MSP Hint of the Month for September 2011

Our Hint of the Month for July 2011 about the use of aircraft lights elicited some interesting and spirited discussion among several of our most experienced pilots. While there was general agreement about the use of the NAV, BCN and STB lights, there was some disagreement about some of the details about use of the TAXI and LDG lights. I will be reviewing this discussion and issuing an amendment to the July Hint, so stay tuned.

For the September Hint, I would like to discuss the use of the "Save Flight" feature in MSFS. Every so often I receive a message from one of our pilots saying that he completed such and such a flight but didn't log it because he crashed on landing. I applaud this response (not the crash, but the decision not to log the flight). I have found myself in that position on a number of occasions. Of couse, you can overcome this problem in a number of ways: you might become a better pilot so you never crash (I have been working on this for 8 years), you might turn off crash detection in MSFS so you don't know that you would have crashed, or you might just fail to mention the fact in your PIREP. I used to simply repeat the whole flight. That ate up a lot of extra time without either fattening my logbook or teaching me very much. Then I noticed a comment from Paul Deans in our Forum. Every so often during a flight, go up to the top menu and "Save" the flight with a title something like "SPA 1423 enroute", a half an hour later do the same thing, using the same title (the second will overwrite the first) and so on at half hour intervals throughout the flight. Now if something unexpected happens, i.e. you have to go to bed, your MSFS crashes to the desktop, or you crash, you can simply reboot, load the saved flight and continue from your last saved point. I try to remember to do this at regular intervals, particularly on a long CAT VII flight where you stand to lose hours of work if you have a crash (computer or aircraft). But, I always try to do it as I start my final approach to landing. Then if I do have a tough cross wind landing and run it off the asphalt into the grass, I can quit that flight, load the saved approach and refly the landing. That way I only have to repeat the short, difficult final stage of the flight to feel OK about logging it AND I get to practice that tough landing over and over again until I learn how to do it flawlessly and I can come back to that saved flight later to keep my landing skills current on that aircraft.

I like to use Radar Contact 4 (RC4) for ATC. Recently, I learned that I could save the Radar Contact file at the same time I saved the flight and, if I save them in the same folder, I could restart both the flight and the Radar Contact ATC at the same point in the flight. That way I don't miss that congratulatory "Critique" from RC4 at the conclusion of the flight: "Excellent! Keep this up and you're goiing to put FSDO out of business"

Mike

Mike Daugherty
SPA 48
MSP Hub Manager