Have you ever crashed in Flight Simulator? and would you admit that it was probably a fatal crash if it where IRL.
A thread to discuss your flight sim failures and what you should have done or not done to prevent it.
I personally have had plenty of crashes and yesterday was my latest and greatest.
I decided, in my infinite wisdom to take my Piper Arrow III turbo on a little IFR trip to Liverpool EGGP
from Shoreham EGKA in the middle of some horrendous weather. Created and filed a flight plan and checked the weather for my route. STOP! I didn’t really check the weather thoroughly. I knew it was raining over a large portion of England but If I climbed high enough I could fly above the weather and whilst icing may occur, it would soon melt away during descent. It is June after all.
On the climbout from Shoreham, I was assigned FL120 by ATC. On entering the cruise phase I was still deep in IMC and elected to request FL150 from ATC. At FL150 things where no better but OAT had dropped sub zero and icing had begun. I requested a further increase in flight level to FL170 in the hope that I might get above the weather. No change. Icing was getting bad and I was struggling to maintain the climb up to FL170.
About an hour into the flight, I could see from the weather radar function of the GTN750 that I was flying in considerable rain but to the left of my flightpath the rain was much less so I disconnected autopilot and set a manual course to the West.
As my Airspeed had dropped to about 80kt in my attempts to reach FL170, it took a long time, maybe 15mins to get out of the precip and into the better looking area. It was still full IMC and still sub zero.
At this point with the plane heavily iced and struggling to maintain cruise altitude, flying fully manually on Instruments, I made my final fatal mistake. I decided to put the plane back on it’s GPS course via the autopilot.
The plane began a bank to the right which I expected and then it just kept on banking! In the few seconds I had to do something about the problem, I simply looked at my attitude indicator in disbelief. The plane flipped over on to its back and began to fall. Within seconds the airspeed exceeded the capability of the airframe and my plane disintegrated at 17000ft over the midlands and I was left looking at the RESTART button on my screen.
The list of things I should have done and not done are extensive, I know but the one glaringly obvious mistake was clearly taking the trip at all!! In a plane with no icing equipment into known icing conditions.
I am a 300 hour sim pilot and have taken the IFR course offered by FS academy (twice) and have flown many many flights in IMC succesfully.
Anybody had any similar experiences they would like to fess up to?
. So yes, I have fatally crashed in the sim.
So glad that it’s not real.
