The thing about military jets, and ‘military flying games’, if you like, is that very little about what you need to learn is real-life procedure, it’s just about learning what does what in the cockpit, and then you can go and shoot stuff…so you can “chuck’s-guide” your way through quite a lot and blast through the skies.
With the modern civilian tubeliners, it seems like quite a different learning exercise - operating the plane is a lot about the FMC, but to understand that, you need to understand quite a lot about IFR flight planning, chart reading, procedures etc. just to make the plane do what you want…so even if you’re not that concerned about doing it exactly right like in real life, there are a lot of areas one needs at least a rudimentary understanding of, just to get the “why’s” of the FMC.
What can I say…I am a modest man who has a good deal to be modest about
Trying to get the finer points of the FMC without refreshing the basics would be to climb a tree a** first, as they say…so I find myself at the Cessna factory at Wichita where I tried to learn the basics previously, 6 years ago in XP11
Over the Hump (again!) overhead Ledo and descending towards Dinjan. I just popped out from heavy clouds with some serious up/downdrafts and spectacular vistas of hilltops lurking from the clouds… but unfortunately I was hitting a wrong key combo to take screenshots so this is the first one after I realized my mistake.
Short finals to Dinjan. How short I don’t know as I was not visual with the runway. You can see that I was still flying towards the LMM and keeping the min altitude all the way to the LMM.