The best statement I have seen here sofar is Murray´s: "Don´t use PP to learn to fly a plane". Many of us jump from one plane to another and fly it, or try to, without even bothering to get a good look at the panel. It works good when you are not being monitored because too many details are ignored.
I maybe an old-fashioned pilot (I got my pilot license back in Jan 1969) but I can assure you guys that the procedures remain the same in real life. Now, why it should be different in the sim world? I have said many times that the beauty of the flight simulation is the possibility we have to fly as real as possible. But the problem is that we want to fly as real as possible without performing as real as possible.
Since the very beginning I fell in love with EHM because Propilot. At that time I used (and still do) and application called FS Flight Keeper and for the first time in my 25 years flying FS I found out that I was a very lousy FS pilot. But the whole thing remained between FS FK and myself. FS Passengers is less demanding technically speaking than FSFK but posed some other pressures which are not that bad.
This said, here is my idea for the next PP version:
1.- Capability to monitor pilots carreer in EHM.
This simply means that whenever a pilot is a candidate to be promoted to another rank and is allowed to fly a new fleet, he or she should choose what plane or planes would be the ones to fly.
Once this is confirmed, the pilot MUST fly at leas 10 hours WITHOUT crashing in the new plane. This special training session should be monitored by PP. I am not a computer genius but what I know is that many things can be done today with a computer.
There should be a minimum passing score to get promoted.
Only after getting this 10 hours logged in PP and with a score above the passing leve , the pilot would then be promoted.
This could reduce the crash rate we have.
To finish with this point and speaking about crashes, could it be possible for the MT to make the crashing reports public more or less like the NTSB does? This could help other pilots to learn from others. I realise this is a little bit touchy and that´s why it is only a suggestion.
2.- Capability to monitor the fuel usage.
Many has been said about this issue so I will not get in the details except for one thing:
I am not very sure about how PP calculates fuel usage. For example, if you have a look at the PIREPS for the Kuala Lumpur-Bahrain leg, you can notice a wide variety of quantities. How is that for the same type of plane, the same distance and almost the same flying time the fuel usage in one is 200,000 lbs while the other is about 100,000 lbs?
Sorry for the length of this post but I had to take advantage that my boss is out of the office today and I could not wait until tonight.
Regards,
Hector
