I’ve been flight simming a long time and I’ve never done a long haul flight. I guess I’m more of a regional guy…an hour or so is long enough and then I want to move on and do another flight somewhere else.
You guys that do these long haul 10 hour flights…how do you do them? Do you take off and go to bed, go do housework, mow the lawn?
I guess what I’m getting at is you certainly don’t look at the gauges for hours, right? Do you go back and check the status and go on again? Thanks!
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Well… Every time I plan a real long haul B747 flight, I’ll set it up and fly for an hour before going to bed, then wake up and see that at some point it had executed a perfect CTD. VIDP to KORD has yet to be conquered!
Wow. Must be frustrating! 
I’m more of a regional flyer also!
I’ll usually throw some music on and recline my seat back a little while in VR with autopilot on.
It’s been plenty of times I’ve fallen asleep with my VR headset on.
If I get really antsy I’ll simply use the teleport function on the VFR Map for VR addon I use and place the aircraft about 30-50 miles out of the approach zone of the destination.
Most of the time I’m moving between seats in the cockpit staring out of the windows like an excited dog on a car ride admiring the cloud sky and terrain scenery.
The longest flight I’ve actually sat through in flight simming was 2.5 hours on autopilot and that felt like forever. My longest manual hand flown flight was an hour and forty minute Miami to Kingston, Jamaica trip. I tell you what there isn’t anything like the feeling an accomplishment of enduring a whole flight in real time without any teleport/time cheats or going AFK ! It really makes the destination landings very special.
I rarely do long haul flights (let’s say longer than 3 - 4 hours), maybe a couple times per year, so when I do it is a bit of a happening. That means when I do it I stay engaged for that flight.
There will be food and snack breaks of course, but a lot of the time is spent in the chair doing flying chores: navigation follow up, weather follow up, performance and fuel follow up, taking any actions necessary like a deviation for buildups or an altitude change for a smoother ride or planned step climbs, maybe power setting changes depending on fuel and time status, tons of time spent looking out the window enjoying the scenery and following up on a non-aviation map to find out what I am looking at, taking some screenshots. Refreshing my memory on some chapter in the manuals when there is some spare time. Pretty much doing what I would do in real life.
Many years ago when I more routinely did long haul flights it became more set it and forget it, leave it running and come back and check on it every once in a while. Now I don’t find that very enjoyable anymore, if I am not going to fly then why am I flying? But that is just my opinion, back then I had fun doing it that way.
Relax to music, I love electronic.
Yeah, that’s the way I feel. To each his own, but I get more satisfaction from doing low flight level regional flights all over the world than flying from Frankfurt Main to JFK at FL420 for example.
Spend the time here, on the forum.
Go out watch movies etc.
I just don’t do them.
I don’t get a lot of free time so many flights are under an hour. That is one of the limitations of the Navigraph survey for me - they don’t seem to account for those of us who don’t do long flights on MSFS. I have probably done upwards of 800 flights but I doubt that more than five were 1.5 hours or more.
Wife brings me inflight food service 
I also don’t often do long flights. The longest so far was the Asobo to Microsoft challenge. It’s about 10:30 hours. I did it last Super Bowl Sunday.
I did stay in the plane for a while for the great sunsets. They I did what other have mention, read forums, etc.
I watch the game and from time to time would go check to make sure all was okay.
The arrival timing was perfect. I was in the cockpit for the last 45 minutes of the flight.
I did the flight in the Longitude. I had posted to the mega thread, but I think they started a new thread and the old phots are gone.
Maybe I post a few tomorrow. Already in bed and read the forums on my iPad waiting for my sleeping pills to kick in.
I have done long haul flights on VATSIM. There you are not allowed to leave the cockpit. So you do what normal pilots do, except having a 2 hours nap while the 3rd pilot has taken your seat…
Exhausting.
The best idea is listening to audiobooks and Creepypastas.
I play the Microsoft solitaire collection on my cellphone our watch YouTube our even play on my Xbox one
If it is a 6~7 hours flight or so, I would set AP and AI traffic at cruise alt, stay around and listen to conferences, watch videos, cook, read the news. And check at times where I am, whether in the sim or LNM.
When it comes close to 10 hours, which is quite common to me, I would just get to cruise altitude, check AP and AI traffic and go to work or bed. Next time I came around, it would be time to prepare for descent.
You mean during the boring parts?
I have mapped the Sim Rate “Increase” and “Decrease” buttons to the HAT of the Yoke for exactly this.
During the start I watch the scenery from various windows of the plane, then go into the cockpit, make sure (trimming all three axis)) the plane flies straight and level (the Junkers has no real autopilot) and of course high enough, then accellerate time to 4 times normal.
You do not wish to leave the pilot seat during that, as the slightest twitch might turbo the plane into something.
When I arrive close to the target I closely watch the clock (esspecially the seconds in the little dial) and return time flow to normal.
This I also do when I see the plane derivating from the course too much (wind, user errors and such), correct anything, then accelerate again. Beware of the automated pause on XBox, though.
For the little streches there still is the manual to read (loaded it onto an ebook reader) and the forum of course.
So I guess it’s safe to say there are not a lot of people doing long haul flights on Vatsim? I envy anyone that can stay in the cockpit for that length of time! I simply don’t have that kind of time to dedicate to it…thus the reason for doing regional flights.
I think I may try one just for fun on the weekend just before bedtime and see how it goes. I’m usually playing on the Xbox on Saturday nights when the wife goes to bed anyway.