Parent in need of some help please...

So my son, who's 15, brilliant, loves flying... is always telling me that he "has to sit at the computer for this flight that takes 5 hours from pt. A to pt. B" or he doesn't get it into his flight log book.. Another example: he's wanting to be part of April 2nd's CTP event, which he says will likely take 9+ hours... 9+ hours sitting at the computer playing a video game??? So for the more experienced parents here who've run into this issue before: there's no way to pause, save, resume, something?? You literally HAVE to sit there for hours on end? We really try to restrict his PC gaming .. we already struggle with Fortnite, Minecraft, etc.. so to have this on top of it is killing us, but we do NOT want to stifle his passion for flying (he's actually flown a Southwest airlines simulator in Dallas at their training facility, invited by a pilot friend he made).

Appreciate any advice/info

J

:confused:

Hi, J. It IS possible to put the simulator on pause, then pick up later. In the previous version of this sim (I don't have the current one, but others will be here) you could save the session and pick it up later, and you could even run the simulator at several times real time, that is, speed up the simulation by 2 times, four times or more, though going past four times made certain things awkward, especially with the sim's version of Air Traffic Control (ATC).

Since I'm not familiar with the "CTP event" I can't answer whether that requires all of it being done at once in real time -- someone else will have to answer that -- but most other things can easily be subject to whatever computer time limitations you feel are needed, since the sim CAN be paused and, hopefully, the session even saved.

I don't know how the logbook works on this version of the sim, so others will have to address that.

At age 15 he is eligible for a Young Eagles flight in a real aircraft, and depending on where you live, there may well be an EAA (Experimental Aircraft Association) chapter near you where he can make friends and learn a lot. See EAA.org and go to the Youth & Young Adult tab, and you can see several programs available for youth. I highly recommend he do this- note that he can even get a logbook.

IF he has inclinations towards the military, there is an Official Auxiliary of the US Air Force called the Civil Air Patrol, where he can learn about aviation, get several free orientation flights (expected to learn some things each time), as well as learn about military customs and courtesies, drill and ceremonies, aviation (almost a pilot ground school) and wear Air Force style uniforms with special insignia. Plus, he can get involved in search and rescue, radio communications and a number of other things. For this see https://www.gocivilairpatrol.com/ where you can find your nearest local squadron and learn more about the program.

Hope this helps.

Hi, J. It IS possible to put the simulator on pause, then pick up later. In the previous version of this sim (I don't have the current one, but others will be here) you could save the session and pick it up later, and you could even run the simulator at several times real time, that is, speed up the simulation by 2 times, four times or more, though going past four times made certain things awkward, especially with the sim's version of Air Traffic Control (ATC).

 

Since people are still commenting here on what they don't own, and passing along miss-information which is very dangerous in itself, especially for these types of events, here's what can be done and can't. You CAN use Active Pause to pause the sim - HOWEVER, and this is a BIG HOWEVER, your aircraft will still burn fuel and weather will change and time of day will change. You can also use the ESCAPE key to go to the main menu to pause it, however time of day will still pass and there is no way to go back to where you were earlier.

So yes, your son IS telling the truth in this version, there is no real way to pause the sim.

I have not tried any saved flights, but there have been a number of reported issues prior to the last two updates, in saving flights. This is very different software than older versions. I don't know if any of the latest updates have addressed the saved flight issues?

For long flights, he has almost surely created a detailed flight plan. With that in place, he can use the autopilot to step away for an extended period.

Look at the bright side: at least you know where he is and is not somewhere else getting in trouble.

Cross The Pond is sponsored by VatSim. There will be 2000+ simmers, 200+ controllers, etc. It's a big deal! Has been for 20 years. You sit and wait for: info, booking, call sign registration, flight plan, etc. It WILL be congested so 2 hrs wait will surely happen - too many people!!!

Ok...to me it's NOT a 'Big Deal' as I didn't ever intend to join. Too much monkey business for me. BUT, a 'pro' simmer with intentions to become a commercial pilot WOULD do everything possible to attend. Lots to learn (especially if using MS2020). It's a good thing. Once a year. Life is short so one must take advantage of opportunities available today. They might not be there tomorrow. Let the kid fly!

Chuck B

Napamule

Real world pilots have strict limits on the amount of time they can fly and managing those hours effectively is part of a pilot’s and airline’s responsibilities.

As someone else pointed out, with a flight plan files and autopilot, there’s no need to be at the controls for a full transoceanic flight. I doubt a RW pilot would do it his or herself.

Perhaps you can set a weekly time limit and have your son responsible for managing those blocks himself — make it part of the challenge, as it were.

Depending on the aircraft, he *could* put it on autopilot and step away for a little while. I've read of simmers doing transoceanic flights, step away for several hours then come back to it. But, there's no telling if something could need attention while he's away and things go haywire.

Dad, my advice is stop calling it a *game*, get it in your head that it's a *simulation* and let him go. :cool: You could have a future Delta captain sitting there.

If he really wants to get serious about it I can give you links to several publications on the FAA web site. It is all pertinent to any flight simulator and will allow him to self-study. Just let me know. As FYI, I'm a private pilot in real life.

Since people are still commenting here on what they don't own, and passing along miss-information which is very dangerous in itself, especially for these types of events, here's what can be done and can't. You CAN use Active Pause to pause the sim - HOWEVER, and this is a BIG HOWEVER, your aircraft will still burn fuel and weather will change and time of day will change. You can also use the ESCAPE key to go to the main menu to pause it, however time of day will still pass and there is no way to go back to where you were earlier.

 

So yes, your son IS telling the truth in this version, there is no real way to pause the sim.

So they've REALLY goofed it up in that regard, and it's not a TRUE pause, where it stops everything in its tracks- OK, my apologies for not realizing HOW Different it is from ALL the other sims I've used. I'm surprised that something so operationally logical for a home-based PC sim is not implemented. So I stand corrected.

But since parents still have a right (and a NEED) to limit screen time in the context of their own environment and their own preferences for how a youngster should be reared, they can take this updated info and perhaps let him do it this once (perhaps the contest folks need to rethink their way of running it, too), while now knowing better how/whether/when to restrict him.

So J, hope you now have enough info to decide your action(s) to take.

So they've REALLY goofed it up in that regard, and it's not a TRUE pause, where it stops everything in its tracks- OK, my apologies for not realizing HOW Different it is from ALL the other sims I've used. I'm surprised that something so operationally logical for a home-based PC sim is not implemented. So I stand corrected.

 

But since parents still have a right (and a NEED) to limit screen time in the context of their own environment and their own preferences for how a youngster should be reared, they can take this updated info and perhaps let him do it this once (perhaps the contest folks need to rethink their way of running it, too), while now knowing better how/whether/when to restrict him.

 

So J, hope you now have enough info to decide your action(s) to take.

That was a big surprise for me as well! How shocked I was when I ran out of fuel the first time on a longer flight when I paused and DID step away for something like that. I'm into realism with the sim, so I either try to land and refuel, or attempt to complete, but I was NO where near any airports and couldn't do it. The reload of fuel option is just not one I like to use if I don't have to. Can't do it in real life, so I don't do it in the sim. :)

I agree - they DID goof it up in that retrospect.

Editing timed out, so:

FSX does, indeed, pause EVERYTHING IF the Use System Time box is unchecked, but continues as Head described with that box checked. It's a shame if the new sim doesn't have that so obvious (to many of us) feature.

As an adult who also sometimes enjoys 9 hr+ simulated flights, I can attest that being able to pause the sim and step away for a few minutes, hours, or days to attend to real-life activities is absolutely essential to my ability to enjoy and even participate in this hobby. Learning methods to pause these experiences so as to resume them later in a satisfactory way is an exercise in both technical and life skills.

Your son probably has understandable reasons for not feeling he can pause the sim. But it is indeed possible even in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, if this is the sim your son is using.

I'll back up for a moment to provide some background you may not be familiar with but may be helpful in understanding and managing the situation. There are multiple simulator products on the market of which Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is the most popular right now pretty much for the sole reason it can generate an impressive looking out-the-window view of most areas of the world with minimal technical fiddling. Every other simulator product I know of can be easily paused in such a way to allow for a straightforward resumption of the flight at a later time. This is less the case in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 due to a case of the product becoming a victim of its own philosophy of being a "digital twin" of the real world. Resulting from this philosophy is a set of features encouraging the user to always operate in current, right-now conditions of weather and air traffic which it is able to simulate based on internet data. Because these features can't be paused, you can't really use them as intended if you pause the sim. This is probably part of your son's concern with pausing.

Another factor may arise if he enjoys using additional add-on products which provide virtual air traffic control provided by real people playing the "game" along with you in real time, many of which feature real-time events with other users he may want to participate in.

So given this, sometimes it may be understandable if he feels the need to complete a long session without interruptions. Is that OK? Maybe so on occasion. Will life always allow him that opportunity? No.

The long-term solution may require him to realize this, and learn work-arounds which allow him to enjoy both flight sim and other real-life opportunities as they present themselves. This might require learning how to sometimes accept the compromises inherent in the available means to pause this sim.

To make things complicated, there are really three different "pause" functions specifically in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 which it may be helpful for you to understand:

1. "Active Pause" accessed by a button on the in-flight sim screen or keyboard (Pause key by default I believe): This is the most obvious features but really is not a pause feature at all, so explains why lots of people don't think pausing the sim is possible. It just makes your airplane freeze in one spot in the air while everything else continues (time going by, engine running and making noise, instruments responding and etc.). It's very unnatural, causes problems on resumption, and in my opinion pretty worthless.

2. Pressing Esc from within a flight to enter a "pause" menu screen: This is almost a real pause. This may be settings dependent, but in my installation everything stops including the clock *except* that live weather and traffic are not paused. This means that the weather will have changed between when you pause the sim and resume it later. Not too realistic, but sometimes we have to make compromises in life.

3. A pause feature from within a developer mode menu which takes a little but of fiddling but which can be set up fairly easily if you search for "MSFS 2020 developer mode" for instructions. This definitely pauses everything (except for live weather/traffic) including the clock, except oddly the sound.

Given all this, can your son pause the game? YES! Will he be able to do so in a way that preserves an experience he is trying to have that involves using live weather and live air traffic control? Maybe not all the time. Does he need to use all those features all the time to enjoy the simulator hobby? Absolutely not!

Varying experiences are the "meat" of life and for flight simulation too. Maybe now and then an all-day flight in a multiplayer event with live weather, live ATC, and no interruptions could be a fun and healthy way for him to spend a day. But not necessarily every day. He could still use one of the pause methods above and complete a long flight over several sessions, even over several days, by turning off live weather and not using live ATC services, so to allow simming to fit better with the real world on some occasions. The suggestions by others about opportunities for real-life aviation experiences include a lot of great ideas for keeping his aviation enthusiasm from being a strictly glued-to-the-computer affair. And he might want to try out some of the other current major simulation softwares (Prepar3D, X-Plane, and AeroFly) which have been overshadowed of late in popularity by Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 among casual simmers because they are less visually impressive, at least without extra work and fiddling. But they each still have their own strengths compared to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and have lots to offer for an aspiring pilot looking for more "professional" and less "game" oriented experiences. And all these sims can be fully paused at will.

There is a simple solution to this problem. Any flight in MSFS can be saved by hitting ESC and using the "save" function at the bottom of the screen and specifying a name for that flight. This preserves all information about the plane, position, weather, etc., and the flight can then be re-loaded at any time, even after MSFS is exited and re-started. There is one caveat: in a loaded (saved) flight, you cannot change the weather, including time of day, from the way it was when you saved it. The way I handle this is, prior to exiting the flight, I set the time of day and the weather as I want it to be when I re-load. I do this routinely and it works well (or as ballplayers would say, "it works good").

P.S. You can also accelerate time in MSFS by hitting R(Num+) and decrease it by hitting R(Num-). This allows acceleration of time by 2X, 4X, etc. (not sure what the limit is).

Real world pilots have strict limits on the amount of time they can fly and managing those hours effectively is part of a pilot’s and airline’s responsibilities.

As someone else pointed out, with a flight plan files and autopilot, there’s no need to be at the controls for a full transoceanic flight. I doubt a RW pilot would do it his or herself.

Perhaps you can set a weekly time limit and have your son responsible for managing those blocks himself — make it part of the challenge, as it were.

This is the way.

Thanks all - VERY informative replies!

J

For all the popularity of the giant jumbos, this is one reason that many virtual pilots gravitate towards regional jet or turboprop planes: lots of 1 to 2 hour flights being the norm. This sort of sidesteps the issue of pauses or saves altogether for many cases.

Thank you RyanBiggs and cobalt for your posts, very informative!!

With MSFS though it seems that there is growing attraction to all sorts of categories of flight, in particular bush planes flying to tiny gravel strips... which had a dedicated but rather niche/small following in previous sims, but now quite popular in MSFS due to lots of these strips being included as part of default scenery, the scenery details being high, and so on. As helicopters for MSFS grow, I'm seeing more and more popularity with that, also since ED's DCS also is seeing a rapid growth with helos too, with the Mi-24 Hind and AH-64 Apache, UH-60L mod, and more on the way (BO-105 and OH-58D Kiowa Warrior)

This is one reason why I really loved the C-130 in FS2004: longer range, short range, airports, airbases, short strips, gravel strips, abandoned roads, ice, desert sand... you could operate from any of these and more! Carried a significant load, but you always had the balloon tires for rough terrain. That no one seems to be developing a C-130H for MSFS is a bit of a disappointment to me.