Microsoft FSX is pretty impressive and you can set it to be almost as real as you want to. The FAA is approving it for more and more sim training lessons. If you pair it with a killer video card and a large monitor or three, it will look aesthetically better than the simulator on the show and have about as many options.
I have real flight time as well as lot of PC Sim time. I still believe that I could land at least a business jet if I had to and the show backed that up.
I have nerd-girl crushes on the entire younger team of mythbusters, and Jamie. Adam…somehow he fails to do anything at all for me in that way–though I think he’d be fun to hang around with. I’ll have to watch this episode Saturday.
There’s a flight sim for the PS2? What’s the full name of the game? Google isn’t helping today.
OMG d00d shez totally into u!!!
I don’t actually know if there is or not. I was referring to the movie “Snakes on a Plane.” One of the guys who hangs out with the rapper claims he has over 700 hours of flight experience and volunteers to land the plane after the snakes have killed off the flight crew. Once he’s in the pilot’s seat, he reveals all his experience has been from playing a flight sim game on his PS2.
Why? You both have red-eye.
Yes, I am jealous. No, I’m not just jealous.
“It’s like flying a really big Pinto!”
Who’s that chick with Kenny Rogers?
d&r!
They took pains, it seemed to me, to point out that this never happened with a commercial liner. Anybody have any info on if it ever happened with a private plane, either jet or propeller driven?
Your granddaughter is adorable!
I once tried going for maximum realism.
Lost my luggage.
I have a pilot’s license and have logged about 70 hours in a Cessna 172. At the arcade in the local mall is a 747 simulator so I gave landing it a try. I killed everyone on the plane 4 times. The problem is the delayed reaction from the controls and since I seriously doubt anyone without experience could safetly land even a small plane the myth is already busted for me. No amount of help from the tower is going to change the fact that you can’t ‘feel’ it. It would be like telling a child how to ride a bike and expecting them not to fall the first time.
Fairly often, actually. General Aviation pilots run into trouble probably more often than commercial pilots do as they’re alone, rather than a member of a flight crew and don’t go through the rigorous medical exams required of commercial pilots. As a result, there’s a statistically significant number of GA pilots that suffer heart attacks, strokes or similar events while flying.
Quite a few flight schools offer “pinch hitter” courses for spouses and friends of people who own or frequently fly General Aviation planes. Just the basics of how to use the radio and how to put the plane down safely - no promises that the plane will still be pretty or even re-usable, but the humans inside will have a good chance of survival.
Old pilots’ saying - a good landing is any one you can walk away from. A really good landing is one you walk away from and the airplane is still usable.
Yes, there was a story about ten years ago in New England. It was a typical small plane. The pilot died at the controls and the non-pilot passenger landed safely. I am not sure if the story is on the web but it was a pretty big mass media story at the time. It isn’t that surprising. I landed 3 times during my first flying lesson. The first time was 30 minutes into it and the instructor offered little help.
I successfully flew a tow on my second flight lesson on a glider, and successfully did the landing pattern and final approach on my third (instructor did the actual touchdown, but from where he took over, I could have at least survived the crash if not landed the plane). My instructor always insisted I was a natural, but I pin my success on hours of PC flight sims.
I have never flown a motorized plane, but I am sure that the bigger the airplane, the easier it is to fly for someone who is being coached.
At any rate, the whole sky diving “myths” were total crap. Anyone who knows someone who skydives, let alone anyone who has actually done at least a single tandem dive knew the answer to all those.
All glory to the PlayStation!
I watched some of the airplane show. I thought it was interesting that it was pointed out that although it is a common cliché in movies, there has been no actual case of a non-pilot being talked into landing a plane by air traffic control due to an incident incapacitating the pilot. I also thought Jamie’s solo flight was unintentionally funny- he couldn’t find the switch for the landing gear, and ended up on the tarmac with the nose on the ground and the rest of the plane pointing skyward.
Commasense, you forgot your photo credit- Adam Savage took that one, right?
Something similar happened to me. On my first lesson, the instructor would say something like “Climb to 3000 feet, turn to 180 with no more than 30 degrees bank”. The first time I tried that he said, “You mess around with flight simulators don’t you?” I took it as a complement at the moment but it wasn’t exactly. I was flying by instruments and that isn’t good for a pilot going for a visual rating. He had to keep reminding me to actually look outside the plane and not the instrument panel. I got another instructor later and the same thing happened. If you want unnatural precision flying by the numbers from a non-pro, I am your guy. Unfortunately, VFR flying isn’t always about pegging instrument needles perfectly and there is traffic to contend with outside. Still, I learned to fly by the numbers from a PC sim and that translated directly to a real aircraft.
I think PC flight sims don’t get enough respect around here. Microsoft Flight Simulator X is an incredible tool even down to the autopilot and GPS knobs. Most people treat it a little like a toy but a disciplined person can use it as the equivalent of a multi-million dollar simulator and the FAA is starting to recognize that. The level of detail it has now for planes, airports, flight planning and ATC is absurd for a $70 piece of consumer software.
I’m not a pilot, but I’ve heard that often novice students and even first-time students are given the opportunity to land small planes. If you understand how planes work and what controls do, and you’re in good conditions, I don’t see why landing something like a 172 would be very difficult.
I think the difficulty of piloting tends to be played up by pilots because they want to feel as though they’re part of some exclusive club based on skills that the average person can’t achieve. Which isn’t to say it’s not a skill - it is - but I think it’s overplaying the difficulty by far to say that someone with no flight experience couldn’t land a 172 type plane if they otherwise understood the principles of flight (simulator time, whatever).
I doubt this. The bigger the plane, the less responsive it is. There’s more momentum involved. The plane’s reactions to your control movement is more delayed and so you have to plan ahead more… it’s more likely to induce overcorrection, it’d be less likely to be tolerant of extreme manuevers (I’m guessing, I’m not sure how 737 airframes would hold up compared to a 172 for example), and require more touch upon landing because of the momentum. The instrumentation and flight controls are more complex too.
I don’t have a pilots license. I have never been at the controls of a plane. I have quite a few hours of Intellivision time. I do however understand the principles of flight.
Anyway my company hired a new guy who had worked for Fairchild Aviation. They had a training school and flight simulator for this bad boy about a mile from my office.
One day our new hire popped into my office and asked if I wanted some sim time. Not only was my answer yes, it was hell yes.
So off we went.
I got the full tour of the facility. The instructor described the sim as a 12 million dollar video game.
I got to strap in and fly it. I did four take offs and four landings. I was given no coaching other then a few basic item like how to trim the bird. (push both switches, not just one)
Taking off is easy. Flying is easy. Landing is hard.
On the first landing they would have used a dust pan to pick up the pieces. At one point I think I saw the runway above me. :eek:
The second landing was better in that it would have required heavy equipment to get the pieces off the runway. That and the runway stayed below me the entire time.
The third time some of us might have lived. I will call this a good landing.
On the fourth landing the instructor put me in fog. I used the ILS in the glass cockpit and flew the plane right down to the ground. We were in full motion, and it was smooth. The instructor told me that I did better in fog then some of the pilot trainees he sees. 
So if we run out of pilots, either give me three tries, or some fog and we are golden. 
That’s not really the case. Large commercial planes (and small commuters) are extremely stable. Responsiveness and stability are diametrically opposed concepts and a very stable plane is precisely the type that a beginner could manage. Because it’s nominally stable it’s apt to almost land itself if you manage the throttle properly and are in the proper approach vector because the plane is almost stuck in level flight. A pilot would almost have to break his arms to “over correct” or make anything like an “extreme maneuver”, the controls simply won’t allow any type of maneuver that would strain the airframe short of a nosedive.
The reason landing a large plane would be more challenging, aside from the complexity of the computer and nav systems, is because it has a relatively high landing speed. That high landing speed requires a narrower window for the proper approach speeds and AOA. Momentum really has nothing to do with that landing speed either, the plane has to travel at a high speed to avoid a stall. Momentum only really comes into play during braking when the plane is already on the ground.
A pilot could very easily make a untrained landing with good instruction so long as the plane is in good working order and they are calm. The reason I believe this is because the ATC could always instruct the pilot to abort any landing attempt if they are outside the proper glide path. Aborting a landing and doing a go-round is extremely simple so one would assume that the novice could simply keep retrying the approach until they finally find the right speed and altitude combination. Once they get into that profile and have it properly trimmed the plane is essentially landed.