Hacker News Reader

Comment by martinjones | Hacker News Reader

This does sounds like a solid lead - maybe the most interesting news in the last few days.

Breaking news. Most pilots with flight simulators have airports loaded into them that fall within regions in which they might fly.

I didn't see anything in the news... Was KUL-PEK a normal route for this pilot? Makes a lot of sense to have and practice on runways in the area you take off or land into the most.

No it doesn't. That would be like a programmer writing "Hello World" in C over and over again.

That would be like a programmer writing "Hello World" in C if landing commercial aircraft was as easy, inconsequential and irrelevant to the main part of their job as writing "Hello World", or if programmers worked in a highly-regulated regime where their lives were dependent on absolutely perfect execution of repetitive "Hello World"-type tasks. Or indeed, if piloting and programming were remotely comparable activities.

Stretching the analogy beyond it's elastic breaking point and devolving in to pedantry: Good job! I was in essence pointing out, being both a pilot and a programmer, that pilots and programmers have zero interest in doing the same procedure over and over again in their leisure time just for shits and giggles. I don't practice landing at Van Nuys airport on the simulator in a Citation because that's old hat. I practice landing on the simulator at a scenic airport in the Swiss alps, with 40 knot cross winds, low cloud layer, just at dawn because it is fun...

There are times when pedantry is called for, one of which is when people are insinuating there's anything remotely unusual about a pilot playing with some nearby airports on a home flight sim; whether you intended to contribute towards the excessive levels of FUD on here or not.

The Maldives are pretty darn scenic, the landing strip is a tiny island and a 777-rated pilot wouldn't have been flying there with MAS; some of his friends might have been. And even landing somewhere as run-of-the mill as Changi can be made less dull by doing it on the military runway in a storm - it's a lot easier on a sim when you don't have to explain your actions to ATC

And there are enough plane spotters amongst the aviation enthusiast community to suggest that the real aviation industry equivalent of reimplementing of "Hello World" has its fanbase :-)

I'm actually surprised that most simulators don't have many if not all major runways (1000+ meters) loaded on them.

There are essentially two simulators that the majority of pilots use. Microsoft FSX and Xplane. They both have pretty much all of the airports in the world installed by default. The extras you install are the actual scenery, but the airports are there without any manual installation.

Sadly, sim software has been getting less and less user friendly as it becomes more of a niche product. Flight sims used to be a major gaming category in the early years of computers, but now with the gaming market having become so ruthlessly competitive, sim developers have fewer casual customers.

Nowadays, most sim enthusiasts are semi-pro pilots and aerospace engineers. The biggest draw of sims is being able to fly aircraft that you normally couldn't, like the A-10 which is masterfully simulated down to its tiniest details by DCS in DCS Warthog.

This sounds like a prejudgment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com