Flight Simulator

Did you ever fly out of Meigs Field in downtown Chicago before it closed? It’s one of those airports you will never forget—if you were lucky enough to visit before the painful closure in 2003. But ask just about any pilot today who learned to fly in the late 1990s or early 2000s, and memories […]

These days some hangar flying in a flight training device doesn’t seem all that unusual, especially to pilots living in cities with local shelter-in-place orders. No matter how realistic a simulator claims to be though, most pilots will tell you they still know the devices are simply pretend airplanes. Trying to take on that realism […]

The smartest of smartphones these days can handle plenty of meaty chores like text, audio, photo and even video editing. When it comes to gaming though, most fall pretty short. Nowhere is this more apparent than when we airplane geeks try to recreate our flying with any of the flight simulator apps. Even Laminar Research’s […]

Flight1 Tech announced that its Enterprise G1000 flight sim product has secured FAA approval, and can now be used for pilots to log time towards an instrument rating, as well as to maintain IFR proficiency. The advanced aviation training device (AATD) stems from four years of development to create a highly realistic environment needed for […]

In 2009, Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed in the Buffalo, New York, metropolitan area, killing all 49 passengers and crewmembers on board and one person inside the house into which the Bombardier Dash-8 Q400 crashed. The extensive post-crash investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board found that the pilots were completely at fault. The captain […]

(June 2011) I recently asked FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt about the tough time that applicants have been having on FAA Knowledge Testing (the tests that many of us still refer to as the “writtens”). Many test takers are failing the tests because the FAA has included a lot of new, previously unpublished questions that are […]

Though I thoroughly enjoyed being the guest of US Airways, after two tiring sessions in its simulators, I was ready for a break. The Boeing 757 and 737 had been fun and, for the most part, understandable to me. I had survived assorted V1 cuts and wind shear in both airplanes and was pretty well […]