Today I spent a couple of hours playing in a fun 737 MAX simulator, from a company called AeroSim. Here’s their site, and they have a few locations around Canada I think. This isn’t a review or anything, as I didn’t pay (a friend invested in the business) so not exactly fair/impartial, but wanted to share here as an interesting time.
I didn’t really know what to expect, but it was great fun and a real brain work out. I was left to just do what I wanted and managed a couple of short flights, and then just a pick-n-mix of challenging (for me) approaches and landings. Because I’m a VR sim flyer normally it was nice to have all the physical equipment to play with (good grief I do love my switches, they felt so good). I could have spent an hour alone just hugging the FMC and doing cold starts to be honest. The set-up uses a couple of projectors on a 220 degree screen and hardware from Flight Solutions. The business makes some money doing orientation training for new pilots plus people like me that know some long words but just want to play around a bit. I declined the chance to put on the white shirt 
It all uses FSX underneath with a couple of PCs and had quite a lot of scenery installed for all the big airports. It’s not exactly ‘MSFS good-looking’ but it didn’t really matter as I was kept super busy moving stuff around. I know the PMDG 737-800 and the flows on that quite well in an amateurs’ way, so going to the MAX was fine.
I had someone in the right seat doing the Pilot Monitoring who did a great job helping me out and setting up scenarios to try out. We didn’t exactly do all the proper procedures ‘by the book’ all of the time but we did take it from cold and dark at the gate and did most of the ‘happy day, things always work’ flying. We used checklists and the stuff I had learnt from sims stood up pretty well. I do realize that not having to worry about safety for real or deal with things that don’t work is the vast majority of commercial piloting skill, so for me just to do the 5% fun bit felt great with some real buttons.
In the time I had I did some circuits of CYVR Vancouver BC, did a Visual at KSAN San Diego 27 (as I like the view and tried not to hit the parking structure), did a 26R de-rated departure for KLAS McCarran Harry Reid and then pretended we needed to go back and did a super challenging (for me) 19L RNAV landing. Then off to Heathrow for a nice ILS 27R over the city, a quick scary approach into LOWI Innsbruck in the snow, and then to finish off a bad weather take-off and landing at my favourite CYLW Kelowna. Lots of hills on that one and super high work.
The difference between VR and this where pretty big as you can imagine. Working the yoke required quite a lot of movement, and I only use a HOTAS at home. Trusting the pilot monitoring to do their part was obviously something weird for me as well, as I’m used to working both seats and the radios (VATSIM etc) and burning my brain up. I used the autopilot a lot less than I would in VR, as it seemed a shame not to push that yoke and throttle quadrant around a bit manually. Replying or making verbal call-outs was something I was also pretty bad at, but it was great to fly in tandem like that. They didn’t use real world traffic or a lot of comms, so I think that would have been a nice next step up in complexity. We did PERF INIT and the steps, but let’s just say I didn’t wait for a load sheet etc.
So yep, good fun and exhausting. It would be nice to have longer but after a couple of hours and jumping around the world trying to find approaches left my brain at 0%.
Sorry about the quality of the pics, as a bit of an afterthought. Here’s what the set-up looks like from way back (not me, just how it looks):
