Hey guys, happy new year to you all and I hope you all enjoyed the festive period.
So as the title may suggest, I’ve found myself with a bit more spare time on my hands than I thought, I’ve been reading through past aviation news more specifically the issues with the Max 8. Now, here’s where my thought process starts to wander. Why don’t companies like Boeing, airbus, Cessna just to name a couple work with companies like PMDG, FBW etc to model their aircraft and systems into a commercially and globally used simulator such as MSFS, XP and P3D and test the systems on there via users such as our good selves. I get it’s not real world testing and some workarounds to problems within simulators may not be viable in practise but surely would the vastness of hours by sim pilots uncover some issues that may flag up in only very specific conditions?
I do appreciate some of you will likely be a bit worse for wear from last night but my main questions are:
Does anyone get where I’m going with this?
Has it been done previously?
Have I got too much time on my hands to be thinking like that?
I appreciate any insight, discussion or feel free to tell me I need to get something else to do🤣
Cheers for the insight, I had no idea they already had done things like that. I mean I never thought major aircraft manufacturers took much notice of feedback from regular sim pilots or regular simulators like the sims we use. Saying that I suppose it’s worth their time given the complexity of many mods is on or very close to a par with operational assets.
Well, it would be a good idea, for sure, but this platform of ours is in the “never ready” stage of it’s life.
From a companies perspective, yes, there would be a great wealth of information, but also from the companies perspective, you’d not want to expose your dearly written software to the opposition without them having bought an aircraft of yours for “evaluation purposes”… as i think still nowadays, the competitivness on the market is murder out there. Even though we are all like minded flyers, there’s also the procedures that normally testpilots would go through and every of our testpilots would have to endure that process to have the ability to write arguous and laborious reports that these soft- and hardware engineers would have to comb through and understand. (as most of us do speak a fair bit of english, most of us are not actually from a native english speaking continent, hence, communications sometimes sort of break as we mean one thing, but some think we mean the other thing… i personally think that still rips through lines of code between Asobo and Microsoft, which gives us all these newly revived bugs every other update.)
Anyways, i like your throughts and it would be awsome so use virtual pilots to combat real world problems as time spent should be valued by all. And also, a very happy new year to you in good bodily and mental health
Because a Billion Dollar corporation and some CEO boards consisting of 60 year old multi-millionaires does not care about videogames, about “users”, about computers or graphics, about videogame designers, about hobbies, but about stocks and shareholders only and how give millions to some experts who write the software and systems for their planes.
They would never hire PMDG to enhance their 737 or give them a flash-drive with their cockpit systems for simulator use - they don´t even know that PMDG exists. (Or that Flight Simulator 20 exists.)
Did you really hope some Billion Dollar corporation cares in the slightest way what some tiny poor ant like some private computer-enduser or videogamer or YouTuber think about their airplane systems and MFD screen menus, and make them test-fly a correct hyper-realistic virtual iteration of their plane?
For what reasons would they do this?
There would be not only no trustworthy scientific benefits if some armchair hobby sim pilot says “this new turbine design and the nice new navigation layout looks cool” but also no financial benefits for huge super-corporates and bankers in doing so - that´s why it´s simply not done