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Panel and First Flight The first sight of a nearly wall to wall vision of big, bright CRT displays might intimidate someone who has only glimpsed this sight while shuffling back to steerage, but if you've used any of the best Boeing glass panels for FS, you'll feel at home right away, at least until your first glance overhead or down between the seats. There's a lot going on that we don't have in FS, and that you couldn't possibly see on a single monitor, but unfortunately there's not much time to study breakers and switches if you hope to get in a little flying in the same day. Adjusting the seat and rudder pedals proved to be exactly the same challenge as in the 172 that I had flown a month earlier. Push as hard as I might on the tops of the pedals, I could not persuade the damned brakes to respond. Taking off with the brakes locked is not a commonly simulated emergency, so I fiddled around until I got enough leg force on the pedals, and we were ready to begin a serious study of the new toys that all lay within arms' reach. With the first glimpse of the Primary Flight Display and Nav Display, I knew that in some ways the real thing was going to be easier to fly than FS. While I understand that the LCD displays in the 777 are even more easily readable than the -400's CRT's, what I saw in the -400 convinced me that improving instrument readability for PC sims will make better pilots of us all. While I can't claim that my flying was precise during most of the two hours, I can say that the large, bright, clear displays responded so smoothly to my sometimes tentative control movements that in my view I was actually making mistakes with greater precision! The weight and placement of the controls, plus movements that require a firmer hand than a mouse click, make the sim feel like a large, heavy aircraft when it is sitting motionless on the runway. I checked control freedom and movement by watching the position indicators, and then I did it twice more just to feel the silky smooth "spoon in jar of honey" movement of the yoke. With a few more hours to play with, I think that I might have concentrated on getting more out of the autopilot and flight director's various modes. The latter was essential during hand flying, which I did for all but the final low visibility Category II and Category III(B) approaches. My wife, who had never touched a PC simulator, soon learned to handle the heading and altitude settings that she programmed into the flight director when it wasn't guiding us along an ILS. Had I been trying to replicate day to day line flying, I would of course have concentrated more on flying with the autopilot, but I confess that I wanted to do something with that big yoke and leave the button pushing and knob twisting to the professionals. I've said little about the flight management system, the gadget that some of the most talented FS programmers have worked so hard to give us in various forms. With so little time to fly the sim, I gratefully deferred to my instructor and co-pilot and enjoyed the magic show. Buttons were pressed in just the right sequence, and there on the nav displayt in brilliant magenta was a short round robin from O'Hare's Runway 9L to 27R. The FMS appeared to be no more difficult to program than a surround sound home theatre system, but then again I had a UAL instructor as my co-pilot's co-pilot. |
