My favorite at the CAE DFW Ultra sim was that it was so worn out that the flap handle had too much play in it…and would sort of wobble a bit during normal sim movement. As a result…you’d often get activation of the HYD BYPASS annunciator (orange) during the takeoff roll… And we’d continue to the takeoff below V1 because we knew that’s what it was. Talk about negative training. The FlightSafety Ultra sim down in San Antonio was a bit better maintained. And the PC-24 sim at FlightSafety DFW is still pretty new…so looks and acts pretty good. It is the only PC-24 sim in the United States though…so it is booked solid.
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But…but…these sims are Study Level…. 
This is why I tend to quietly chuckle at the people who are so demanding with what they consider a ‘study level’ sim aircraft should be.
I get what you are saying about flying the airplane every day… something I don’t do. I take the boss where he wants to go, and then sit for several days until it is time to fly home. It’s a rough job, but someone has to do it 
. Flying is like riding a bike to some extent. You never forget how, but the more you do it, the more finesse you tend to have.
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LOL you’re bringing back memories! The XL sim had a left throttle cutoff that was wore out so at idle it would go to cutoff on its own if you took your hand off of it. Finally fixed this time around.
Most of the time there’s at least two moments where you both turn around to the instructor and say “is that a simism, or did you really fail the blah blah blah?”
One year both FMS kept dropping into dead reckoning mode, while we were trying to fly the RNAV/VNAV approach. The instructor couldn’t figure out how to fix it, so he had us go ahead a fly it anyway! 
You can’t make this stuff up!
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Reading this honestly is depressing…Maintenance should be much better than that.
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@WarPig , @BeachAV8R and @PaulRix
Thank you for posting stuff like that. For y’all that might just be annoying parts of your job, but for people like me they are an intriguing glimpse into a world we are interested in but that is mostly out of reach.
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Yes, but commercial sims run day and night, all year. No stringent flight safety demands on their maintenance, like an airframe has. Every minute of maintenance is money lost…
Been a maintainer, been a dev, been an integration specialist.
There’s always time to change a piece of cockpit.
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Well, it sure seems like they keep that time at a bare minimum…
Yeah…like @Troll mentioned (and I know you were once a sim-tech @komemiute - still are?) - the civil aviation schedules lately have been so jam packed that I think there is only one assigned training block dedicated to maintenance. And as you probably know, the parts that go into the sim generally have to be OEM parts - so the sim techs run into the same problems that us line operators are running into - lack of parts particularly for older airframes like the Ultra. So if a tube goes bad or some piece of hardware physically breaks in the cockpit, if they don’t have a backup on hand, it can be a struggle to find a replacement. So often I guess they try to rig them up so they work mostly correctly. I think the parts that take the most abuse are things like the emergency brake handle…which was never designed by Cessna to be used 10 or 12 times a day…so the hardware that it consists of is just not able to withstand that many cycles. It must be hard to keep all those parts working.
The best is when the sim just gives up and falls off motion. Haha… We had that happen in the PC-24 sim a couple times last year. It is abrupt and somewhat violent. Enough so that the training center manager contacted us after our training to ask if we had suffered any injuries…probably to learn if they were going to get sued down the road. LOL - no…we were fine.
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I was and I still am in fact. I do helicopter now.
It’s just that negative training is so dangerous that it makes my hair stand on my back.
(Or whatever way the saying goes)
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I manhandled the sim into submission once. Got stuck controls after departure on a immediate turn schedule. We split the controls and mine were free, so I started the turn. Damn those controls were heavy! I wrestled that virtual aircraft out of there by pure will and muscle power, which was a lot more some 15-20 years ago! Then the sim quit and settled on the jacks. The instructor leaned forward and wondered what was going on.
We didn’t catch it, but the split control lever had snapped back into dual again. But in our minds the controls were split, just very heavy. Turns out I was fighting against the sim servo motors the whole time, until it gave up. I won!
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It is.
But the number of times I’ve been told ”it’s just the sim. Continue!"…
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SMDH.
(Yes, forum it is a complete sentence)
It’s gonna be quiet tomorrow with the “storm of the century blowing in” 
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Our country names every storm now. It’s ridiculous. “Rainstorm Jenna is moving up the eastern seaboard…and we can expect…um…rain from it. Yeah…” Scramble the weather team with their measuring beakers…!
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It’s what we used to call Winter…. Don’t the press love to sell a story.
We’ve brought our ewe’s in as they’ve had a week of awful wet and wind and we can’t risk them losing weight, it’s a week or so ahead of lambing, but better safe than sorry.
Aside from that, we may lose power for a few hours, but really… when you see what weather can really do, I cringe with the naming of storms in the UK.
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Jenna is very wet…… #weatherreportfauxpas
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morow morning and its totally calm there at the moment.
But our school in the Thames Valley is on about closing
I’m driving a 16 ft Curtainside double decker with 12ton on top deck.
Yay gonna be fun tomorrow morning
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But you’ll be sensible because you have experience and you evaluate all those risks on a daily basis anyway.
Stay safe.
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