I’ve been watching the new series of Air Crash Investigation on TV. What a great documentary series it is. It covers tragic events of course, but it also shows the amazing amounts of effort that go into making air travel as safe as it can be. For the virtual pilot it also offers a wealth of detail on how aircraft, airport and ATC systems work and of course, when pilot error is involved, what not to do.
In fact, one of the things I find FSFlyingSchool helps bring to the simulation, with its random and loose wire failures, is the ever present danger of overlooking something simple which has gone wrong, especially if the instructor has been configured so as not to draw the pilot’s attention to failures. This can lead to some scary situations and when under stress, (not like a real flight, but at least you want to get that bird down safely), even simulator pilots can take the wrong emergency actions which makes a bad situation worse.
I mention this because in my earlier simming days I once had a fuel tank problem in a heavy and, duh, decided that the thing to do was apply maximum power and trim the rudder to compensate. In other words I had confused loss of a tank’s fuel with loss of an engine. This did a great job of making a bad situation considerably worse, but it’s just the sort of thing that can happen when you panic. Yes – this is why we have emergency procedures…
