I did that one Tangier-Whangarei nonstop, and on the way back did a brief refueling stop in Auckland. I think around 23 hours each way (roughly), more like some long ferry boat crossing than a long flight. Otherwise I've done Singapore-Bogota, a potential (but unlikely) Star Alliance connection (10,424 nm), Shanghai-Sao Paulo (2 megacities with no direct links 10,033 nm), and of course SYD-LHR 9,188 nm which should soon become the real life longest regular nonstop. SIN-JFK and SIN-EWR are shorthauls for me, just kidding. In MSFS so far I've just been using the BBJ1 (PMDG 737-700), and I can't exactly remember the longest, but I believe it was Singapore Seletar to London City, maybe like 14 1/2 hours.

I think the sim/game distinction doesn't matter so much and goes way back. Say I find an old computer and a box of floppy disks in a basement. I dust it off, plug it in, and voila, it works! I find a flight simulator amongst the disks. I try some aircraft carrier landings in a 747 and feel like I'm playing a game. I hop into a Cessna, set the visibility to 1/4 mile, practice shooting some ILS approaches with the squiggly little needles. Also some IFR cross country's, noticing the needle sensitivity increases as I get closer to the VOR. Also noticing the DME reads about a mile when I'm directly overhead, since I am about a mile overhead. I try out all sorts of different winds and take note of things like heading and track, and I feel it's a useful training tool, a simulator, and it's really not bad for being so old.

2020 is what I've been using since FSX and it isn't that bad. Yes, the "feeling" of flying seems a bit off. But if we had like shopping cart simulators, and pretty much everyone knows how to push a shopping cart in real life. We'd all of course say the sim doesn't 100% match real life anyway. And different shopping carts even within the same supermarket handle differently. A wobbily wheel, pulling off to one side or whatever. 2020 doesn't bother me so much anymore for "feeling" a bit off. The biggest thing I can't quite get used to in MSFS is the pausing and saving. It's maybe just a small niche, but people who do a takeoff, say for a ten hour flight, and then get a call from their uncle who needs help with fallen branches in his yard, and afterwards have to cook dinner for the family, and no idea when they'll be able to get some quiet time back at the computer, seem to sort of have to give up on focusing on their calculated flight time. What I mean is you for example meticulously plan a flight from London to Los Angeles, and you estimate say 10 hours and 25 minutes. And some flight you're following on Flightradar that day is looking to do pretty much the same. Ahhh, you're looking forward to a nice sunset arrival into LA, the golden mountaintops glowing in the sun, the city lights just coming on beneath you, your flight timed perfectly. Instead you get back to your computer paused at top of decent somewhere outside Barstow. It's already pitch black outside, midnight. Your elapsed flight time is aready showing like 16 hours, you're like what the heck? So you try and adjust that tedious slider, to get back the sort of proper time, but you can't even do that if you ever saved your flight in between. Sure, you might say who cares about flight time anyway? A real life flight maybe got all sorts of strange vectors, crazy flight level assignments. Who cares about the planned flight time? But anyway, for me at least, that's the biggest nuisance. Not so much whether it "feels" like a game, or the flight model feels off. The only other slight nuisance I can think of right now is the weather radar. It seems to be more about showing you pretty colors on the little screen, rather than giving you an indication of cells to avoid.

Maybe also crash your virtual plane a lot in the beginning, even intentionally. It may sound childish, but get rid of any shame and fear about crashing from the get go. It's just a sim, and it can be fun to crash. You'll most likely get the hang of things fairly quickly, growing tired of crashing your plane, and before you know it you'll be doing a pretty decent job at least taking off, landing, and buzzing around trees and buildings without crashing.

There's always that distinction between CAA requirements, company limitations, and what could at least in theory be done by some gung ho cowboy pilots throwing the rule books out the window, in real life or the sim. Anyway, with very low payload and fuel, and firewalling the sucker on departure or max autobrakes on landing if you nail it right on the numbers, it's pretty amazing the tiny airstrips you could potentially get into and out from. I don't think La Guardia has 777's nowadays, but it used to get DC10's and L1011's, which are somewhat similar in size and weight. https://www.nycaviation.com/2014/08/heavies-lga-1970s-little-airport/35573 Although their runways aren't really that short, but some crowded compact airports in Asia like Itami or Songshan might be good and might currently have 777 flights. I'd look around Asia where heavies are often used on shorthauls.