Flight Simulator Airports
Flight Simulator Airports
A bustling hive of activity, the airport is the central hub to your flight experience both in real life and flight simulators. Airports also provide some of flight’s greatest challenges and most thrilling rides.
Being able to safely bring your aircraft to a gentle rest on the ground is a great enough challenge in of itself. But, when other factors adds to the difficulty it requires a steady hand, nerves of steel, and the proper training to see you make it back safe. But once you are back on ole Terra Firma, you have to taxi to the right gate! Otherwise your textbook landing is a little pointless and your passengers miss their connecting flights, or worse still their ride home.
Flight simulator airports are about as close to the actual thing as you are going to find without actually going to an airport. Oddly enough, they simulate what goes on at an actual airport. How cool is that? Pretty cool.
Airport Landing and Take Off Practice
The airport part of a flight simulator is often one people just skip over and don’t think twice about. I submit this, next time you are a little bored with your flight sim, try putting the settings on “crowded” and taking off from Chicago O’Hare or JFK.
Yeah, the game just changed a lot. Getting her back down in those conditions is even more of a knuckle biter, because you just invested 20 minutes to an hour of your life just getting there. While the gamer has the added benefit of a do-over, the time spent trying to do it all perfectly is an investment in frustration is you can’t close the deal.
The time of day is a major factor in how dangerous it is to land a craft. While lighting in and around airports makes it easier to land safely, night time landings are still a skill that takes time to perfect.
Airport Dangers
Once again the flight simulator airports are pretty helpful, allowing for pilots to learn how to deal with low light conditions and fly in darkness in different weather conditions. These are two skills that you want to have and can intensify your gaming experience.
Some airports are just innately dangerous. This, of course, is not by design but due to factors that may have been overlooked during construction or that have arose since the opening of the airport.
These can be dangerous crosswinds from nearby mountains during various times of the year; short runways by modern standards; the airport being surrounded by cliffs or hills; or a runway near the ocean requiring a low, slow approach just above the waves.
While these may sound like extreme cases, there are airports that pilots fly in and out of everyday which has these dangers surrounding them. By accurately reproducing these conditions in the flight simulator airport, pilots are able to take on these dangers and learn how to cope with them in safety.
Airport Emergency Situations
Finally, using these flight simulator airports pilots can learn how to handle emergency situations around them.
For example landing with a mechanical failure at an airport is highly dangerous. From damaged landing gear, to faulty instruments the flight simulator airport is the only place pilots can really learn how to cope with these situations.
Teaching pilots how to land, or in some cases make a controlled crash, with the minimal amount of risk possible is only possible in a flight simulator’s airport.
Next time you are flying in the virtual skies, take a moment to ponder the role the flight simulator airport has in your daily flying experience. It is far more than just a start and end to your journey, but can provide for some of the most exhilarating and terrifying moments in your flight.
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