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If you want to add a new dimension to your flightsimming, try doing it with somebody sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, watching everything you do. For me, until recently, flight simming has always been a solitary pursuit. But a chance meeting with "a friend in the business", led to a unique opportunity for me to merge my flight simming fantasies with reality.
It began a week ago, when a friend of mine dropped in to return an airline magazine. He is ex-Qantas management, and even now in his retirement he sometimes gets to ride in the jumpseat, even during landings. (Which is more than I've ever done.)
He had never seen a PC simulator in action before, so I offered to take him on a short ATC controlled virtual flight from Canberra to Sydney; a trip he has done many times for real. I got him to write down the ground, tower, departure and approach frequencies as they were called out, just to give him something to do.
Well, considering that I would normally have difficulty just reverse-parking a car with somebody watching me, I made no major goofs until we were on the final approach into runway 34L. That was when I suddenly heard a callout from the panel that I had never heard before: TOO LOW...GEAR!
Yes, I had forgotten to put the gear down. I quickly attended to that small matter and we landed safely. I think that he was impressed by the realism of the Microsoft simulator, if not by my flying skills. But that's not the end of the story.
You see, when he said goodbye, he took with him with him a copy of an account of my 5 DAYS CONTINOUS FULL TIME FLIGHTSIMMING adventure. (Is this some kind of record?) A few days later, after plowing through all 12 pages, he rang me. First of all he said that he got a few laughs from reading about my adventure, then he asked me if I would like to visit the flight deck of a 767-300 on Tuesday evening? (No, I would hate that).
So, last night, there I was, out at the international terminal with a small group of aeroclub members, ready for the grand tour. Our plane was easy to find as it was the only one parked there. (Perth airport is such a busy place).
We were invited into the cockpit three at a time and had all our questions answered by a Qantas engineer, whose job it was to enter all the route information into the flight management computer. He explained that the plane would be loaded with more than 130,000 lbs of fuel for its non-stop flight to Tokyo that night.
So what was it like, sitting there in the captain’s seat? Well it wasn’t that great. It was fantastic! The instrument layout was not at all overwhelming, in fact it all looked terribly familiar to me as I’m sure it would be for most flight simmers.
Later on, we were escorted outside for a close-up look at the exterior of the plane. When you’re standing right under the fuselage, a 767 looks vast! We had to stand on a ladder to get up inside the equipment bay to see all the plane’s computers. We saw the huge engines up close and looked inside the landing gear bays. The cargo bays were about to be filled with live Western Australian lobsters, which would make up for the fact that QF 79 would be departing with the passenger compartment only half filled.
VH-OGC will no doubt be pensioned off sometime during the next four years as part of Qantas’s new aircraft acquisition program. It will be replaced by an A330. If the opportunity arises, you can bet that I’ll be first in line to go and check it out.
Sincerely,
Bill Smith / Perth, Western Australia
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