Simulator I

Sunday, my friend Steve invited me to tag along with him during his flight simulator training. This is Pilot Steve, not to be confused with my other pals, Astronomy Steve and Musician Steve. I haven’t seen this Steve in fourteen months. He and his family, who we are very close to (we’re their children’s godparents), moved out to Pittsburgh three years ago. But there’s a bigger reason why I don’t see Steve that much. He flies for an unnamed Middle Eastern company primarily over the Arabian peninsula, parts of Africa, and small sections of Europe.

Once a year he’s required to take ten days off for training purposes. As it so happens, one of the most renowned training centers in the country is in a city about twenty-five miles southwest of where I live. Taking advantage of being stateside, he took his family on a mini-vacation, booking a hotel near the training facility and close to us. So, we all got to see each other and the children got to play together all weekend long. Steve got permission for me to attend one of his simulator sessions.

Wow. I was truly overwhelmed.

Wanna know what the pilot of your aircraft goes through once or twice a year to stay sharp?

All right. This is what happened, to the best of my memory. Remember, kids, I am not a professional pilot. In fact, flying makes me extremely nervous ...

…

A shuttle takes me and Steve from his hotel to this large, inconspicuous building in the midst of a gigantic office park. On the outside, it looks just like your typical, ordinary office building. When you walk through the doors (which require a pass card for entry), it still looks like a generic office building. There’s a cafeteria off to the left, flat screen teevees on the wall, a couple of rooms to the right with tables and ergonomic chairs and PC terminals. Steve is early so he prints out a few resumes he has stored online.

Then, we take an elevator up one flight and Steve uses his pass card to enter the room where the simulators are. This room is huge.

It’s essentially an open warehouse. I’d guess it’s about fifty yards by a hundred, two football fields side-by-side, but that’d just be a guess. It’s big. It’s also a couple stories tall. In the center is a rectangular-shaped cluster of a dozen briefing and de-briefing rooms, restrooms, and the largest room, the server room. Around the perimeter is a walkway about fifteen feet above the warehouse floor. And connected to the walkway are the simulators, eight of them, four on each side, though there appears to be four empty bays for future additions.

The simulators remind me, oddly enough, of the tops of the yachts I saw parked in Hilton Head harbor last month. They’re big, bigger than you’d think. Another guesstimate: maybe twenty feet long, wide, and high. They’re self-contained. You go down a few steps from a walkway, then over a plank, then you open a door, and everyone goes inside: pilot, co-pilot, simulator trainer, and any other observers, like me. The door is closed behind you, and you’re completely isolated inside the sim.

Which was quite unnerving. Especially when the instructor pointed out to me the kill switch: a big, fat, red button as big as a half-dollar on his control console. There are two other kill switches in the sim, one behind the pilot’s chair and one behind the co-pilot’s. “If everything starts going crazy, starts going out of control, and we’re all incapacitated,” the instructor says, pointing to himself, Steve, and the co-pilot, “you can shut it down by hitting this kill switch. Only problem is, everything inside goes black. You die with us.” Gallows humor, pilot-style.

You may be wondering, why would a simulator need a kill switch?

Each of these twenty by twenty by twenty foot self-contained boxes are held off the ground by six hydraulic lifters, each about ten or twelve feet long. It actually resembles a tripod, with two pistons each in the left rear, right rear, and front center, connecting diagonally across to each one’s neighbor at the base of the simulator. It doesn’t look sturdy because the box itself looks like it weighs a couple tons, but I have faith in the designers and the fact that no one else is concerned. Other than to install a trio of kill switches inside the simulator, that is.

Anyway, these hydraulic lifters (they’re actually electric, Steve informs me, but the principle’s the same) are responsible for moving the box up and down and side to side. They also simulate speeding and braking, accelerating and decelerating. At the rear, from the floor to the base of the box, is a black tube about two feet in circumference. This will pump in air and, I assume, the electronics that will trick us into seeing things that aren’t really there and hearing thing’s that really aren’t making any noise.

The first thing Steve has to do, though, is go through a briefing. It’s not brief, but takes about an hour. The simulator instructor goes over with Steve what they’ll be doing, what they’ll be expecting, and what Steve can expect. He explains that his job is not to trick Steve, to try to make him fail intentionally with all sorts of disaster scenarios, but to make him a better pilot. A lot of jargon is thrown around, a lot of abbreviations like VOR and ISL and CAT-2 and perhaps a dozen more. There’s talk of V-bars and foils and bev-keys. That last term I’m writing phonetically, and I have no idea what it is.

Overall, I guess I follow about 20-25% of what’s discussed. Steve is thumbing through his manual and making notes. The simulator is supposed to be identical to the plane he currently flies for a living, but they all note some discrepancies between simulator terminology and real-life terminology. I’d give an example, but honestly, I don’t remember the point in contention. I think it had something to do with categories of slush …

By 4:00, an hour-and-a-half after we arrived, we head out to the simulator. Steve hits the bathroom, and I tell the instructor that I better go, too. “Good idea,” the co-pilot laughs. “Not much place to go once you’re ‘in the box.’ ”

Tomorrow: the simulation itself …