Mike Ray's Airline Pilot Simulator Checkride Manuals

By Andrew Herd (19 November 2006)

ost simmers who have done more than just goof around in the default Cessnas must have tried their hand at the Boeings and then bought something like the Wilco 737 Pilot in Command, or the Level-D 767 and thought, 'Hey, there's a bit more to this flying planes thing than I thought, how come Microsoft left out all these switches I can see up front?' After the initial shock of discovering that modern airliner cockpits are several dozen times more complicated than the default planes would have us believe, I guess that many go on to spend many happy hours fooling around, finding out what does what on the panel, and then try their hand at taking the plane from cold and dark through engine starts and IRS alignments... and all the joys of programming the flight management computers and working out how the thrust management system works and then come those long flights that extend into the small hours. Around that stage, the beginnings of a question starts to form, the question being, 'Okay, so I have figured out how to fly this sim okay, but I wonder how real world pilots do it?' Depending on your personality, the passage of time can make that question grow from a whisper into a shout, as the realization dawns that there must be procedures which trigger airline pilots to do certain things at particular times and that the checklists supplied with even the best addons leave gaps that demand answers.

One way around the problem is to get one of the FS2Crew addons, which provide you with a virtual co-pilot who goes through the checklists with you and reminds you of what to do at each stage during a flight. I reviewed the ATR edition if you want to see how these products work and the Pilot Shop has a range of FS2Crew products covering everything from the default 737 to the PMDG 737 NG and even the new FSX default 747 - but some simmers are still going to be left wanting something more, not least because they will have realized that once you have invested in a product as complicated as the ones I have mentioned, you are selling yourself short if you don't exploit its capacities to the limit. And that is where Mike Ray's Checkride Manuals come in.

Checkrides are a key part of aviation safety, having become commonplace after the end of World War II, although the system didn't become standardised for many years after that. In the early days, if you could fly one plane, it was assumed that you could fly 'em all and in the absence of any kind of documentation, pilots worked out how to stay aloft and alive by trial and error; but as aircraft became more complicated and commercial aviation expanded, the old ad hoc process of 'see one, do one, teach one' clashed with the increasing pressure to make flying safer. Before the war, it was accepted that flying anywhere involved taking risks - to give an example, at least one Imperial Airways flight was brought down by Bedouin firing antique rifles from camel back - but by 1945 expectations had totally changed. One of the things that triggered this change was the advent of transatlantic flights in landplanes that had no chance of surviving if they came down in mid ocean; the idea that this might happen due to pilot error simply wasn't acceptable and so training programs had to be altered to fit. Another big driving factor was the coming of the jet age, which exposed pilots to much more complex aircraft, with many more instruments and cockpit environments demanding enough to mean that it was no longer possible for one pilot to be expected to fly several different planes. At that moment, passing type specific tests became the key to getting and keeping a place in the cockpit - and so the checkride was born and with it came a new breed of training captains, recognised as having the ultimate level of experience on their type and given the responsibility to ensure that other flight crew measured up to it.

One of the challenges of flying modern jet airliners is that the average flight is routine to the point of boredom as far as the pilots are concerned, but has the potential for any one of hundreds of different systems to go wrong (out of interest, it has emerged recently that there have been cases where pilots have gone to sleep in mid-flight because of lack of stimulation and that airliners are increasingly being fitted with warning buzzers that sound if no activity is detected in the cockpit for more than a certain period of time). So one of the jobs of the person in charge of a checkride is to ensure that pilots are current enough with the aircraft they fly, or are intending to fly, and that they can cope with in-flight emergencies that occur during high workload situations. The best way of exposing pilots to these is to use - guess what - a simulator, because jets are expensive things to operate and replace if things go wrong. Needless to say, airlines don't sit their pilots down in front of a copy of FSX, but the principles of how high end simulators work aren't a million miles away from the one we know and love, and many trainee ATPLs use Flight Simulator addons to rehearse for the awful moment when they have to put their knowledge to the test.

Mike Ray's take on the checkride was a breath of fresh air when his first book was published half a dozen years ago. There was some stuff around on the subject prior to 2000, but you had to be dedicated to read it, concentrated page after page dealing with obscure sub-systems and panel conditions that sapped the will of the average individual to live; unless of course, your salary depended on knowing it. In the absence of anything better, most pilots got by by reading the official flight manual, but the trouble with that sort of document is that it covers absolutely everything there is to know about a plane, yet does not incorporate anything in the FAA required operational guidelines, or company standard operational procedures, so when an experienced EAL captain like Mike published a compact book covering the main gotchas, it became an instant best seller, largely because just about everything about the book was right, all the way down to the use of heavyweight paper and a strong spiral binding. Mike has been busy revising and updating his manuals ever since, my Boeing Super Guppy book being version 7 and I am sure there are more to come, but the best thing about this series of books is that in addition to being totally up to date and packed with information, they are fun to read and are illustrated with numerous cartoons and black and white line drawings showing exactly what needs to be done and when.

Having given Mike such a great write-up as an author, I ought to issue a health warning, which is that, amusing and useful though his books are, it should be borne in mind that they are written for ATPLs who need to pass checkrides and not for simmers who want to learn how to operate an FS addon. This isn't to say that the manuals aren't useful - just that I wouldn't want you to buy them expecting to get detailed advice on how to use Flight Simulator. What you do get is a lot of useful hints about real world cockpit procedures and although the books don't quite walk you through a flight from beginning to end, there is enough information that it should be possible to get a good overview of how all the important stuff should be done. To give an example, the Boeing Super Guppy checkride manual begins with a caution to check that you have gotten on the right airplane (mistakes happen) and four steps later devotes a paragraph to the correct operation of the hydraulic pump switches, with a warning that if the Elec B Hyd pump is left on, the flap lever should not be repositioned without proper ground clearance. I have included this page in the screenshots. From there Mike takes the reader through the APU start procedure, with some useful advice about not leaving it too late, as finding out the APU has gone tech just before departure is unlikely to amuse the passengers. Then comes the initial flight deck prep; a couple of pages about programming the FMC/CDU, but nothing much about flight plan entry; a long section on the captain's flight deck setup, which a real pilot is expected to be able to do from memory; final flight deck setup, including the takeoff brief, how to ask for pushback clearance and engine start flow; taxi checks, takeoff procedures including how to do high and low speed aborts and V1/2 cuts; various critical inflight procedures, including the best way to program holds using the CDU; some discussion about system and airframe limits; in flight emergencies; and then on to how to fly the approach, including some notes on nightmare situations like single-engine ILS, and more common CAT I and II/III approaches.

I mentioned the lack of information on CDU/FMC programming above for good reason, as many complex addons can't be flown using standard FS flight plans and some FMC experience is necessary to use them - one reason Mike hasn't covered this subject being the books available from Bill Bulfer and Skeet Gifford, which cover the subject in more detail than most simmers need, but could hardly be bettered for ATPL purposes. Adding text on CDU operation would have at least doubled the size of the checkride books for little purpose - as it is the 737 and the 757-767 manuals run to around 300 pages, so there is plenty to read and if you study them in tandem with the manuals supplied with your sim, in time you should be able to recreate much more realistic flights than you could have done without Mike's help. When it comes down to it, flying the Wilco/Just Flight 737 PIC without buying a copy of Mike's manual on the plane might be tricky, because as I pointed out in the review, the manual supplied with the addon is pretty concise - but by way of compensation, it has to be one of the most amusing manuals ever written for a sim.

But then guess who wrote it? Captain Ray, of course.