I was curious if any one knew for sure if the sim is in real time. As in if you flew from one to place to another in real life and it took 2hours take off to land it would take the same time in the sim (given you are traveling the same knots in the sim as in real life).
For a while I have been convinced it is in real time, given we have the world to fly at our finger tips so I wouldn’t think anything is down scaled.
I tried googling this but nothing comes up about flight duration in the sim compared to real life. Only thing it brings up is the live weather feature.
I flew from Phenix to Las Vegas tonight (loved flying into Vegas at night). It took 44 minutes take off to land. Out of curiosity I googled the real life duration and it showed 1h and 10m. So not far off.
Is the sim in real time with how long it would take to fly in real life? If the wind/weather and aircrafts were to be the same?
The sim is on the money, but that doesn’t mean you flew it the way the Airline would…
Is it real time, absolutely.
But, you can go direct PHX to LAS and you could run it right on the max speed the whole way and easily shave several minutes off the trip vs the published times.
More could probably saved on the ground not having to wait on other taxiing planes, etc. But time in the air could be shaved for sure depending on how you flew it.
If you look at most flights in real life they usually always put flight time as say 1hr 20mins when they always do it in say 1hr…i fly Manchester to belfast 4 times a year and flight time is always around 15-20mins shorter than stated.
Don’t confuse block time with the time in the air.
The official time stated by the airline is block time. That’s the time from Gate to Gate. So they always put a buffer for taxi.
There are a few issues here. One is that airlines are going to fly at the altitude and speed that gives max economy whereas simmers tend to go for max performance to get there quicker. Another, with the opposite effect, is the sim (quite rightly) uses manufacturers official performance data which basically assumes a perfectly new well tuned and maintained aircraft and even then can be optimistic (ask a real life bonanza owner if they can ever achieve the “book” numbers).
In the end the sim will be more or less “in the ballpark” and that is all we can really expect.
Airliners generally achieve the book performance.
The only thing that changes with age is the increased fuel flow.
That’s a fixed penalty in the FMC. E.g. our oldest 767s had +3.5%.
One is that you compare airline flying with GA planes. Another is that you generalize and put all simmers into the same bucket. For most airlines “well tuned and maintained aircraft” are the standard - hopefully.
(Caution: This is tongue in cheek.)
My ballpark is usually within a few minutes of block time unless I screw something up.
Time is a bit weird in this sim, but it is ‘mostly’ real time.
The sim can fall behind when it runs into performance issues, stuttering slows down time. I’ve ‘lost’ over 16 minutes on long (9 hour flights) with performance issues. The time displayed in the weather menu is sim time, which normally goes in step with the actual time but is not synced up.
Sim rate slows everything down or speeds everything up and is reflected in sim time. (Live weather is still retrieved at the actual ‘real’ time, so doesn’t match up anymore if you mess with time, morning fog in the afternoon stuff)
Pausing the game however does not pause time. Everything keeps moving (at the current sim rate) except your plane. This isn’t reflected in flight time, thus if you pause for a break your flight time will be wrong.
Your logged flight time seems to be based on the time you spend in game. So pauses are included, but if you use time acceleration it logs a shorter flight than possible.