40 Great Flight Simulator Adventures

by Charles Gulick

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North Position: 17184	Rudder: 32767
East Position: 16690	Ailerons: 32767
Altitude: 1600	Flaps: 0
Pitch: 0	Elevators: 32767 (IBM only)
Bank: 0	Elevators: 36863 (all except IBM)
Heading: 180	Time: 12:15
Airspeed: 120	Season: 4-Fall
Throttle: 19400	Wind: 5 Kts, 350

Please read the entire text before beginning this flight.

You're in a Meigs righthand pattern downwind for runway 36. You're over Lake Michigan at pattern altitude, which is 1000 AGL nominal (you're at 1008 AGL). A right turn, to a heading of 270, will put you on base. A second right turn, to a heading due north, will put you on final. Great chance here to fly the box, and keep flying it until you get the hang of it.     It's no secret nor any surprise that the simulator is harder to land than a real airplane-in some ways. You don't have the natural depth perception, visual clues and perspectives, and other realworld references that you have in an actual aircraft. Our microcomputers are simply not fast or sensitive enough to get our most subtle messages. What, in a real aircraft, is a little bit of pressure-with perhaps the thumb-to correct just a tiny bit seems to cause the simulator to overreact.     However, we're flying a simulator, not a multi-thousand-dollar real machine (nor a multi-million-dollar simulator), and practice is the only way we'll conquer it.     This mode will save you lots of time getting up there and into position, so you can concentrate on judging and timing your first turn, then judging and timing your second. Both good turns, let's hope, and blended smoothly with flap settings and pitch and power adjustments that put you down right on the numbers.

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