Ah yes, there is a “third pause”!
There are key bindings available for SET PAUSE ON and SET PAUSE OFF. Weirdly it’s not a toggle, so you need two keys/switches etc, but they are there. Search for PAUSE in the control mappings. This pause option does pretty much everything that active pause does, but it actually stops your aircraft. Hence you can leave this pause on for as long as you like without fear of the sim continuing to calculate the movement of your aircraft with potentiallly bad results. There are a couple of things to know:
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Time still doesn’t pause, even with this pause - so if you leave it for an hour, the sim time will advance an hour. You can work around this by moving time back when you return but, for example, in plane clocks etc still continue. You’ll be an hour late to gate
. You can also work around this to a degree by lowering the sim rate to 1/4 speed. Time still advances, but 4 times slower -
Real time/AI aircraft and other things (ground vehicles, cars, clouds, weather) are not paused
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Switches, controls etc CAN all be used in the cockpit as normal - HOWEVER switches that move physically (e.g. a toggle switch) will not actually move/change position until you unpause the sim. Similarly some indicator lights won’t come on until you unpause. Example - if I press the enable AP switch, nothing will happen until I unpause, at which point AP will turn on and the indicator light will come on. Rotary controls are fine, as are softkeys or keys that interact with the G1000/3000/FMCs etc. If you are in a panic moment, you can easily hit the SET PAUSE ON key you’ve chosen - press the buttons you think you need to press. Press the SET PAUSE OFF button and the SET PAUSE ON again immediately - and all the controls and buttons you pressed will now move, be in the right position and you are paused again.
There is more info here on the different types of pause…