Tonight's Mythbusters episode was AWESOME! The question they asked was if the pilot and co-pilot of a commercial airliner suddenly dropped dead, what are the chances that Joe Q. Passenger could sit down and land the plane safely?
For anyone that knows me, you know that I love simulator video games. I love to pretend that I am drving things. Big things. Mean Things. I've got Microsoft Flight Simulator, Microsoft Train Simulator, An Apache Helicopter Simulator, A F-16 Simulator, Two Submarine Simulators, a space flight simulator. Yes, I am a geek. Julie is always scratching her head at how I could spend so much time on those things. The F-16 simulator she can understand as at least I can shoot things, but the Train simulator really baffles her.
Anyone that knows Alex, also knows that he shares the same passion for this kind of stuff. Long before this Mythbuster episode came along, he and I have asked ourselves the very same question. Could we land a plane safely knowing only where we took off from, where we were going and how much time had passed since we left? Our answer has always been a resounding YES! But we have had no real way of proving it short of it actually happening to us. Alex apparently had a line on some simulator time on the Westjet simulators they use to train their pilots, but so far it hasn't materialized.
This Mythbusters scenario is so close to the one we have floated that I have to wonder if Alex sent them the suggestion. In any case, these guys got some time in a NASA simulator and completely blew it on their own and crashed badly when given no instruction. However, they were able to land when talked through it by an air traffic controller. An interesting finding indeed.
I have said, and I still say that both Alex and I could get the plane on the ground safely and in one piece on the first try, without any instruction from somebody coaching us through the process. If anyone can hook us up with a high end simulator to try and prove it, we're all ears!
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2 comments:
Okay - that's it. From now on, I'm only flying with Darren or Alex. Are either of you free in October?
LOL Darren, that was a great episode. As soon as the episode started, I was thinking, oh man I gotta call Darren, I go grab the phone and it rings.. Darren beat me to it. Darren, you and I could totally land a plane, I mean, if the newbies were able to land it by ATC instruction, we could do it in the dark, with radio silence. I'll get us some time in the simlulator, I think we owe it to ourselves to beat Adam and Jamie on the first attempt. This just made it to my top 10 things to do before I die list.
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