• Please see the most recent updates in the "Where did the .com name go?" thread. Posts number 16 and 17.

    Post 16 Update

    Post 17 Warning old domain name stealing credentials

  • Special Server Maintenance

    Just when you think you have everything running some what better...

    You get a message from the Hosting company. Short story they need to move us to a new server. I have been working with them to plan a good date for all concerned. Here is what we have come up with as a schedule.

    1. November 4th 17:00 -5UTC shut off the forums and start backup proceedures. During this time there will be no access to the forums or the Resource Section.
    2. November 5th Continue with Backups and download same until complete.
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    4. November 7th - 8th restore backups and upgrade forum software.

    If all goes well we should be back online on November 8th.

    To keep you updated we will post updates on AVSIM forums.

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Boeing to Use MSFS for Pilot Training....

Personally I am glad to see this as it means all the years of very hard work from the Devs to make the PC based simulators more realistic and thus worthy of being true tools of training has gained yet another tier of recognition. Bravo!
 
If it were Boeing pre MD's takeover it would be an impressive endorsement - in their current state it's more of a punchline...
 
A procedures trainer is not a flight simulator, so this is being misunderstood by a lot of people.

Essentially, a procedures trainer is there for pilots to learn the "flows" for a given airplane/airline and how the various systems work without spending several thousand dollars an hour running a full motion sim, and since PC hardware has got better and cheaper over the last few years, those have gone from "wood mockup of flight deck with posters of the controls on them" to flat panel touchscreens and/or VR headsets.

The airline I fly for actually used the Majestic Q400 addon for P3D as a procedure trainer when we had a fleet of those.

If an aviation governing body signs off on MSFS for this, it's not saying "this is completely accurate", but it's more along the lines of "it's close enough to how the airplane works, and it's not gonna hurt anything to use it as part of training".
 
I haven't been involved with FSTD Level D (the top level for FAA certified flight simulators) devices for over 20 years, but the visual fidelity of today's MSFS far exceeds any of the Level D devices from 20 years ago. (And some of the "home brew" cockpits I've seen online are better than older Level D devices!) Level D devices aren't "completely accurate" either, they are just certified to a specific standard (e.g., use actual aircraft controls (yoke, knobs, switches, etc.) in the simulator and have the exact same dimensions as the actual aircraft...among other requirements). I wouldn't be surprised if MSFS (or some derivative of it or even X Plane) isn't used somewhere as the visual software component of an actual Level D simulator.

In the Navy (back in the day) our procedures trainer was a poster of the cockpit taped to the inside of the toilet stall.....

Sorry about the thread drift.
 
One still gets the "paper tiger" cockpit poster issued, but I never opened mine as P3D worked well enough for the basics.
 
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