The question (real pilots need not bother)

[cpxxx]

I say they are easy to fly?  It flys like a video game.

Stop please you're killing me You're a pilot yourself, you should know better. It's like saying flying a taildragger is easy. I imagine if I was up in an F18, (an ambition of mine BTW) and the pilot said. 'Do you want to fly it, I would have great fun boring holes in the sky, loops, rolls etc. That's easy, but if say the pilot ejected and I was left alone. Would I try to land it? No way, bang I'm out of there. Sometimes flying looks easy, sims often make it seem easy. Sunny day flying in a light aircraft makes flying seem easy. But once you start moving onto more complex aircraft, there's a lot more ways of getting into trouble. Flying isn't that easy.

[Cougar68]

Cobra, you have no real F-18 or 737 time.  You simply can't speak as to how they fly. 

I understand the ground handling of tail draggers, but I've never really heard of a super cub being called a widow maker. 

[Cobra516]

Why do you think landing a Hornet on a 10,000 ft runway is difficult?  What do you think would make you unable to land it?  You know what the throttle does,  you know what the stick does, you know what the AOA indicator is showing you, you know what the velocity vector is on the HUD and what that is telling you - and you know what to change to make the airplane do what you want.  It is not complicated to land the damn thing.   You fly it onto the runway, there isn't even a flare!  Hold that flight path marker around where you want to touch down, use the pitch to regulate AOA and throttle to move your touchdown point. 

A Super Cub is a lot harder to land well than a Hornet - it just is.  The Hornet sim I flew illustrated that point to me quite clearly - I was surprised as to how stable it was and how easy it was to fly, to get it configured for landing and to land it - there really isn't anything to it - there was absolutely no dancing around with the controls as I got close to the ground (like there is in a light airplane/Super Cub), once you're stabilized on the glide path just fly it right down to the runway, touched down at about 600 FPM. 

Maybe I have a hard time understanding how someone couldn't land one, because what seems simple to me may not be for someone else.

[Cougar68]

Why do you think landing a Hornet on a 10,000 ft runway is difficult? 

I don't know if it is or not, seeing as how I've never flown an actual Hornet.  I might remind you that you haven't either.  Go find a Hornet pilot with real flight time and ask him how the sim compares to the real thing.

A Super Cub is a lot harder to land well than a Hornet - it just is. 

Prove it.  I think tripling the approach speed in a real life situation may make up for the Hornet having an extra wheel up front.  But again, it's all mot until you get actual flight time for the comparison.

[Cobra516]

I don't know if it is or not, seeing as how I've never flown an actual Hornet.  I might remind you that you haven't either.  Go find a Hornet pilot with real flight time and ask him how the sim compares to the real thing.

Prove it.  I think tripling the approach speed in a real life situation may make up for the Hornet having an extra wheel up front.  But again, it's all mot until you get actual flight time for the comparison.

I have talked to Hornet pilots that have flown Janes F/A-18 and they said that the game was harder to land than the real airplane   They said that what you have to do to land the game is exactly what you do in the jet, they explained that landing a Hornet on a runway is really not a hard thing to do.

When you touchdown in a Hornet, it doesn't try to swap ends with you, it won't bounce if you hit a little too hard, and it isn't nearly as affected by wind as a Super Cub.  After touchdown it wants to continue tracking straight down the runway, you're not dancing all over the rudder pedals to try and keep the tail from coming around - the Cub will get away from you much quicker than a Hornet.

Hey, the thread title says "real pilots need not bother" - woops - sorry about that! 

[Dago]

This thread is way to funny. A guy trained to fly a Hornet will find landing a Hornet easy, and if he has no experience landing a sim plane, he will find that hard.

Being a sim pilot does not mean you can land a real jet.  Or warbird.  Or Cessna 150.

Forget the fantasy, if you haven't flown a real jet, you do not understand all involved.

Also, because you play Guitar Hero, you are not a rock star, and can't play FreeBird on a guitar.

Because you play Code of Honor, you are not a Ranger or Delta Force member.

Because you play driving games, you would not be able to drive in a NASCAR race.  (you would die)

[Cobra516]

It is a pretty good thread, I'm glad I could keep it going! 

[Serenity]

Well it is a fantasy and unlikely to ever happen. But my blood runs cold at the thought of Serenity's scenario of two MSFS 'pilots' up front.

Yeah, lol, It PROBABLY won't end well, but I would bet dollars to donuts it has a better chance of ending well than two guys with NO MSFS OR RL experience, and it has a one-million-percent chance of ending better than no-one at the controls. I'm not saying it would be easy, or even that it would be guaranteed to work. But it would certainly help having SOME kind of experience.

[Marauding Conan]

This question comes up every now and then and invariably some Microsoft pilot stands up and tell us he can handle it.    The author of hte original article comes across as an arrogant ass. Despite all his supposed expertise he makes this remark: . Making a stupid comment like that makes we wonder about the rest of his story.

Like Cougar, I laughed my bellybutton off at Cobra516's comment about landings.  No, landing an airplane isn't magical, it takes skill, training and practice. But even most experienced pilot screws up from time to time.

The fact that you flew a 737 sim  aged 14 proves nothing. The fact that you have thousands of Microsoft hours counts for nothing because the day you find yourself up there in the real thing, alone, scared and overwhelmed will be the day you realise you know nothing about flying an airliner. Landing any aircraft from a set up approach isn't that difficult. The real issue to getting the approach right as any pilot will tell you.

Let's set up a scenario, it's all happened and you approach the flight deck, past the stricken bodies of the crew. You sit down, heart pounding and take in the situation. You establish you're at FL370, you can see your speed and your heading. Now what? Where are you for one thing. You know you need to descend, you know you need to change heading to route to a suitable airport. Once you manage to descend you need to configure for landing. You need to know when you lower flaps, what speed to use on the approach. What if the weather is bad, it's at night, there's turbulence, crosswinds. What if the aircraft you're in, doesn't resemble the flight sim you were playing with. Which switch, does what? What is that alarm going off in your ear? It's an utter nightmare.

Now I'm actually a working commercial pilot with several hundred hours and I have 'played' with MS flight sim. In the aircraft I normally fly. I have occasionally found myself in a situation where a little tension fills the air, in cloud, with turbulence with the main Artificial Horizon and stand by AH having an argument as to which is correct and the stall warning chirping away. Your ears tell you one thing, your eyes another and the disorientation begins to kick in. You don't get that in MS FSX.  Never mind your mythical 737, could you take over if I fainted in fright?

No we'd both die, although the skydivers would probably get out.

The reality is that in all probability even a fairly experienced but non airline pilot would probably scatter wreckage all over the airport even if they managed to get that far. The Microsoft ace would do the same thing only sooner.

It's all a Walter Mitty fantasy. Having a fun day out in a 'real' sim is not the same as finding yourself actually sitting in a hurtling piece of metal at high altitude.

But it's fun to speculate, Interestingly it has never happened in reality. The closest was the Helios flight in Greece. With both pilots unconscious, the steward who happened to be a commercial pilot actually got into the cockpit too late after the aircraft ran out of fuel. It was too late and we'll never know if he would have managed to land it safely. But I wouldn't have bet on it.

Maybe someone should hire out a sim and ask for a random flight to be set up and then be dumped into the Captain's seat and left completely alone except for someone pretending to be ATC.

I agree with him totally. Having flight time myself (on Cessnas) and in flight simulators, and knowing the difference between them, I can only hope that I am never stuck on the position to replace the professional pilot sitting at the front.

[Treize69]

The heck with landing it, could you get it to take off from a conveyor belt?

G,D,R

[cpxxx]

I wasn't going to return to this thread. But I came across this and thought it appropriate. First ever flight in a Boeing 757. Sorry it's a bit long.

I sat in the right seat for the first time on the ramp at Manchester. Not only did I sit there, but I took control once the Captain had taxied us onto RWY24L............
"You have control"
"I have control" of an 85 tonne 757.
"JMC757T, the surface wind is 230/5, you are clear take off RWY24L"
I call for 1.2EPR to be set, releasing the toe brakes. The captain calls "stabilised" and I reach to press the 'EPR button' on the Mode Control Panel. The auto throttle spools the engines up to the derated take off power and we start to roll. Off we go accelerating to V1, Vr and I pull back on the column at 2.5degees/sec, the nose wheel lifts, and then the mains.......I am flying a 757!!!!!!! Boy does it go with no passengers on board! We're climbing at 4000ft/min, on up to FL210 and off to Prestwick for some circuits! Wow, this is just the best.

No time to think about it at Prestwick as we go straight into the first circuit from a touch and go. Whoops, thousand feet, lower the nose, pull back the power, follow the noise abatement and start the crosswind leg. Start the level off in the turn with the flaps retracted to ‘flap 5’ and the speed at vref+40kts. Well that’s the theory. I was 200ft above circuit altitude and 20kts too quick and fighting against the old pitch/power couple! Just about got it sorted as we went abeam the downwind threshold and then it was time for gear and flap 20 and start the watch. Turn base to final at 45secs +/-wind correction, take flap 30 and get on down the hill at 700fpm. Roll out on finals and there you are, right of centreline and with 4 whites! Get it sorted and this one’s a full stop, landed off the centreline but didn’t crunch the mains on, relaxed the back pressure like in light a/c and thought the nose wheel was going to come through the floor and join us it hit so hard! Hmmmn, must remember that next time round. All in all did my six landings and improved with each of them to the point that I was more than chuffed with the days work. The training captain gave me some praise and the Chief Pilot (who was on the jumpseat ‘signing off’ the training captain, just to add a little more pressure!) penned his words of wisdom in my training file. He was very complimentary and I felt this just capped things off as far as I was concerned. I left the cockpit as the next lamb went to the altar and spent the rest of the flight familiarising myself with the forward galley!

Interesting, But this was no Microsoft pilot or someone who flew Cessna 172s. This guy had at least a thousand hours, had just finished a couple of months training on the 757, 3 weeks of which were on a full motion simulator, spending four hours a day in the sim, with six hours a day preparation. He found his first real flight tough going as you can read.

Do you still think you can get an airliner down in one piece on your own?

[Reschke]

Funny story to add to this one for a possible hijack...oh well.

When my wife and I lived in Mobile, AL in our apartment section our neighbors were as follows.

Across the breezeway Coast Guard instructor helo pilot. Down the breezeway was another Coast Guard guy who worked in the simulator areas setting up and organizing times for the HU-25 "Guardian", HH-60 "Jayhawk" and the H-65 "Dolphin" full motion simulators they used at ATC Mobile. The guy who worked in the simulator group had a stripper for a wife and one of their good friends who lived under us was another stripper who was from the same area my wife grew up in...anyway...Both strippers worked nights and the pilot and the simulator guy would get me flight time in all of the different sim units on base. This was in 1997 when you could pretty much walk onto any military installation with just a wave through if they knew the person with you.

Any way I probably got around 30 hours or so of Jayhawk simulator time and 15-20 each of the Dolphin and Guardian time. For the Guardian he would setup a full run where you would take off from Mobile and fly west to just outside of Houston and then back east to Fort Walton and then back to Mobile and land. For me that was a pretty fun setup but I was way out of my level of experience from only playing combat flight sims up to that point.

Back on target though...I would raise my hand and say that I would give it a shot but for everyone to be prepared since we were most likely going to die anyway with or without my help. With my help they would just be there faster.

[dunnrite]

[cpxxx]

Yup, no pilots on board that day.

[Wingnutt]

still on concrete, no perks lost.