After university I plan to begin flight school. I started playing this game about 4 months ago and honestly apart from some bugs here and there it’s been fantastic. I’ve been removing every assist available in the game to really get into the immersion. It truly improves the game and I advise everyone to do so. BUT the most important thing I started doing that has massively improved the immersion of this game for me is getting into doing the checklists myself. I mean cold and dark to start to take off to cruise to descent and all. This part of the game just hit me with one of the biggest lessons in aviation. FOLLOW THE CHECKLIST.
So I fell in love with flying the 737 max, I have all the other default airliners in the game and honestly I love the Boeing 737 max. It flies like a beauty and feels like I have more control.
So here the story begins. I had a flight from Miami to Manchester and I was doing my checklist. This was the first ever time I didn’t just use the shortcut button to get the plane started (737). I see this part of the preliminary preflight that says “set cruise altitude” me being naive I think they’re saying cruise altitude on the altitude selector so I ignore it and tick it. Everything goes smooth for the rest of the checklist and the flight begins.
About 15 mins into the flight I get a blaring warning. I’m panicking, I feel like I must’ve missed something in the checklist. Then I see it “CABIN ALTITUDE”, this is where all my knowledge of air crash investigation comes in. Remember when I said I ignored the set cruise and landing altitude in the checklist it hits me. I’ve certainly done something wrong. I immediately request from ATC a 10,000ft drop of flight altitude. We descend all the way down to 10,000 ft as fast as possible. At this point I’ve figured out how to fix the problem (picture in post), I change it but the alarm is still going. I have to then stay at 10,000 ft for a few minutes then I ascend again back to 35000 ft where the flight was set to be and the flight finishes with no issues.
Why am I telling this story you ask ?
Remember Helios flight 522, the ghost plane. That’s what happened to me. I hadn’t set the pressurization model selector to auto and I hadn’t set my cruise altitude. The sheer panic in me as I tried to figure out the problem. Going through the checklist seeing if I missed something was kind of surreal and a bit frightening. And this was just a simulator but imagine in real life. I felt like I kept my composure which allowed me to think back and remember what I missed that’s what basically saved my flight. I don’t know if game characters get affected by hypoxia but the I’ve seen my pilot pass out from a lot of g force of small planes so I thought after, “if I had continued that flight would everyone in the plane have died and would I have gotten a mission fail or a very bad reputation drop.
In conclusion all I’m saying is this. Fully immerse yourself in this beautiful game all we aviation nerds have been praying for. The whole situation made me feel like a pilot and has transcended me into another realm I never believed this game could reach. And remember FOLLOW THE CHECKLIST Good day.
Thank you Microsoft
