Welcome to Cyberairspace

Smithsonian Air and Space Magazine ^ | 1/01/2010 | Ed Regis

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

Although I’m sitting in the living room of a second-floor condominium in Germantown, Maryland, what I see on the monitor of Dan Ward’s Dell computer invites me to imagine I’m in the cockpit of an Embraer 145 regional jet. Visible through a cockpit window is the jetway, which runs from the passenger door to a gate at Terminal 3 of Chicago O’Hare. The cockpit instruments are dark, but after Ward types in a few commands, the control panel lights up like a Christmas tree.

Soon Ward, senior pilot for Delta Virtual Airlines, is keying flight data into the flight management system, the automated device that will fly the Embraer 145 from just after takeoff to just before touchdown while he sits back, monitors progress, and talks to air traffic control. Then he types in the departure and arrival airports (KORD and KATL), flight plan (CMSKY CARYN CYBIL PXV J73 BNA ERLIN5), initial climb rate, cruise speed, altitude, fuel reserves, winds aloft, number of passengers, and so on. The entire process takes about 10 minutes. Finally, Ward is ready to go.

As the jetway moves aside, Ward requests push-back. He starts the engines, which make a whoosh in the background, then speaks into his voice-activated headset: “Chicago Arrival, Delta 6461 with you, IFR to Atlanta.”

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

Where you can fly from Chicago to Atlanta without leaving your living room

[Domandred]

Long interesting article for anyone interested in simulated flying and ATC

I used to control KBOI on Vatsim while studying. KBOI was generally slow so plenty of time to read and do homework. Usually only traffic I had was people practicing take offs and landings with touch and goes. Now that I have a toddler though no free time and kind of a distraction.

“Delta 358 descend and maintain DADDY DADDY DADDY!!! er um 4100 till established on the localizer”

Yea that won’t work.

[Domandred]

Oh good story though.

One day when I was “flying” I was on approach to McCarran International in a King Air 350. The throttle on my yoke stuck full (the only way to fix was to quit flight sim, reboot my computer). Well I had been in the air for two hours so I wasn’t doing that because the flight time doesn’t get logged till landing.

The only problem was that there were other pilots in the air around me, I was third in line for landing with two behind me.

Instead of calling an emergency (which is allowed, but frowned upon when there is traffic) I played it cool and cut my engines and glided. When I slowed down too much to maintain altitude I started the engines back up. Played the shut down, start up game three or four times.

Now I’m on final and thinking to myself “please don’t crash please don’t crash”, while nobody dies it’s still embarrassing and everyone laughs at you.

Best landing I ever had, and played the shut down, start up game all the way to the gate and rebooted my computer.

Nobody had any clue I had a stuck throttle.