Cockpit Follies - in a Flight Simulator
“I always wondered how anybody could learn to navigate and fly a humongous jet plane—especially one filled with nervous passengers. The only time I got to fly in a real cockpit was as a courier for the long gone Flying Tiger Airlines. It was in DC8 cargo jet loaded with footballs. The flight was from New York’s LaGuardia to San Francisco, and I’ll never forget the pilot looking out the window and asking the co-pilot, “Is that plane coming right toward us…above us? Or below us?”
Some years later after moving to Montreal, I made a friend who worked for CAE and offered to arrange a flight for me in a flight simulator. I flew at the chance. It would make a great read for my Innocents Abroad column in The Montreal Gazette.”
I'd never landed in a blizzard before. But two hours after leaving my apartment in Montreal on a hot morning in August, I was bumping through Tokyo airspace with blobs of snow whizzing at the windshield of the Japan TransOcean Air No. 737-400 I was flying.
A minute before I'd taken the controls, we'd landed on the island of Shimogi. The sky was a gummy grey. Lightning flashed an eerie green as volcanos smoked on the horizon. The runway was crisscrossed by fresh tread marks. I looked down at the body of water and foolishly called it a lake.
"That's the Pacific Ocean," evaluation pilot Thomas Brilotti corrected me.
Brilotti touched a button and we were cruising at 35,000 feetagain. Then it was night, then dawn, then day, then dusk - as if we'd leap-frogged times zones.
"Pull the throttle when we get to 140, and then turn," Brilotti instructed.
I banked a sharp right, then jerked left. Suddenly I felt the nose diving down and my stomach swooping up. Was it because we were over Japan that I was flying like a kamikaze pilot?
"Pull her up again!" Brilotti said, taking the control column.
How did those early pilots ever fly without radar and all these space-age knobs and dials? Bush-pilot Beryl Markham had even done it in the dark, finding her way around Africa at night like a bat. In her 1942 memoir, West With the Night, she wrote: "When you can see the branches of trees from a cockpit, and the shape of rocks no bigger than your own hands, you are too close."
I knew I was too close. I could smell the sulphurous fumes of the volcanos and could have eyeballed Godzilla over Tokyo. But I was too distracted by the scenery to watch the controls. I was admiring the snow-covered mountains, and wondering how the virtual-reality folks at CAE Electronics re-created the blizzard so the snowflakes came whizzing at you as they do in a real storm.
I wondered how they linked the flight simulator's detailed, textured visuals, motion cues and audio input —"Close flaps! Close flaps!"— to the physical sensations of ascent, descent, turns, turbulence and landing impact, so that you could make yourself really airsick if you hadn't popped a Gravol.
With the mere touch of the image-generator button, you could switch continents, airports, altitudes, speeds, times of day and weather and air-traffic conditions, and simulate aviation mishaps like fires and failed engines.
Like that kid in the candy shop, I wanted it all - windshears and microbursts, hail and thunderstorms, hurricanes over the South Pacific; near collisions over JFK with jets circling me like sharks around prey, to land in pea-soup fog at Heathrow, to fly through volcanic ash and sandstorms over Dubai; to land in Quito, Xian Yang, Guanhan, Kunmin, Honolulu - and still get home before breakfast.
But we'd only five minutes to go. At 8 a.m. the "flight" I'd requested more than year earlier would end. The real inspector from Japanese Overseas would arrive to test-fly the $14-million simulator (a six-week task) before it was shipped to Tokyo.
My flight had been tame compared with that of my colleague Pierre Tougas, who had once "flown" to Norita, Japan, with his son Mike, a U.S. navy fighter pilot. Mike pushed a button, and when another plane came out of nowhere, he went into barrel roll as he does in his F-18 Hornets.
"You can't do that on a commercial airline with 300 people aboard!" the evaluation pilot said with a laugh. He congratulated Mike on his three-point landing, but told him he'd wiped out a hangar, half a parking lot and a Wendy's.
We were out over the East China Sea when we heard at knock at the door. The flight was suddenly over. Sayonara Tokyo.
Climbing out of the shiny white contraption, I peeked at the calligraphic collimated mirror that had projected the wrap-around scenics for our trip. Ralph Thompson, CAE's visual-systems marketing director, thoughtfully loaded me down with colorful brochures and company presentations to take home.
CAE makes 80% of the world's simulators, and the hangar-size factory room fluttered with the bright flags of CAE's client nations, from Mexico to Malaysia. We'd been testing a commercial airline simulator, but CAE also supplies to NASA and the defence forces of 20 countries.
Did you hear the urban legend going around this week, about the supersonic jet fighters that have been shooting themselves down, flying into their own bullets while in a dive? (It really did happen to a Grumman F-11 Super Tiger off eastern Long Island on Sept. 21, 1956.) Well CAE's "user-friendly" combat mission simulator has put an end to that problem. And their civilian aircraft simulators keep pilots in shape for handing a variety of flying conditions, from difficult to disastrous.
Getting into my car and driving onto Boulevard Côte de Liesse felt strange. The sky was a gummy gray. I thought I saw volcanos smoking in the distance. I half-expected my old Volkswagen camper to pick up and fly.
