5 Mistakes Flight Simmers Make

DISCLAIMER: The following tips apply to Microsoft Flight Simulator, not real life. If you are a real life pilot feel free to correct any mistakes!

1. Extending spoilers on a jet before touchdown. If this is done too close to the ground, it often results in the plane crashing because of a too high descent rate, if realism settings are on hard.

2. Landing on all 3 wheels.

3. Trying to flare the 747 too much on landing. The 747 can be put on the ground with a fairly flat attitude. Simmers flying the Cessna 172 and moving onto something like the 747 often have the tendency to flare too much. Three degrees nose-up on landing is often sufficient. This applies to other jets but is very noticeable in the 747. Remember that the whole point of flaring a plane is to reduce the rate of descent. Don't flare just for the sake of it. If in doubt check your VSI and see what the rate of descent is.

4. Over correcting for crosswind landing. Planes will tend to point their noses into the direction of the wind anyway.

5. Using the Approach Hold as Autoland. The approach hold is not supposed to autoland the plane. It crashes your plane directly into the ground. You need to disconnect it before landing.

FSX Boeing 747 KLAX Stormy Weather Landing

Me attempting to land a Qantas Boeing 747 at KLAX in Flight Simulator X in stormy weather. The 747 sure is difficult to handle, and it's been likened to a cruise ship. But I have a feeling that manually landing a 747 is a lot harder than docking a cruise ship!

Watch as I battle rain and wind in an attempt to get this beast down on the ground :-)



EDIT: It appears that the video quality is so poor you can't see the rain and the wetness of the runway. Next time I'll try to create a higher quality video. The problem is that my Internet connection is slow so I have to make the files smaller in order to get it uploaded faster

HOW TO: Record Your Best Flight Sim Moments

As the saying goes, "If your friends don't see it, it didn't happen". You probably don't want to miss out on an opportunity to show your friends the awesome landing you made in the 747 despite the massive crosswind. The best way to do is it to record your landing using a screen capture tool, and then upload it to YouTube.

Here's the how-to:

1. Download FRAPS. It's a screen capture tool made for games. You can download the demo but it limits you to a 30 second recording plus a watermark is stamped onto the video. I highly recommend you grab the full version. I've also tried alternative freeware products, but FRAPS is the only tool I've been happy with. Trust me, save yourself the trouble and just buy FRAPS ;-) Note I am in no way affliated to the company! If you are not willing to spend the money, then you can Google "FRAPS alternatives".

2. When you install and run FRAPS click on the Movies tab. You will see that the hotkey is set to F9. This is no good because F9 changes the view in Flight Simulator X. I just changed it to 9.

3. Run Flight Simulator X and start a flight. Press 9 to start recording and press it again to stop it. You can start and stop recording at any time. The files will be saved to C:\Fraps

4. You will notice that even a few minutes of recording will give you a very large file size. You're not going to be able to upload that to YouTube! But fear not. See the next step.

5. Download Any Video Converter Free Edition. Yeah it's free. Install it and run it. This is what you will use to compress your file.

6. In Any Video Converter, Click the button "Add Video" and find the video that FRAPS created (by default it will be in C:\Fraps).

7. On the top right of the window there is a dropdown menu. Click on it and select "Customized AVI movie". You can also experiment with the other file types if you want.

8. Now click "Convert". Wait till it finishes.

9. In the left pane click on "Common Used Video Formats". You should see your converted file there. Right click on it and click "Open File Location". And there's your file! It should be much smaller now and ready to upload to YouTube!

FSX: Boeing 747 Hairy ILS Approach Into Singapore

This video was captured on the Monsoon Approach mission in Flight Simulator X. The realism settings were set to hard of course! This is the final 6 minutes of the approach. If you get bored of nothing happening you can fastforward to near the end.

I do a crappy landing. I put the throttles back to idle too early, then yanked them up suddenly when the "pull up" warning sounded. As I went over the threshold noted that the vertical speed was way too high in the negatives. Over -600 feet/min might cause some structural damage (and pissed off passengers?) in a real plane*, but you probably don't need a number this high to constitute a "hard landing". With that in mind I flared about 5 degrees nose up (I think this a pretty significant angle) and kept the power up. The plane ended up stubbornly floating and floating before touching down pretty far from the threshold. Damn, not a pretty landing.

It seems like I need a lot more practice on the 747! I'm much more used to the 737-800 and A321, which are much easier to handle than the 747. Also the default 747 that comes with FSX doesn't have a radar altimeter so it's hard to know when to flare. After all, flight simmers don't get the sense of "3D" that real pilots get so it's difficult to tell how far off the ground the plane is while landing.

There was a moderate to heavy crosswind - it's a monsoon after all.



* I'm not sure how accurate this number is. From what I've read on the Internet that's my rough guess. Yes it's just a guess - don't take it for a fact. I've also read that the maximum landing vertical speed depends also on the aircraft type and its weight. I need to do more research on this topic. Perhaps this will be one of my upcoming posts in a few weeks time. Oh I just remembered - in the FSX add-on FS Passengers, anything over -600 feet on touch down in a 747 results in a blown tire and terrified passengers, and you get rewarded with a "nice" landing if it's around
-200 to -250 feet per second (not sure of the exact range). However that's not a scientific source of info of course!

Flight Sim X: Landing With A Rudder Failure In Boeing 737-800 Part I

I decided I needed a challenge so I took off on the Boeing 737-800 in Flight Simulator X and levelled off at a few thousand feet. Then I made the rudder fail - FSX simulated the rudder being jammed while deflected in the full right position. Pretty soon I started to lose directional control of the plane.


All of a sudden I realised that the plane’s nose was pointed at roughly a 45 degree offset to the direction of travel! I suppose I could have tried to use the trim to control the plane but too bad I didn't know the shortcut key for that, and I had another idea anyway.

Yep you're right - I began to use the throttles to control the direction of the plane by manipulating each one independently. I was in the virtual cockpit view, and I had one hand on the joystick, and another hand on the mouse trying to change the power settings by dragging on the "throttle handles".


After doing this for a while, I did actually manage to land it without crashing, albeit not on a runway. The angle I landed at was so ridiculous it would probably not have been possible in real life.

In Part II of this post I’m going to post up a video of another attempt at landing without the rudder.

Must Have Features In The Next Flight Simulator

Microsoft recently announced that it has halted development of the Flight Simulator franchise. It's hard to comprehend the quality and mind-boggling scope of the product, and also the amount of work that has been poured in by developers over the last 25 years. It's nothing short of amazing. And to top it off it sells at such an unbelievably cheap price.

However, X-Plane is still actively in development (I have yet to try it out yet, but I will), as is the open source Flight Gear. Probably other high quality flight sims will appear in the future. Anyway, the following are some features that I'd like to see in flight sims in the future. For sure, some of the features I mention probably already exist in X-Plane and add-ons but I'm just not aware of them. Nonetheless, here are the features that I'd love to see:

Immersion Features
There should be moderate to violent screen shaking on landing depending on touchdown vertical speed. Because flight simmers can’t actually feel the force of the landing, this can add significantly to immersion. Slightly exaggerated screen shaking during takeoff and landing run to simulate the bumps on the runway would also help.

I'd like to see graphically damageable aircraft (this was available in Flight Unlimited II, released in 1997). Graphical damage modelling has never been a priority in Microsoft's Flight Simulator franchise After all, the purpose of a flight sim is to simulate flight, not to simulate crashing. However, this feature would add to the immersion. If anybody has played IL-2 Sturmovik (a World War II combat flight sim), you may appreciate things like how stressing out the aircraft in a dive pulls the wings off, but the simulation keeps running. In IL-2 Sturmovik the landing gear and gear doors come flying off the aircraft if you try to extend the gears when going overspeed.

World & Environment
Keep the scope smaller. Focus only on a part of the world. This allows more time to get the other priorities in order. E.g. just focus on the United States, or even just a part of it. Of course you may disagree :-)

Things like bird strikes - I believe X-Plane already has this feature - and the effect of other foreign material - e.g. ash - entering the engines would be nice.

Rain should form droplets on the windshield (this was available in Flight Unlimited II, released in 1997). Often it’s the tiniest things that add immense amounts of immersion.

Graphics
What I really want so see is the "mirage" effect behind the engines.

Cockpit and Instrumentation
A weather radar would be an awesome addition to the cockpit. Simulating smoke in the cockpit would also be a welcome feature, and would add to the immersion. Simulating the stick shaker on the airliners too, would be nice.

ATC
I'd like to be able to declare emergencies.

System Failures
Doing long flights in any flight simulator can get tedious, and often you want to simulate system failures to challenge your flying skills. FSX has a flexible way for you to organize system failures, but it could be improved upon. One weakness is that you know when the failures are going to come and the nature of those failures. It would be good if the player had an extra option to set the % chance of a failure happening on a flight. Futhuremore, failures like cabin depressuration should also be modelled, along with simulating hypoxia with blurriness of vision and the enventual loss of conciousness. If you think that's too far fetched, you should keep reading for more far fetchedness ...

Eearning Awards
"I don't need no validation from the computer game", you might say, but still, earning awards for your flying can be a nice touch, if not a big touch. FSX already has an awards system but I'd like to see it expanded on. It should also be possible to go online and show off your awards to other flight simmers.

Next-Gen Flight Sim Features
There's no harm in getting creative, right? Who says a flight sim has to be limited to you sitting in the cockpit? That's just limiting the possibilities. Let's envision what the flight sim genre could be.

It'd be awesome if the pilot could stand up and walk around the aircraft - assuming we're in an airliner. Perhaps, not only can you walk around the cabin, you can also talk to the passengers and crew in the cabin. You should also be able to brief the crew in emergencies. This would happen via some sort of menu system not unlike in a role-playing game.

In some airliners there's a trapdoor in the cockpit floor that you can climb into. Access to that would be nice. To be honest I don't know what's down there but it'd be cool nevertheless.

There is also a fire extinguisher in the cabin ... you know what I'm thinking. I want to be able to pick it up and use it in emergency scenarios.

Maybe some people think that's too far fetched, but I certainly don't!

Programmer API
The programmer API should be well documented and have functions that are self explanatory, and allow developers lots of flexibility to do what they want. It would be good if high-level scripting languages such as Python could be used to very complex create add-ons, in addition to the low level C++.

Conclusion
And that was my 2 cents!

FSX: Boeing 737-800 Vs Airbus A321 Showdown!

This is a light-hearted comparison of the two FSX aircraft. Boeing or Airbus? Whose plane reigns supreme? Yeah I so stole that line from Iron Chef.

Please note that this is a comparison of the virtual aircraft as they are modeled in Flight Simulator X, and not the real aircraft themselves.

	FSX Boeing 737-800	FSX Airbus A321
Cruise speed	Mach 0.785	Mach 0.81
Power plant	Two GE CFM56-7 Wikipedia: Rated with takeoff thrust from 18,500 to 27,300 lbf	Two CFM56-5B3 high-bypass turbofans Wikipedia: The thrust range is between 22,000 to 33,000 lbf
Handling	8/10 Handling is pretty nice, can’t say it’s perfect. It's not difficult to land the plane in significant crosswind scenarios. You have full control of the rudder (as opposed to the the A321), so you have a good deal of flexibility in terms of what technique(s) you'd like to employ for the crosswind landing. Some x-wind techniques: http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Crosswind_landing	6/10 Extremely slow to respond to input, unless SEC** is switched off in which case the controls feel way too sensitive. On landing, the transition to below 100 feet will automatically deactivate the SEC so you get more control. Control of the rudder is not possible with the SEC switched on (I believe it's automatic). Surprisingly it’s very easy to land the plane in significant crosswinds even without control over the rudder - perhaps even easier than the 737 or roughly the same. But remember you do get total control below 100 feet so you straighten out.
Interior Styling	Drab. Needs some fake mahogany.	Drab. Needs some fake mahogany.
Air condition	Yes, as standard	Yes, as standard
Autopilot	9/10  Easy to understand and use.	7/10 Easy to understand and use. However I don’t like the dial/push combo buttons (the ones you can turn and also depress). In addition, having those combo style buttons and rectangle push buttons mixed together garners a feeling of inconsistency.
Control type	Yoke.	Sidestick. There's nothing wrong with it but I’m more for the style of the traditional yoke.
Panel & Instrumentation	8/10 A nice feature I like is that the airspeed indicatordynamically displays the never exceed airspeed range, and also the stall range. By dynamic I mean the ranges are automatically altered at different altitudes.  One thing I don’t like is how in one of the primary LCD display modes, the green arrow graphically depicting the direction of the wind is not shown, but only numbers are.  I like the panel, it looks and works nicely.	6/10 The primary LCD-displays seem smaller than the 737.  I’d prefer a numerical readout of the vertical speed which the 737 has – it’s easier to read.  Also the radar altimeter displays numbers in a bright green colour making it difficult to read. And what’s with all the unfilled space on the panel? All that space could be for larger standby instruments or something else.  Overall good, but I think the layout of the 737 is nicer.
Safety features	8/10 GPWS, seatbelts . No alpha floor protection on this baby, as the A321 has.	8/10 Angle of attack protection*, Spoiler/Elevator Controls (SEC)**, GPWS, seatbelts
Computer technology	6/10 All the standard fly-by-wire stuff. Oh yeah and GPS comes as standard. A weather radar would be nice eh?	8/10 This baby’s packed with tech! The flight computer system even prevents the pilot from stalling the plane. It also prevents you from doing crazy things like intentionally or unintentionally turning the plane upside down or placing it into a steep dive. Pity it can’t make coffee or do the tax!
Alloy wheels	No	No
Exterior Styling	9/10 Nice nose and eyebrows. The big winglets are sexy, and the flattened undersides of the engine nacelles are uniquely beautiful. Centre landing gears are exposed even when retracted, looks a bit dirty from below.	8/10 Nice nose, but I prefer the sharper look of the 737. Landing gears are all covered up nicely when retracted.
Fuel consumption	A lot more than your truck	A lot more than your truck
Tank size	6,875 U.S. gallons (3,060 nm)	6,260 U.S. gallons (2,454 nm)
Price	Too much	Too much

*Available when SEC is on
** SEC is part of the A321’s Flight Control System (FCS)

Conclusion

I’m going to give the trophy to the Flight Simulator X’s Boeing 737-800. The panel and instrumentation and the handling were the main reasons for it coming out on top, but the Airbus A321 is pretty cool too and it’s growing on me!