Japanese Airline Sells Flight Sim On-Board

Thanks to GameSpot for their report that a Japanese airline are selling a PC flight sim on-board their domestic routes, allowing resourceful laptop owners to buy the game in mid-air, and then replicate the flight they're currently taking. According to the article, "This game, called 'A Flight with Skymark,' allows players to take control of a Skymark badged 767 and fly any of that airline's routes", and this PC budget software "will be featured in in-flight videos and the airline's magazine as being available for purchase during the flight."

Comments

Hey

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if my pimp will offer GTA

Sounds like fun.

[WTFmonkey]

I was talking to an old-timer pilot a while ago who tells stories about getting into the bubble of the plane and taking sextant sightings to figure where to point the plane. It wasn't uncommon to be WAY off-course when you were out over the middle of the ocean, only to be corrected once overland. He was complaining that the new airbusses actually land the plane for you-- the pilot only has to land every 10 or 12 times to make sure he remembers how.

Somehow, autopiloting a plane for hours doesn't seem like a real fun game. "Okay, folks, we'll be cruising at this altitude for the next six hours, sit back and enjoy yourselves..." while the pilot does the same thing. Whee.

Re:Sounds like fun.

[Carnildo]

He was complaining that the new airbusses actually land the plane for you-- the pilot only has to land every 10 or 12 times to make sure he remembers how.

And this is why I won't ride on an Airbus plane -- the autopilot can override the pilot.

About a decade back, there was an incident where an Airbus plane made a nice, perfectly controlled descent towards a Boston neighborhood, three miles from the airport. The pilot realized that the airplane was going to land short of the runway, and took over manual control of the landing. But the autopilot wouldn't let him land at the airport -- it thought he was overshooting the runway by three miles! After a few tries, the pilot was forced to land at a different airport -- one that the airplane was willing to admit existed.

Re:Sounds like fun.

[Anonymous Coward]

IAAAP[1].

You can force A32x and 34x aircraft into direct law, where the computers (with the exception of the ones that read the joystick and give commands to the flight control surfaces) are entirely disabled. The incident you are describing happened because he was trying to do a landing without radio navaids and forgot to align the inertial measurement units beforehand, resulting in what we call "Map Drift". It was negligence on the pilot's part. He should have flown the landing himself, but he never disengaged autoland.

You can always disable autoland. There is no exception. You can also fly the airplane into the ground. There is even a button on the overhead to disable the GPWS alarms so the system doesn't irritate you when you do this. Otherwise, how would you ditch the aircraft at sea if the need arises? (There is also a DITCHING switch on the overhead which closes all of the air intakes below the water line in the event of a ditching, so that the aircraft will float.)

The idea that the pilot can't override the flight-control computers is bullshit spread by Boing drivers because they can't fly anywhere near as smoothly as the Airbus autoflight.

The only thing the autoflight will not let you do is stall outside the landing configuration, and there is never any reason whatsoever to stall the Airbus. (But if you really really want to, force direct law and you can do it.)

[1]I Am An Airbus Pilot.

Re:Sounds like fun.

[Terminal Saint]

A pilot friend of mine was telling me that a joke ammong pilots is "I can't fly for crap anymore, but I can type 60 words per minute."

Imagine the Daymare...

[vigilology]

You bank right in the flight sim, the aeroplane you're in banks right. You bank left in the flight sim, the aeroplane you're in banks left. Oh my god, you're controlling the friggin' 'plane! You wake up with a startle.

real cameras

[Jahf]

I would much more enjoy being able to see actual video out of the front of the cockpit ("pilot's eye view"). I fly frequently and am always wishing I could see that view, and perhaps a wide-angle down view, while craning my neck out the window.

Re:real cameras

[Yakman]

I recently flew Lauda to Europe from Australia, on one of their 777s, and they had exactly this as part of the entertainment system. There was a channel that was a "pointing down" camera and one that was a "Pilots Eye" view.

The downwards pointing one would have been a lot cooler if it was a bit more wide angle, and the pilots eye was kinda useless most of the time since in cruise the nose is usually angled slightly upwards, so all you could see was sky.

However, when coming in to land the nose cam was very cool, especially coming in to a windy Vienna and seeing the whole view skewed by about 5-10 degrees as the pilot had to yaw the plane to correct for crosswind.

Both cameras had the downside that they weren't very high quality (both resolution and image quality) and so didn't cope well with low ambient light levels.. landing was cool at night though, because you could see just the runway lights.

Replacing the pilots

[Alereon]

This is actually just a cost-cutting measure. By using passengers with laptops to control the plane, they don't have to employ pilots. Welcome to the future of aviation! Shades of Ender's Game and all that.

Just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

I've gotten strange looks from people in bars and other public places as I or a friend discuss what we did last night on GTA (running over cops, chainsawing hookers, etc). I imagine talking of 767's crashing by over-zealous gamers(Oh SH*T the wing's come off!) is not a good thing on board a plane.

How much you wanna bet...

[EnVisiCrypt]

...that this is just a plan to fly the plane using passengers as a cheap, distributed, AI cluster? Just think, if you average the maneuvers of each of the sim pilots... ;)