Flight Simulator Screen Shots

Sometimes, just for fun, I'll kill the engines (Ctrl+Shift+F1) and try to make a successful dead-stick landing, wherever I happen to be. Here's a shot of my Beechcraft Baron with feathered propellers, while I'm looking for a place to land.		Another view of the Baron dead-stick landing. The pilot seems to have a worried look on his face, and this emergency landing ultimately was not successful. I never did find a good place to land (in the middle of suburbia) and wound up crashing into buildings. Oh well, throw that airplane away and get another one.

I was fooling around with a Boeing 737 and landed it gear-up, just to see what happens. Flight Simulator does a particularly bad job of simulating gear-up landings. Although the airplane slides to a stop, it never comes to a complete stop and keeps jittering up and down and making crash noises continuously. For this landing, after the 737 slid to a stop, the airplane wound up slowly moving backwards and leaving a trail of smoke and sparks as it jittered up and down.		The result of a water landing. If you land in the water too vigorously, the program declares a "crash" and restores the airplane to flying height, even if you have crash mode turned off. Therefore, you have to land very gently at minimum speed, in which case the airplane slides to a stop on the surface of the water, rests for a moment or two, then the tail tips up and the airplane starts to sink. Before it completely sinks, the program declares a "crash" and restores the airplane to flying height. One very obvious flaw with the simulation is that the engine keeps running even as the airplane sinks.

Horsing around with the Beechcraft Baron, trying out unusual attitudes. You can click on this picture to enlarge it; use your browser's "back" command to return.		I noticed when landing the Lockheed Vega that it is nose-heavy when braking. If you brake too hard, the airplane flips over, and the program declares a crash and straightens out the airplane. So the secret is to use just enough braking to tilt the airplane on to its nose just as it stops rolling. This is gentle enough that the program doesn't declare a crash. You can also do this with the Piper Cub.