Flight Simulator Training

I thought flying and being a pilot would be cool as a child, but was told pilot's can't wear glasses. This turns out to be true only for military pilots. According to FAR Part 61, civilian pilots just need to be correctable to 20/20. In fact, the Naval Academy has recently begun offering PRK to cadets for free, and a surprising number took them up on it.

But of course, I was a snot-nosed-punk in the 80's before vision correction surgery was available and no one pointed out that the 20/20 rule was only for military, so I settled for flight simulators. The first ones were pretty rudimentary, and the ones I recall were all combat. As computers doubled in power every 18 months, the simulations got better and more complex. When Falcon 3.0 came out in 1991 by MicroProse, it included a manual that was over 250 pages thick including how to fly a pattern for landing and combat tactics. Falcon 3.0 remained the ultimate in flightsim realism for years. Although MS had already released 4 versions of their Flight Simulator game, it wasn't until 2000 that they developed a popular following.

I played with it a little, but didn't really get hooked until 2004 ("A Century of Flight") was released. Like many others, I demo'd FSX (2006) and decided to stick with fs2004. As of January 2009, MS announced that they were disbanding the FS team and ending the product line.

The two mainsteam heirs at the moment are X-Plane and FlightGear. X-Plane is more polished and easier to get started, but if you can get FlightGear working, it's free and has gobs of add-ons that are also free. Both have a small selection of training flights and options like weather and terrain imported from official surveys.

For official training, the ASA has their "On Top" program for IFR proficiency, which isn't cheap, but does tie into certified training hardware. You still need an instructor for the time to count and about $5k in controllers.

Saitek has recently come out with an array of cool flight sim controllers and these little LCD displays which can be programmed as instruments.




Seriously, the day I lose my medical, I'm probably getting the whole line of flight controllers and instruments from Saitek. I may still talk myself into it to practice for my Instrument rating.

FS2004 actually had a fairly good tutorial and flying lessons included, not the least of which was Rod Machado narrating the flying lessons. A piece of advice if you start with flight sims is that trimming to hold an altitude without having to push or pull on the yoke/stick is much, much easier in real life than in the simulator.

Spending some time on a good flight sim with a simple aircraft like the ubiquitous Cessna 172 can really help you get some of common misconceptions out of the way before you start burning avgas. Things like adding power if you're coming in too low instead of pulling back is important and easier to learn on a computer in some ways since you are in fear for your life.

There is a huge community for flightsim fans and even online airlines with real people putting in time as virtual ATC. This site is the best resource I've found for files and add-ons for the MS flightsim. There are a number of additional aircraft to download and collections of missions where you fly into challenging airports in difficult weather. But finding training missions is difficult. The ones that came with FS2004 are great, but only up to a point. The IFR missions seem to be a huge leap. I can complete them, but not in any fashion that would be approved by the FAA.

Then while searching the web trying to nail down ILS vs. Localizer approaches, I found this amazing site which is filled with great history and theory of air navigation by Charles Wood and has lessons dressed up as a continuing story where you're a pilot for a small, New England charter service. The site includes files to download with chunks of sectionals approach plates and other forms that you would use just like a real pilot. He also gives you the weather and other MS flightsim settings for each flight. It's not really like the training missions in the program, but in some ways it's better for a real-world pilot or aspiring pilot. That is, one with a computer, MS flightsim and a color printer.

While putting all the link together for this post, I also found "MS Flight Sim as a Training Aid" which looks pretty good, by Bruce Williams which includes a CD with dozens of training flight missions. And a much bigger book, "MS Flightsim X for Pilots Real World Training" by Jeff Van West and Kevin Lane-Cummings that comes in at over 700 pages doesn't include a CD, but directs you to the publishers website to download them.

I haven't tried either yet, but they both look worthwhile.

system census and ssh-keyscan

A fairly common problem for admins is to check a list of systems to see if they are alive in some script.

The most common solution is to ping each system and check for a response.
For example (the domain and exact IP address are anonymized)
# ping -c 3 frey
PING frey.domain (IP) 56(84) bytes of data. --- frey.domain ping statistics --- 3 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 1999ms

# ping -c 3 freya
PING freya.domain (IP) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from freya.domain (IP): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.044 ms
64 bytes from freya.domain (IP): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.045 ms
64 bytes from freya.domain (IP): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.045 ms
--- freya.domain ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.044/0.044/0.045/0.007 ms

#

I usually just use ping -c 3 host | tail -2 | head -1 | awk '{print $4}' for look at the next to last line and the number of packets received.

Some problems with ping are:

• Some OS's (depending on version and security settings) require root access to use ping.
• Some hardware (esp server class NIC's) will reply to the ICMP ping requests even if the system itself is unresponsive.
• Many firewalls and some routers block ICMP traffic.
• Some packets are always going to be lost, so you can't just ping each system once.
• It is slow; you have to wait for n pings if it's ok, or n timeouts for down systems.

I've recently been querying the system for its ssh public key which requires the system be up and responsive to get a reply. It is also fairly quick and never gets dropped like ICMP and UDP traffic.
# ssh-keyscan -t rsa freya
# freya SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_5.0
freya ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEAr4+j538gsyn9DwGbh4q0V2ACyamef7SPRGtFwlgnO7
qmQbLLo/rt4bOpCJxDE7bsen5uyLlYjU5tRPS16QbryI7j4bi0setMNsbwa4V/Ode4WJhHQt5addPPG/5oYD
qs4B4qMdnGUt7VGgSFuI90tOwHp/FRXEvYa8SW6SbHZc9N2vDZQWHkKqyUV1WNnn1ZfztAjYo6qJtG2hMhvX
BGEsQ3jhHv7XOPM4Ls60wExT+oNTz6ykNQXBA2C5matoDE7jWWo0uc+IPPdALN1zPx9TIRw/PbTQhOM/pEEm
SOgDkhoa2kNNO38fAf6tCOUJtx37FmGlXSWIbPkYt/MDs8nw==

To just get a yes or no, you can use grep -c for the hostname. I usually use something like this to give me a response including the ssh version:
# ssh-keyscan -t rsa frey 2>&1 | grep "^#" | cut -c 2-

# ssh-keyscan -t rsa freya 2>&1 | grep "^#" | cut -c 2-
freya SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_5.0

Of course, the downside of using ssh is that you need a ssh daemon running on your target systems, but the reduction of false positives is nice, and you can use the output to do things like populate your ssh keylist or to make sure that the systems's hostname agrees with the DNS entry for that IP.

Tech and flying

The commercial passenger aviation industry has been telling us for sometime to turn off all electronic devices during take-off and landing. As a pilot, I know that these are the two phases of flight that are most critical both in terms of requiring focused concentration from the pilot and in terms of the aircraft being most vulnerable since it is slow (controls are sluggish) and low (there are things to hit and limited recovery time).

Looking at it from a passenger standpoint, I seem to have a choice between the plane being extremely (alarmingly) fragile, it being some bogus rule imposed for no good reason, or some other absurd reason.

[http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/10/30/]

The truth is that 99.9% of the time or more, the EM produced by electronics isn't going to be at all detectable, and the other times will be slightly annoying like a mosquito's buzz.

I don't have any problem with having everything off and sterile from turning onto the runway to 5000' AGL and from the same altitude down and until we turn off onto a taxiway. Basically, anytime the engines are producing a significant amount of power and the retractable landing gear is down.

And there's got to be some better way to phrase it so that passengers will be happy to help instead of grudgingly compliant and annoyed.
For everyone's benefit, please turn off all electronic devices now so that your pilot can have the best possible radio and radar reception during the most critical parts of flight, the take-off and landing. We will let you know in a few minutes when you may turn on devices approved by the FAA.

By the way, I don't know how cell phones and towers work when the phones are 7 miles in the air and moving over 300 mph; however, they get a great signal in my plane -- the ambient noise is the problem. I suppose it depends on how closely spaced cell towers are will dictate what happens as you fly overhead and hop from one tower to the next. It turns out that the FCC is who has regulations forbidding cell phones on planes. The FAA doesn't care. I would imagine that the rules are enforced by the airlines as more of a protection against legal action from the FCC than any safety reasons.

From a personal standpoint, I'd rather not someone sitting near me on a long flight chattering away unless the airplane is equipped with a "cone of silence" in addition to those little oxygen masks.

Being a computer geek, I do habitually carry a lot of tech gear and it doesn't always get shut off before flight. I have noticed that I can actually hear my phone's acknowledgment on my radio when I do get an incoming call before it ever rings, but nothing loud enough to keep me from hearing ATC.

[From: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20090611&mode=classic]