I was thinking about it the other day, and thought, “I want zero failures and minimal maintenance requirements in my daily driver. Why would I want my aircraft to fail?”
Is the difference because aircraft are much more complex, requiring more skilled maintenance, and it’s that need to pay attention that makes some simmers prefer having complex failure modes?
Failures happen in real life… why not simulate them in a simulator? Plus, they provide a challenge for those who want to practice dealing with such situations.
With an option to turn them off completely if you don’t want to deal with failures on a given flight, everyone is happy. Which is what you get with most planes that have failures as an option.
I get that sentiment. I’m a bit different, though. I like to fly without worrying about what in real life is pretty rare, given that aircraft are subjected to much more rigid maintenance schedules. I do enjoy the maintenance requirements in my A2A Comanche 250, and my FSR500. I just bought both Dukes, and I’ll enjoy that aspect with them as well. But maintenance and random failures are two completely different things.
To carry the original analogy a bit further… In my truck I change the oil, filters, battery, etc. on a regular basis. I don’t want to contemplate the engine blowing up or an axle breaking. Do those things happen IRL? Very, very rarely.
But as I said in the thread title, I’m all for what people like. And if something fails because maintenance wasn’t done, then bad things can happen. It’s the random failures that some people like that I don’t really get. But that’s just me.
For sure, and I love options as much as the next person. It’s the psychology of failure that interests me, and why some people enjoy the (simulated) threat. Kind of like skydiving. Some people love the thrill that comes with risk. I wonder why anyone would jump out of a perfectly good airplane. 
Just adds a little something extra for people who want to be kept on their toes and want the challenge of having to deal with different things happening. I would never use it as I always like to get to my destination but just doing this might get boring for some. Most pilots will never encounter an engine failure IRL but it adds an extra challenge in the sim for it to happen out of nowhere
So it’s akin to preferring to fly a commecial simulator, in which failures are an effective training tool, as opposed to flying a real plane, in which the goal is to avoid failures.
Exactly (10 characters)
I wouldn’t necessarily say the goal of flying a real plane is to avoid failures, yes you never want them or aim to have them, but unfortunately they can happen at any time without any intervention from the pilot. Simulating failures in MSFS can be great for learning opportunities, to discover more about the depths of the aircraft and its redundancy/backup systems, or simply just to change things from your normal A to B route in a completely safe environment!
You could always just pull the red lever or flip the switch bar down on a whim… The rest of the maintenance I would cover in another game, aircraft mechanic simulator. Could pair it with power wash simulator.
I like knowing that butter landings will gratitude me with happier and healthier landing gear in my c310r (ownership), and gentle engines managing will take me where I want go, and getle manuvers will make my passengers happier etc.
So, can you fix failures settings on xbox then? They are broken since ever…
To make it real, we should pay for the maintenance and pay a lot if something will broke. 
LOL. I was flying my Hjet and hovered the mouse over a covered switch above the front window. It didn’t show me a tooltip, so (wondering what it might be) I clicked on it. Oops..engine out.
I’ve never clicked anything to see what it does and had anything bad happen… but I’ve zoomied in and out too quickly on the overhead panel with my mouse scroll wheel and given myself an interesting scenario to deal with 
Even a perfectly maintained aircraft can decide to not play nice on any given day.
For one most of the GA fleet is simply well aged by now. And in some ways the annual inspection can be as much of a cause for trouble as it should be the prevention.
While most really important things are built with redundancy, some are not or a single error or event can cause very unexpected results.
A friend with a Bellanca had a truly „impossible“ scenario almost ruin a perfectly good Sunday. And in part his preventative maintenance made it possible.
He had replaced the fuel cap seals, to prevent water from coming into the tanks. Even though rain is not typically a problem in SoCal, he usually cleaned his aircraft with a California Duster and furniture polish.
On that Sunday he took off right after us in the Saratoga and we had planned to fly to Oceano for a nice lunch.
The day before there was a wings&wheels event at the airport, so there was a bit of extra rubber on the runway 
Some of it may have been knocked loose by the Saratoga or maybe his own front wheel. And that. One piece lodged into the breather tube for the right tank.
Somewhere near Burbank the engine sucking fuel out of that tank, the fresh seals and the blocked breather had combined a vacuum in the tank strong enough to starve the engine.
He reacted relatively swiftly and on the other tank the engine came back to life without too much drama.
But he decided to land at Whiteman all the same and check things out on the ground…after all the right tank was more than half full.
I came back in after him and on the ramp we looked the old gal over, and when he popped the tank cap you could hear the air rushing in very clearly. That lead to looking at the breather tube and the rubber deposited there.
That will never happen again…to him or me. The odds are simply too long for that.
But FS can train you for this situation where something unexpected happens. And if your reactions to or reading of the situation is not as good as Bob‘s that morning….well you will live another day.
Do you know where you can turn them off? Look in settings Amd cant find anything. Im into flying but i am constantly having landing gear failures and engine failures that i cant fly where is the option to turn it off?
IRL learning to fly the airplane is just a first step. With some skills to practice, we then learn how to plan a flight, plan ahead for the unexpected, weather changes and what not. There are a few emergency procedures required of private pilots but things get more interesting with the instrument rating; and more serious with the commercial and airline transport pilot licenses. At the ATP level, a lot of training and recurrent training is all about handling emergencies, failures, unusual situations, and often in multiples. Their flight instructors may be of a sadistic bent, or so it must seem exiting simulator sessions at work! I do not have an ATP though through the years I have read enough hair raising tales to appreciate that pilots at that level of accomplishment are distinguished by their non-normal procedures prowess. Think about that, serious stuff, truly.
What I prefer in my flight sim hobby, like many of you here, is quite the opposite: To enjoy a relatively calm, normal procedure sim flight; and as good at that as I might believe myself to be (some days), I could never manage the multiple contingencies that the pros do everyday, even if only in their recurrent training as an ATP. So hats off to the real pros, and kudos to the sim pilots who take on failures and enjoy that challenge. Of course, our gear tends to throw us a few things to handle that IRL pilots would never see, so we all have some system failure skills from practice!
I’m not keen on random failures.. but I like wear-n-tear, eventually leading to failures due to improper operation ( MP/RPM/Mixture.. CHT management.. deploying gear/flaps at too high an airspeed.. poor routine maintenance..etc.. )..
That’s where the A2A Comanche, is brilliant.:
Hi @Aspect3102,
I MSFS 2024, you can disable them Under “Realism”, here:
