I watched TV, ready some aviation related articles or just have look outside the window (of the plane) to enjoy the beautiful scenery. It’s actually quiet relaxing to have a slow paced game.
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I never use it. Tried it with one version of the old FS. It took something away from the game, felt like cheating. You can’t use it in real life. If point A to point B requires 4 hours of real flight time, then that’s what I’ll do. When I have to leave the machine for a while, I’ll pause it.
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I go to work to pass the time until I can get back to the sim.
Joking aside…
At the moment I’m bush flying alot trying to navigate by landmarks and maps (flightsim.to for the bush trips). Before that I got into the flight planning and long haul jets. But what I like most in any flight sim is studying the planes get to know all the little details .
On another note, I like to get to know the geography of our planet during long haul flights and you know, kinda then get lost in reading about history or culture of a particular town or city I currently fly over.
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I much prefer actually flying shorter low altitude routes.
However, when I engage heading mode over the flatter bits of Europe or water bodies I tend to take a few Duolingo lessons.
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I actually also fell asleep once during cruise!
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I definitely don’t. I fly in real time. If it’s a 12 hour long haul flights. Then it’s flown at 12 hour real time. It adds hours to my logs and more content for my YouTube. Hahahah.
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Before every flight, I turn on all of the failure options and set the time for the failure for each of them to something like 1-1000. This means that I do not get a failure during every flight, but I will get one from time to time. Doing this forces me to monitor all of the aircraft systems throughout the entire flight.
In addition to monitoring for failures, I’m also always keeping several steps ahead of the aircraft. This includes setting up expected radio frequencies, setting up my vhf nav radios (for backup even if I’m using GPS) to verify my location, reviewing my next fix, reviewing the anticipated arrival and approaches. Reviewing the arrival airport map to determine what taxiway I believe that I will turn on and which direction that should be. Reviewing the taxi routing that I will probably been given to my parking spot so that I’m familiar when I arrive. Oh, and never forgetting to watch for those failures.
There is a lot that should be done while en-route and doing these things should keep anyone busy. Anyway, that is what I do during the cruise phase of my flights.
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No need to leave if you want to sleep.
IRL one of both pilots is usually sleeping during the first 50% of the cruise and the other one the remaining 50%.
Any yes, it does happen that the one who is supposed to stay awake also falls asleep in his seat…
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Lol, even last night I fell asleep on my seat on my 2 hour flight. I woke up when the ATC tells me to descend. Hahaha.
I leave my AI copilot to have the conn.
That makes complete sense. Having failures off, as I have now, takes a lot of the real-world uncertainty out of it. Nice idea, thanks.
I’m never getting on a real plane again 
Many years ago I did an around the world flight in an RAF Comet and some of the students in the school where I taught sponsored the flight and we raised almost £200 for the baby ward at the local hospital. My memory is not so good these days but I think it took 53 hours not non-stop but I had to promise to end each leg with a landing somewhere in other words I was n’t allowed to save in mid flight.
My wife had told her colleagues at work what I was upto and on the day I landed back in the UK I had my wife and several of her colleagues stood behind me complete with a bottle of champagne to celebrate. Just a tad over the top but great fun I never repeated the round the world again the once was enough.
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Very nice idea. I would like to do that but I would like some visual representation of the flight. You get the idea - some way of showing my progress around the world.
I know things like navigraph have moving maps (which is a nice way of seeing which places you are near) but something that tracks and stores my progress would be amazing.
How about something like Flight Recorder? (flightsom.to free addon)
reading (in this forum) and enjoying the view
That’s what I’ve been doing my long hauls on the sims for decades!!!
I have started doing airliners only.
Longest in MsFS being around 13 hrs so far.
I’ve joined a VA (virtual airline) as well as IVAO and VATSIM for extra immersion.
Setting up a flight (route, aircraft, flight plan) can take an hour or so until liftoff. Then depending on ATC coverage I stick around and monitor the fight. Once I am out of ATC coverage I either keep it running and monitor it on my mobile while I go workout or spend time with the family, watch shows/movies etc. or I go to sim rate 4 and do the same things mentioned above.
Usually I come to an hour before arrival and setup the arrival, active etc and re-engage with ATC if available.
If I am doing shorter flights I’ll do a turnaround or a hopping flight, everything is linked via ACARS at my virtual airline.
Cheers!
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That sounds absolutely amazing. That’s the kind of immersion I would eventually look for.
Monitoring your flight from your mobile phone is a great idea. Never heard of that before.
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On my days off I usually load up a 8-10 hour mid haul flight (787) and just do house work, read, watch movies etc etc. During work week I just maybe do a couple of hour hop (A320) and sit around the computer watching it. In my old P3D days I would do a 12 to 15hr long hauls and go to bed and come back to it in the morning.
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I only do things that are interesting in FS. If boredom were to set in, I’d stop doing “that” and do something different that’s exciting.
You paid for a toy, enjoy it.
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