After 6 month of not flying at all, today I had my first flight in the 737 again.
When using the UFT Takeoff performance calculator, I couldn’t select Flaps „Optimum“. I was only able to select a flap setting from 1 to 25. In several YouTube videos I saw, that for flaps there should also be the „Optimum“ option. Besides that the aircraft and the tablet worked without any problems.
It’s not a big issue, but I was quite surprised to see that my UFT is „different“. Did anybody encounter this before and knows how to solve it?
I have no idea how to link replies together so I can reply in one post but it’s great seeing the discussion on how to implement a two pilot cockpit strategy.
The shared cockpit would be a great step in the future of msfs and being a hobby that would allow you to share your hobby with mates.
But it would be cool (especially if you don’t have mates that are into flight Sims…) For a pmdg ghost like FO dc6 like implementation across the range that can be set up to share the load, like in real life.
That would also be a step in the right direction in the evolution of flight Sims.
Having options like selecting 1 engine taxi and have a trigger point when the FO starts the 2nd engine as you drive the plane ( I’ve gone off roading a number of times doing various things such as dimming overhead lights, doing the checklist stuff like in the 787 and starting the other 2 engines in the Bae 146…)
Bring realism to flying a 2 pilot aircraft…
But like mentioned, there is something in the actual game but not sure how good it is
When I used to do truck driving, a small family business with two trucks team of 8 and we traveled in pairs, I drove with everyone in that team and it was definitely the case of having a few especially this Dutch guy who would just talk and talk and talk over the CB ughh it was just tiring especially the night shift and you just wanted to listen to music and you know…
Then others were completely silent and it was great… As you said nothing wrong with those drives…
And…
There was one guy where we just didn’t click… I could only imagine being on a four hour flight in a cockpit and not clicking and getting on each other’s nerves
Crew pairings - no, it’s pretty random. Captains and first officers each bid for a monthly schedule. Whoever is awarded the same line as you (based on seniority) is who you’re originally paired with, but then much trading happens in both seats so in the final schedules, you’ll likely fly with a different person every trip. This speaks to my earlier comment about standardization being valuable for its own sake - when you’re flying every single trip with someone you’ve likely never met before, standardization is literally the only way that we can do what we do, safely.
As far as simulating multi crew, shared cockpit is probably the holy grail. Your Controls without the bugs would be a fine implementation of this.
But otherwise, I use Multi Crew Experience. I took the time years ago to customize it so that it uses all my company’s profiles and checklists, as a curiosity to see what it would be like. It’s actually kind of eerie sometimes… But the little bit of simming I do on Vatsim, I hand fly the same way I do in reality, and just lean on MCE to operate anything in the cockpit I need via voice command. I’ve built him entire flows that I can command him to do, like the “after landing flow” which is something I would not normally call for but the FO would just do, but it allows me to do nothing but taxi and talk to Vatsim ATC … I really think MCE makes a huge difference in the realism level of a home sim.
I fly the Huey and Mi-8 with a friend of mine quite often in shared cockpit on a server. We have no problems, the controls in front of us move reliably. DCS is quite good with latency, it has to be, bullets and missiles are fast, too, and hits in a fight need to be spot on as well. Anyway, control movement is spot on to what happens in these helicopters.
The actual synchronization isn‘t that big of a problem either. In DCS we press C to request control, then your system becomes the master. Giving up control makes your system the slave. Actual aerodynamics will be calculated by the master simulator, critical information to follow can easily be sent. We usually fly with a ping of ~15-20. But I flew the C101 with someone in Spain (I‘m in Germany) and the ping was about 80. No issues. If the sim has been designed properly, that‘s really a no brainer. In MSFS2020 I would honestly not expect anything like that to work well, though.
How long will it take to PMDG to understand that Asobo have no intention to implement wiper effects.
No need to wait for it. Other developers already understood this and have implemented their own effect.
Why PMDG can’t?
I’ve been trying to get the B737-800 started up from cold and dark based on the checklists and skimming the PDF documentation included with the plane, but keep getting stuck on not understanding why some things don’t work – for instance the yaw damper warning light sometimes doesn’t extinguish when activating the switch even though electric power is present, or the speed trim and mach trim warnings light up even though electric and hydraulic are active, low pressure lights are extinguished, and the IRS appears to be aligned.
Is there a more thorough text manual that explains, for each warning light in the cockpit, exactly what situations might be causing it and what I would need to do to fix them? This information does not appear to be in the PDF manuals I was able to find in the aircraft directory.
Thanks for any pointers to text documentation (not 30-minute videos please).
PMDG’s license with Boeing no longer allows them to distribute standard (real world) aircraft documentation. You’ll have to Google for “737 FCOM” or something similar. Googling for a basic “737 startup checklist” would also be fruitful.
That said, although you don’t want to watch a 30 minute video, there are a number of excellent ones out there that show proper cold and dark startup flows. Learn the up-to-down, left-to-right columnar visual flows and basic power up procedure only takes a very few minutes (plus whatever time it takes for the IRS to align).
For the trim failure lights: possibly I hadn’t cleared the master caution, I’ll try that next time if the problem crops up after I try a more careful startup:
The manuals you’ll find online are most likely standard FCOMs. The standard FCOM does not usually contain the chapter “amplified procedures” with detailed flows of what to turn on and in what order like you would find in the custom FCOMs that companies usually have. The best thing you can do is watch videos by actual 737 pilots.
Start with this one by an ex-colleague who betrayed us and switched over to an Airbus…
I’ll bite the bullet and go ahead and do the step-by-step w/ the cold-and-dark videos next time I get a chance to sit down with the 737. Thanks for the link!
What I found uselful info was FilbertFlies with a real A737 pilot, and on the you tube channel there is a link to download the checklist for the 737. It is very clear, and flows nicely the SOP is for Ryanair, so other SOP may differ.
Just sharing an observation of the 737-800’s VREF calculation speeds in-sim, following a screenshot I took from a recent Justplanes upload of the same variant.
Going by this example, it seems that the VREF speed calculations are 2-3kts faster in MFS, which I think a lot of us had that gut feeling about. It’s not very far away of course, but just adds to the challenge of landing at the likes of Jersey, Skiathos, etc. … It has me wondering if this is just a general inaccuracy or was adjusted deliberately by the devs to give the correct pitch attitude in MFS’ flight model?
Of course, I’d have liked to use some more real-word samples to do some further comparisons, but this info isn’t easy to get (unless you just-so-happen to fly the 738 irl :wink )
Keen to get some thoughts on this - especially for those who own the -900 (which I don’t have) . Are you seeing a similar variation?
Not all 737s are identical. It has changed over the years and the AFM has changed too. The PMDG may be modelled after different version to the one on the video. Maybe they modelled it after a version without winglets… Can’t confirm if the standard winged version had different speeds. If you look closely the PMDG has higher flap placard speeds too.
I just did a calculation in my OPT at 63t and VREF is closer to the PMDG screenshot. 2 or 3 knots is not going to affect how the airplane feels on approach anyway.
Thanks for confirming and testing this. For the sake of the experiment, I did use the same variant in the video, which was a Norwegian Air Shuttle 737-8JP that has winglets. As you say, nothing to split hairs over in terms of sim performance - more thinking out loud if PMDG have had to make such refinements to get it to agree with MFS’ model.
As for the liveries, if there are any that actually factor-in the slight changes in performance from say, a standard winglets variant to a scimitar type , I’d be very pleasantly surprised!
I mean, my aerospace engineering degree is older than a lot of sim pilots (and a lot of IRL pilots too) but I’m pretty sure I remember the basic equation for lift.
it was just tiring especially the night shift and you just wanted to listen to music and you know…
It may come down to watching some of those long videos haha 
… It has me wondering if this is just a general inaccuracy or was adjusted deliberately by the devs to give the correct pitch attitude in MFS’ flight model?