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Having been in the Flight Sim Community since the early 80's, I've done a great many things and enjoyed countless hours in flight simulation. I've run several groups, and I've introduced and taught a great many flight simmers how to fly various airliners and fly online. In hopes of enriching someone else's flight sim experience, I'd like to share three bits of advice. If you're reading this specifically for the Cross the Pond advice, please skip down to the bottom of this post. Flying Online First and foremost, if you're not flying on VATSIM or IVAO, then for the love of Pete you simply must invest the time to do so. Recently, someone posted a video about why they would never fly except online, and I have to tell you that he barely scratched the surface for why many of us feel the same way. Flying online (VATSIM is my preferred network) will get you closer to actual aviation than anything else, in fact nothing comes close. Beyond opening all sorts of doors, each flight offers nuances that can lead to memorable experiences. Add flying with a small group of friends (each in their own aircraft) while talking together online while also chatting on a private voice server (we stop taking with ATC is talking) is also terrific, but flying with a friend in Shared Cockpit... man, that's where I've experienced some incredible and seriously memorable events in my flight sim experience. This leads me to my second piece of advice. Shared Cockpit For quite some time I was pretty much the only person promoting Shared Cockpit in the flight sim community, and several aircraft developers would very likely not have implemented this amazing experience for us if it had not been for my promoting it with them (damned near harassing them... lol). Today we have more people than ever interested in Shared Cockpit, but there are so many people who have yet to think about it or give it a try. The number one reason I've seen why some tries Shared Cockpit and doesn't get addicted to it is simply because they flew with the wrong age or type of person, and I get that. I have about 5000 hours of shared cockpit time, and I was lucky enough to seek out people and eventually create a small cadre of like minded, fun loving people to fly with. So yeah, with some exceptions age is a deal breaker. Now, I fly airliners, so that's where I'm going to focus on. Having said that, there is nothing stopping people from enjoying shared cockpit flying general aviation. Just like when I fly with the Navy, the active "working" times of performing a airliner flight are per-departure, taxi to the active, departure and climb, the descent, arrival, landing and taxi back to the gate. That leaves a lot of time from 18,000 ft and cruise to the latter stages of descent, and that time is spent chatting about everything under the sun, sharing humor, laughing at things we hear from other online pilots and controllers, and basically having a terrific time. It's never, not EVER boring, where flying by yourself certainly can be. Moreover, the team work during the more active times of the flight is equally if not more enjoyable. One other amazing benefit to Shared Cockpit is collapsing time frames when it comes to learning how to fly online or how to fly airliners. What would take you consider time to learn on your own, jumping into the flight deck with someone who's experienced and willing to share what they know (I think that's most flight simmers) will help you learn so much faster and the experience will be fun and without frustration. It's important to remember that the guy you'll be flying with is fully capable of flying and handling everything by themselves, no there will never be any expectations for you doing anything you're no comfortable with. Each flight you'll enjoy learning bucket loads of things in a relaxed and fun atmosphere... I know, because I've personally done this with at least 60 people over the years. A Different Way to Fly the VATSIM Cross the Pond (CTP) This event takes place twice each year, a Europe to United States (Westbound) event and then an Eastbound event about six months later. Thousands of pilots fly this event, filling the skies with airliners during which is typically at least an 8, 10, or 12 hour flying experience. Weeks prior to the event pilots vote on which 5 airports will be selected as departure points, and the same for arrival airports. Of course flying this event in Shared Cockpit is loaded with benefits, including allowing you and your copilot to make runs errands, do some chores, whatever, while still doing the flight. Flying for these long flights really isn't my cup of tea, as I'm more interested in the busy times of flying rather than hanging out at cruise for 8 to 12 hours or longer. So many years ago I got my group together, and we began flying in between event departure airports while most pilots are departing for their long trip. After all, the goal is to experience what it's like to fly in and out of busy airports, right? Well, you'll rarely find busier airports than the CTP event, and we're flying in between departure points so it's flying out of a loaded airport and flying into one as well. After the flight, we all leave the computer to go and take care of whatever, and about 8 hours later we repeat the experience at the arrival airports. Guys, this is an amazing way to fly this event, it truly is. Do this in Shared Cockpit and you'll just be amazed, you really, truly will. Thanks for listening, I hope that I've given you some ideas about expanding your flight sim experiences. One can always come up with reasons why not to try something new, but you only need one good one to act on, and I hope you can find that reason in what I wrote above. As always, I wish you the very, very best. Dave

Updated October 7, 2017 Updated Shared Cockpit Airliner List Below There are many terrific aircraft in flight sim, but as far as many experienced flight simmers are concerned the two best aircraft (fidelity, realism, performance) ever developed for desktop flight simulation are the Majestic Dash 8 Q400 Professional and the Leonardo Fly the Maddog MD-80 Professional. The guys at Leonardo did things with the MD-80 back with FS2004 that nobody else did until Majestic released the Dash 8, but even the Dash was developed under FSX (and then P3D) and Leonardo did these things under FS2004! Of course both these aircraft are Shared Cockpit capable! The Maddog was ported over to FSX, meaning that there was no way it could be ported again into P3DV1/2/3, and certainly not into P3DV4. I'd communicated with Davide (owner of Leonardo Software) several times over the years about updating the Maddog, and even tried to get other developers including Aerosoft interested in purchasing the rights or working with Leonardo to re-develope the Maddog for FSX and P3D, but nobody was interested. I then opened talks with Davide about purchasing the rights to the Maddog software, but that too didn't work out. This aircraft is so terrific that several friends and I have kept FSX installed for the sole purpose of flying her and one other aircraft (MD-11), but overall it seemed that the flight sim community would loose this amazing aircraft. UPDATE: Last week it was announced that Leonardo has already begin work on re-writing the Maddog software for P3DV4! I've spoken with Davide and my primary Shared Cockpit test partner (Grant) from the Dash 8 Q400 Professional project will be helping with the new Maddog. Regarding the Dash 8 Q400... if you're not aware, Majestic changed their mind about the development timeline for making the Dash 8 compatible with P3DV4, so we'll have this, the other of the two best aircraft ever developed for desktop flight sim, back in our hanger as well! For those who haven't experienced flying either of these two STELLAR aircraft - especially in Shared Cockpit, you'll be in for a MAGNIFICENT EXPERIENCE. With that, I'm EXCITED to update the Airliner Shared Cockpit list. It's going to be a GREAT 2017/2018 for shared cockpit flying!!! Best wishes to everyone.

Hiya I was looking for a skilled pilot who is willing to do a shared cockpit with me. I have been doing simulation flying for 7 years now and I have P3D Please contact me on aryan.khanna2002@gmail.com aryanthegamer5@gmail.com or aryanvatsimva@gmail.com Kind Regards Aryan

I know the basics, have everything setup, and can fly solo on VATSIM (FSX). However, I am still making mistakes and I believe that flying with someone and just watching them will help me a lot. If you wouldn't mind flying with me, please add me on skype : awesomedude7128 Thanks

On Saturday, November 25th I hosted the Annual Flight Simulation Web Conference (2017). For those of who you who were not able to attend you may watch an unedited recording of the broadcast below. I'm mentioning this because the focus of this year's conference was Shared Cockpit, and there are some big things happening in the Shared Cockpit genre of our hobby. Subscribe to either the OVPA Facebook Page (see my signature below) or Youtube channel for notice of Part 2 of the conference. Best wishes.

This is a breakaway post from a Shared Cockpit discussion taking place in a thread in the PMDG Forums. I created this thread to prevent deraining the other thread, which was about Virtual Cabins. DISCUSSION CONTINUED Going back years ago I had several private message sessions with Ryan about this. First it was something he said they were planning (his words Rob) but then things changed. Then later it was something they wanted to do, but things changed again. Then he posted openly that the programming for shared cockpit was too much work, their wasn't any documentation in the SDK, etc., etc., etc.. It's just that (at least then) the folks at PMDG (or at least Ryan) didn't understand the difference between the code that Microsoft gave us for shared cockpit is not what was being used by other developers (because it wouldn't work for for all the functions that a third party aircraft has). At least up to the point when Ryan posted this, it wasn't their thing and they weren't interested enough in shared cockpit to research it (well actually, I did tell him that one couldn't use the Microsoft Shared Cockpit functions and all that, but he must have forgotten). Leonardo created fully functional Shared Cockpit for their incredible Fly the Maddog MD-80 in both FS9 and FSX, and systems wise that aircraft still revivals any aircraft in flight sim today, and Digital Design also did this for their Fokker and were supposed to add Shared Cockpit to the Concorde but sadly that never materialized. I've been meaning to talk with Hans about this, but he's been really busy with CRJ - which I can promise you is a terrific aircraft! I sincerely hope PMDG will change their minds about Shared Cockpit at some point, as I agree that a Shared Cockpit capable PMDG 737, 747 or 777 would be incredible! I think what is needed is for a lot of people to start asking them about it again, and point to the successes other developers have had with it. I'm immensely grateful that Oleksiy at Majestic and Collin at TFDi Design for being far more open minded and implementing Shared Cockpit, and for Mathijs at Aerosoft for having the foresight to do so! My huge thanks to them all, but especially to Oleksiy at Majestic for being open to listening. He created the first shared cockpit capable airliner since the Leonardo/Digital Aviation days. Also, what Collin and Joshua did with the Shared Cockpit interface was absolutely terrific! What Aerosoft is planning for the upgraded Connected Flight Deck is going to be completely different than what anyone else has done before and I'm looking forward to seeing it.