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I bet this was a guy raised on video games. I was about to make a joke about it but I'm actually serious. Once I, a former Houstonian with no experience drivin

I bet this was a guy raised on video games. I was about to make a joke about it but I'm actually serious. Once I, a former Houstonian with no experience driving on ice, was driving through the snowy mountains and lost control of my car. Instead of panicking, my video-game-induced laser focus kicked in and I calmly piloted the car until the wheels gained traction and I could park the car on the side of the road. But learning how to focus in the midst of chaos, instead of panicking, is a technique I specifically had to learn in childhood to beat challenging levels of Super Mario Brothers. Thanks, video games.

rhdunn 4y ago
If they made a film of this or a similar style story, it would be interesting to do it in a slumdog millionaire style where the character picks up some things playing video games, some from a case where the nato phonetic alphabet is used, some from watching aircraft investigation shows, etc.
qwopqwopqw0p 4y ago
sandworm101 4y ago
"Moore is suspected of being responsible for approximately 100 thefts in Washington, Idaho, and Canada, including bicycles, automobiles, light aircraft, and speedboats.[15] It is believed that he learned how to fly small planes by reading aircraft manuals, handbooks, watching a "How to fly a small airplane" DVD, and playing flight simulator computer games.[17] One plane he stole was a Cessna 182, FAA registration number N24658, belonging to then KZOK-FM radio personality Bob Rivers, valued at over $150,000.[20] The plane was later recovered from a Yakama Indian Reservation crash site. Though badly damaged, it was rebuilt and is in Florida." "He became known as the "Barefoot Bandit" by reportedly committing some of his crimes barefoot, once leaving behind 39 chalk footprints and the word "c'ya!". Despite the widely reported nickname, officials said that he more often wore shoes." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colton_Harris_Moore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colton_Harris_Moore https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-airplane-thief-244878/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-airpla...
- tadfisher 4y ago
  However, he crashed every plane he flew.
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    He also wasn't landing at an airport with help from ATC. If you put an aircraft down on an unprepared beach/field, and walk away, that was a good landing irrespective of any damage done. For many pilots, a "crash" must be unintentional. Deliberately putting an aircraft down somewhere other than a runway is "ditching" or a forced landing, but never a crash.
    - shkkmo 4y ago
      > If you put an aircraft down on an unprepared beach/field, and walk away, that was a good landing irrespective of any damage done. For his skill level, walking away is a great result. However, there are Alaskan bush pilots who land some pretty remarkable places. Some of them are not official runways and many of the ones that are official (Alaska has a LOT) won't have ATC support. OFC, Alaskan bush pilots aren't representative of pilots overall, but they still show we should be careful about overgeneralizing. When my father and his friend tipped their plane forward and bent their prop landing on a gravel bar moose hunting, it wasn't a "good" landing, but neither was it "ditching" or a "forced landing" (they were able to unload the plane and trim the prop enough to fly the plane out so it wasn't that bad of a landing either). From past discussion on here, it is a little complicated if it was legally considered a "crash".
      - cbm-vic-20 4y ago
        Those planes have reinforced landing gear that is much more suitable for landing in those places, as opposed to planes that usually land on paved surfaces.
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    As the adage goes, "any aircraft landing you can walk away from is a good landing" and "any landing where you can still use the aircraft is a great landing."
Nextgrid 4y ago
Video game experience is absolutely better than no experience. On small general aviation planes, the feature set is quite minimal and most simulators will replicate all of it faithfully enough, so the only remaining thing is the “feel” of the plane which you can hopefully experience a bit during flight before landing. In contrast, a big passenger jet has insane amounts of different systems that need to be configured - not only are those typically not fully replicated in consumer-grade simulators (you probably don’t want to spend 30 minutes configuring your plane for takeoff before being able to start a game) but even a complete simulator such as the one used for pilot training won’t be enough to actually learn all those systems - that’s why it takes years of training. Simulator-only experience for a big plane? No chance. For a small plane? Yeah if there’s no damage or other edge-cases and the weather is on your side you have good chances of making it especially if you have an instructor on the radio to double-check everything.
- the_af 4y ago
  I wonder about DCS "study sims" of combat jets. No, no, I'm not saying one could actually be a fighter pilot just by flying DCS F-18. But I wonder about the realism. It seems every single knob and button and thingy on the cockpit is clickable. Every subsystem is simulated. The manual is reportedly huge (I don't own it, just watched videos on YouTube). With such a realistic flightsim, TrackIR, a HOTAS setup, and all the gadgets, how far is it from the real thing? I wonder how far you can go on an actual F-18 with just DCS experience. I suppose a huge detail that is missing is the pressurized suit and the enormous G forces. (I also wonder how come most of this isn't classified, and is instead generally available to the paying public. I suppose the answer is "because as a private individual, you cannot buy an F-18 with weapons").
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    I think a big part is also to be able to operate under pressure and not panic. It's one thing to operate a complex machine from the comfort of your office chair, it's another thing to operate the same machine when any small mistake could mean death.
  - meheleventyone 4y ago
bluedays 4y ago
I’m pretty video games saved my life while driving, too. Once I was driving down the highway at 70 miles per hour and the car in front of me stopped on a dime. I always maintain a good distance from the car in front of me but I knew for sure if I would have just hit the breaks I would have hit him. I wound up swerving into the next lane with a reaction time of under a second only to drive by a six car pile up which included the car that had been in front of me. It is one of the scariest incidents I have ever had in my life while driving.
- mhb 4y ago
  I'm not so sure you know what a good distance is from the car in front of you.
  - jonny_eh 4y ago
    In a multi-car pileup, the car immediately in front of you literally stops in an instant, much faster than if it were to fully hit the brakes. It's much faster than any driver could realistically expect. It can happen so fast, you may not even see brake lights turn on. It's why these pileups can get so surprisingly large.
    - cecilpl2 4y ago
      That is why you should always leave enough space in front of you so that you can react and safely come to a stop if the car in front were to suddenly hit a pileup.
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        The braking distance at 70mph is a huge 75m, which is about 9 London buses. Add your reaction time, and do you aee why distances of over 100m between cars are slightly unrealistic?
        cecilpl2 4y ago
        No, at 70mph (31m/s) you travel 100 metres in 3.2 seconds. I was always taught 3 seconds on the highway is a safe following distance, and 4 seconds in adverse weather conditions like rain. It's not at all unrealistic - it's safe.
Swizec 4y ago
I believe Formula E and various other racing series have had huge success with hiring drivers out of e-sports. If you’re fast in a sim, you only have to add the physical prowess and stamina to race. That’s much cheaper than spending a decade in minor racing series. Sauce after quick googling: https://www.popsci.com/story/technology/video-gamers-new-racing-champions/?amp https://www.popsci.com/story/technology/video-gamers-new-rac...
- InitialLastName 4y ago
  You must be thinking of a series other than Formula E (or at least, it's not what I'd call "huge success"). All of their current drivers had pretty normal feeder series careers (often including brief, unsuccessful stints in F1) and I don't see any that have notable sim accomplishments. WEC has made some amount of noise about hiring sim drivers (including a tie-up at some point with Nissan and Gran Turismo), but the same applies for the drivers in their top two classes. Even your source doesn't care to mention any drivers who have gone from sim racing success to what anyone paying attention to motorsport would call "huge success" in top-level racing (two of the GT Academy drivers did have a successful one-off drive in LMP2, with a factory team and a much better-established teammate).
aerostable_slug 4y ago
Quite a few years ago, a buddy of mine got an incentive ride in the back seat of an F-18 while he was in the Navy. The pilot handed over the controls to him and started to walk him through some aerobatic maneuver when my friend just executed whatever it was (I don't remember the specifics). The pilot was astounded that a novice flyer would perform the maneuver so well and asked if my pal had any simulator time. His response: "I played F/A-18 Hornet on my Mac a lot."
- DavidSJ 4y ago
  I played that game a lot. What was the maneuver?
  - stouset 4y ago
    My wild guess is a barrel roll or aileron roll. Both are pretty easy to walk a novice through, and not something where you'd be particularly worried about the consequences of them getting it seriously wrong.
proc0 4y ago
Yeah, games are so misunderstood. It's not just for kids, and it's not just entertainment, it just happens to be that way because of the stigma. They are interactive experiences with software and that could be virtually anything. The learning and training potential is huge if companies started making proper games again (where the experience is priority) and not fancy theme park pay2win casinos for children.
- Hammershaft 4y ago
  Games are just rich interactive models of some synthetic, emulated, or simulated system. They can be perfect for building intuition about complex systems that are difficult to represent linearly as in text or video. Games could be a very promising future for education & training but they still carry an old stigma with them & the f2p ad driven game wasteland of the app store only helps reinforce that stigma. https://xkcd.com/1356/ https://xkcd.com/1356/
digitallyfree 4y ago
I spent some time on a Cessna 172 Flightgear sim to get an idea for the plane and its controls (to get some background for some fiction that I'm writing). With the virtual cockpit it's possible to learn where all the controls and indicators are and what they do, as well as get an understand of the basics of takeoff, landing, and level flight. Radionavigation and the autopilot system were also interesting items that I didn't know much about until I tried it out in sim. Obviously this isn't a replacement for real training and experience. But someone with sim experience who knows how to read the instruments and control the yoke, rudder, and throttle would likely have a much better chance surviving than one who would freak out just trying to comprehend the instrument panel. They would probably be under much less stress as well during the event.
lamontcg 4y ago
> Thanks, video games. Based on how common it has become for people to tailgate and then twitchily bail out of their lane at the last second before they rear end the person in front of them, I'm very 50-50 on how well video games prepare our reflexes for the real world.
justinator 4y ago
> I bet this was a guy raised on video games. I was about to make a joke about it but I'm actually serious. That was a major plot point in the movie, Snakes on a Plane.
corrral 4y ago
Can confirm. I once, with perfect calm and focus, steered into a bad slide on long slightly-downhill curve covered in ice. I'd never, ever done that in real life before then, in 15+ years of driving. I didn't think about it, didn't even worry for a millisecond. I'd 100% for-sure have hit a parked car if not for all the semi-realistic-but-still-arcadey racing games I've played.
KennyBlanken 4y ago
As someone who grew up in an area that gets a lot of winter driving conditions and has a bunch of car handling training (dry, rain, and winter specific): you didn't "calmly pilot" anything, friend. You hit ice, you're a passenger until you're no longer on ice. The car is mostly a 2D projectile unless you're on studded tires. You were lucky, that's it. And, I might add: you lost control of the car. There's a whole chain of failures that led up to that point: not being aware of forecast weather, not being aware of changing conditions, and so on. Folks experienced in driving in winter weather know how to watch the road for signs of icing, how to test for traction that's getting worse, how to be smooth with controls, and how to recognize that a control input is starting to cause the car to lose traction. You fully lost control. It is a common joke among instructors teaching car handling skills that the worst students are the ones who have played driving video games. They're overconfident. They don't actually know much at all about car handling techniques. They have no motor skills that good, fast driving requires. No "butt sense" - reading how the car feels, sounds, and acts as it approaches or exceeds the limits of traction. "I safely handled losing control of my car in icy weather because I played Super Mario Brothers decades ago" is almost but not quite the best example of Dunning-Kruger effect I've seen in an HN comment in quite some time.
- asdfman123 4y ago
  Ah yes, the time honored internet tradition of intentionally misreading someone else's comment to assert your superiority
- scarby2 4y ago
  completely agree here. As someone who has done a fair amount of snow and ice driving in some quite unpleasant conditions never once have quick reflexes helped: low speed, correct use of controls (copious use of engine braking, starting in higher gear etc.) and the ability to make small measured corrections have seen me all right. Even then I've come close to crashing three times (would have been a small crash though) twice due to slopes that weren't safe to descend given the conditions and once because a family of deer crossed the road in front of me, i was not able to correct course to avoid them or use the brakes - doing either would have led to me losing control - luckily i was doing < 15 mph and the deer stepped out of the way at the last second.
phkahler 4y ago
>> I bet this was a guy raised on video games. I feel kinda stupid. I played a lot of video games growing up, including a binge on MS Flightsim 4 (I think). When I took flying lessons as an adult, the hardest thing for me was mastering landing. Something about it just wouldn't click for many hours. OTOH I never really mastered landing in the sim either - I didn't really care about that back then and didn't have any instruction at all. OTOH I helped out for years at Young Eagles events and some kids fly for the first time quite naturally, and when asked they tend to say "Yeah, I leaned on the computer".
- throwawayboise 4y ago
  > the hardest thing for me was mastering landing. Something about it just wouldn't click for many hours ... some kids fly for the first time quite naturally There's probably a big component of natural ability here. Some people are just better at certain things. If you're not one of them, you may be able to train yourself to a competent level of performance, but you'll never be as good as a "natural." It's somthing that takes a bit of self-awareness and humility to admit, and some people never do.
xhroot 4y ago
There was a guy who made a forum bet he could land a Cessna 172 - first try - with nothing but MS Flight Simulator experience. Here: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/34/other-other-topics/prop-bet-can-i-land-plane-first-try-1200028/ https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/34/other-other-topics/pro... And outcome: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showpost.php?p=35915547&postcount=606 https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showpost.php?p=35915547&p...
- asdfman123 4y ago
  There's nothing magic about flying. At the end of the day it's relatively simple. The difficult part is being absolutely certain you're trained well enough to not crash the thing.
  - robscallsign 4y ago
    ... and trained enough to handle any possible combination of inflight emergency, equipment failure, change of weather, safetly handle any last minute directive or change by ATC, etc.
AtNightWeCode 4y ago
This was probably easier than to refuel and successfully land in Top Gun on NES.
- marcodiego 4y ago
  I like Top Gun on NES. It is better than SEGA's G-Loc and as fun as Afterburner.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
loup-vaillant 4y ago
I wonder how this would generalise. Especially on VR. I have a VR headset, and have played through Half-Life Alyx and a bit of zombie mode in Pavlov VR. My first headcrab in Half-life Alyx was horrible. I panicked, forgot which button to press to release the magazine, fumbled the insertion, forgot to load the gun after having inserted the magazine… but by the end of the game, those head crab didn’t trigger any fear, only a reflex of pulling out the gun, pointing, shooting, and reloading quickly became a reflex. Oh, and I became much better at quick aiming. I’m no speed shooter, but I do land a couple shots per second. Then I tried Pavlov VR. First the shooting range to get used to the slightly different mechanics. And then the zombie mode. This time the zombies were fast. And what do you know, I panicked again. Though I didn’t fumble with the reload this time (I had no spare magazine), and my aiming was okay, I massively overshot. That’s when I thought that people who unload their entire charger really aren’t necessarily vengeance driven bloodthirsty warmongers. They may just lack training. Anyway, I trained a couple times more with the zombies, and it got better. Here’s the thing though: I now have trained VR games to shoot at moving humanoid targets, some of which shoot back, some of which just try to close in to melee range. So now I wonder: if all goes to shit and I’m handed a loaded gun, and suddenly 3 angry people with knives close in on me with visible killing intent, what are the chances that my VR training may cause me to shoot them in the heart by reflex, instead of panicking, running, or negotiating? How far pure video game training can go?
testplzignore 4y ago
As someone who beat Pilotwings on the SNES, I think I could fly a plane. But I would probably crash on the landing and make Big Al very sad :(
daveslash 4y ago
"We've got a story, now, about a mid air scare that _none_ of us would _ever_ want to face" My joke was going to be "Half the lurkers on r/flightsim enter the chat...". I lurk on that sub, and I feel like half the people fantasize of being able to "save the day!" when something goes wrong on the plane. Not fanticizing that something goes wrong... but if it did... the flight would be fortunate enough to have them there to save the day. Though, thinking of having the tower talk someone down always reminds me of It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" ~ "What could possible happen to an Old Fashioned?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWoCLqMq8qM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWoCLqMq8qM [Edit] Formatting.
raptorraver 4y ago
This reminds me of a man who told in some Dirt Rally 2.0 Youtube-video comments how spending hundreds of hours on that game saved his family on motorway. Some incident happened before the car and the man was able to avoid the danger safely with fast reactions and driving experience. This is the story I tell my wife whenever she questions my sim-racing hobby :)

rhdunn 4y ago

If they made a film of this or a similar style story, it would be interesting to do it in a slumdog millionaire style where the character picks up some things playing video games, some from a case where the nato phonetic alphabet is used, some from watching aircraft investigation shows, etc.

qwopqwopqw0p 4y ago

sandworm101 4y ago

"Moore is suspected of being responsible for approximately 100 thefts in Washington, Idaho, and Canada, including bicycles, automobiles, light aircraft, and speedboats.[15] It is believed that he learned how to fly small planes by reading aircraft manuals, handbooks, watching a "How to fly a small airplane" DVD, and playing flight simulator computer games.[17] One plane he stole was a Cessna 182, FAA registration number N24658, belonging to then KZOK-FM radio personality Bob Rivers, valued at over $150,000.[20] The plane was later recovered from a Yakama Indian Reservation crash site. Though badly damaged, it was rebuilt and is in Florida." "He became known as the "Barefoot Bandit" by reportedly committing some of his crimes barefoot, once leaving behind 39 chalk footprints and the word "c'ya!". Despite the widely reported nickname, officials said that he more often wore shoes." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colton_Harris_Moore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colton_Harris_Moore https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-airplane-thief-244878/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-airpla...

tadfisher 4y ago
However, he crashed every plane he flew.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  He also wasn't landing at an airport with help from ATC. If you put an aircraft down on an unprepared beach/field, and walk away, that was a good landing irrespective of any damage done. For many pilots, a "crash" must be unintentional. Deliberately putting an aircraft down somewhere other than a runway is "ditching" or a forced landing, but never a crash.
  - shkkmo 4y ago
    > If you put an aircraft down on an unprepared beach/field, and walk away, that was a good landing irrespective of any damage done. For his skill level, walking away is a great result. However, there are Alaskan bush pilots who land some pretty remarkable places. Some of them are not official runways and many of the ones that are official (Alaska has a LOT) won't have ATC support. OFC, Alaskan bush pilots aren't representative of pilots overall, but they still show we should be careful about overgeneralizing. When my father and his friend tipped their plane forward and bent their prop landing on a gravel bar moose hunting, it wasn't a "good" landing, but neither was it "ditching" or a "forced landing" (they were able to unload the plane and trim the prop enough to fly the plane out so it wasn't that bad of a landing either). From past discussion on here, it is a little complicated if it was legally considered a "crash".
    - cbm-vic-20 4y ago
      Those planes have reinforced landing gear that is much more suitable for landing in those places, as opposed to planes that usually land on paved surfaces.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  As the adage goes, "any aircraft landing you can walk away from is a good landing" and "any landing where you can still use the aircraft is a great landing."

Nextgrid 4y ago

Video game experience is absolutely better than no experience. On small general aviation planes, the feature set is quite minimal and most simulators will replicate all of it faithfully enough, so the only remaining thing is the “feel” of the plane which you can hopefully experience a bit during flight before landing. In contrast, a big passenger jet has insane amounts of different systems that need to be configured - not only are those typically not fully replicated in consumer-grade simulators (you probably don’t want to spend 30 minutes configuring your plane for takeoff before being able to start a game) but even a complete simulator such as the one used for pilot training won’t be enough to actually learn all those systems - that’s why it takes years of training. Simulator-only experience for a big plane? No chance. For a small plane? Yeah if there’s no damage or other edge-cases and the weather is on your side you have good chances of making it especially if you have an instructor on the radio to double-check everything.

the_af 4y ago
I wonder about DCS "study sims" of combat jets. No, no, I'm not saying one could actually be a fighter pilot just by flying DCS F-18. But I wonder about the realism. It seems every single knob and button and thingy on the cockpit is clickable. Every subsystem is simulated. The manual is reportedly huge (I don't own it, just watched videos on YouTube). With such a realistic flightsim, TrackIR, a HOTAS setup, and all the gadgets, how far is it from the real thing? I wonder how far you can go on an actual F-18 with just DCS experience. I suppose a huge detail that is missing is the pressurized suit and the enormous G forces. (I also wonder how come most of this isn't classified, and is instead generally available to the paying public. I suppose the answer is "because as a private individual, you cannot buy an F-18 with weapons").
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  I think a big part is also to be able to operate under pressure and not panic. It's one thing to operate a complex machine from the comfort of your office chair, it's another thing to operate the same machine when any small mistake could mean death.
- meheleventyone 4y ago

bluedays 4y ago

I’m pretty video games saved my life while driving, too. Once I was driving down the highway at 70 miles per hour and the car in front of me stopped on a dime. I always maintain a good distance from the car in front of me but I knew for sure if I would have just hit the breaks I would have hit him. I wound up swerving into the next lane with a reaction time of under a second only to drive by a six car pile up which included the car that had been in front of me. It is one of the scariest incidents I have ever had in my life while driving.

mhb 4y ago
I'm not so sure you know what a good distance is from the car in front of you.
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  In a multi-car pileup, the car immediately in front of you literally stops in an instant, much faster than if it were to fully hit the brakes. It's much faster than any driver could realistically expect. It can happen so fast, you may not even see brake lights turn on. It's why these pileups can get so surprisingly large.
  - cecilpl2 4y ago
    That is why you should always leave enough space in front of you so that you can react and safely come to a stop if the car in front were to suddenly hit a pileup.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      The braking distance at 70mph is a huge 75m, which is about 9 London buses. Add your reaction time, and do you aee why distances of over 100m between cars are slightly unrealistic?
      - cecilpl2 4y ago
        No, at 70mph (31m/s) you travel 100 metres in 3.2 seconds. I was always taught 3 seconds on the highway is a safe following distance, and 4 seconds in adverse weather conditions like rain. It's not at all unrealistic - it's safe.

Swizec 4y ago

I believe Formula E and various other racing series have had huge success with hiring drivers out of e-sports. If you’re fast in a sim, you only have to add the physical prowess and stamina to race. That’s much cheaper than spending a decade in minor racing series. Sauce after quick googling: https://www.popsci.com/story/technology/video-gamers-new-racing-champions/?amp https://www.popsci.com/story/technology/video-gamers-new-rac...

InitialLastName 4y ago
You must be thinking of a series other than Formula E (or at least, it's not what I'd call "huge success"). All of their current drivers had pretty normal feeder series careers (often including brief, unsuccessful stints in F1) and I don't see any that have notable sim accomplishments. WEC has made some amount of noise about hiring sim drivers (including a tie-up at some point with Nissan and Gran Turismo), but the same applies for the drivers in their top two classes. Even your source doesn't care to mention any drivers who have gone from sim racing success to what anyone paying attention to motorsport would call "huge success" in top-level racing (two of the GT Academy drivers did have a successful one-off drive in LMP2, with a factory team and a much better-established teammate).

aerostable_slug 4y ago

Quite a few years ago, a buddy of mine got an incentive ride in the back seat of an F-18 while he was in the Navy. The pilot handed over the controls to him and started to walk him through some aerobatic maneuver when my friend just executed whatever it was (I don't remember the specifics). The pilot was astounded that a novice flyer would perform the maneuver so well and asked if my pal had any simulator time. His response: "I played F/A-18 Hornet on my Mac a lot."

DavidSJ 4y ago
I played that game a lot. What was the maneuver?
- stouset 4y ago
  My wild guess is a barrel roll or aileron roll. Both are pretty easy to walk a novice through, and not something where you'd be particularly worried about the consequences of them getting it seriously wrong.

proc0 4y ago

Yeah, games are so misunderstood. It's not just for kids, and it's not just entertainment, it just happens to be that way because of the stigma. They are interactive experiences with software and that could be virtually anything. The learning and training potential is huge if companies started making proper games again (where the experience is priority) and not fancy theme park pay2win casinos for children.

Hammershaft 4y ago
Games are just rich interactive models of some synthetic, emulated, or simulated system. They can be perfect for building intuition about complex systems that are difficult to represent linearly as in text or video. Games could be a very promising future for education & training but they still carry an old stigma with them & the f2p ad driven game wasteland of the app store only helps reinforce that stigma. https://xkcd.com/1356/ https://xkcd.com/1356/

digitallyfree 4y ago

I spent some time on a Cessna 172 Flightgear sim to get an idea for the plane and its controls (to get some background for some fiction that I'm writing). With the virtual cockpit it's possible to learn where all the controls and indicators are and what they do, as well as get an understand of the basics of takeoff, landing, and level flight. Radionavigation and the autopilot system were also interesting items that I didn't know much about until I tried it out in sim. Obviously this isn't a replacement for real training and experience. But someone with sim experience who knows how to read the instruments and control the yoke, rudder, and throttle would likely have a much better chance surviving than one who would freak out just trying to comprehend the instrument panel. They would probably be under much less stress as well during the event.

lamontcg 4y ago

> Thanks, video games. Based on how common it has become for people to tailgate and then twitchily bail out of their lane at the last second before they rear end the person in front of them, I'm very 50-50 on how well video games prepare our reflexes for the real world.

justinator 4y ago

> I bet this was a guy raised on video games. I was about to make a joke about it but I'm actually serious. That was a major plot point in the movie, Snakes on a Plane.

corrral 4y ago

Can confirm. I once, with perfect calm and focus, steered into a bad slide on long slightly-downhill curve covered in ice. I'd never, ever done that in real life before then, in 15+ years of driving. I didn't think about it, didn't even worry for a millisecond. I'd 100% for-sure have hit a parked car if not for all the semi-realistic-but-still-arcadey racing games I've played.

KennyBlanken 4y ago

As someone who grew up in an area that gets a lot of winter driving conditions and has a bunch of car handling training (dry, rain, and winter specific): you didn't "calmly pilot" anything, friend. You hit ice, you're a passenger until you're no longer on ice. The car is mostly a 2D projectile unless you're on studded tires. You were lucky, that's it. And, I might add: you lost control of the car. There's a whole chain of failures that led up to that point: not being aware of forecast weather, not being aware of changing conditions, and so on. Folks experienced in driving in winter weather know how to watch the road for signs of icing, how to test for traction that's getting worse, how to be smooth with controls, and how to recognize that a control input is starting to cause the car to lose traction. You fully lost control. It is a common joke among instructors teaching car handling skills that the worst students are the ones who have played driving video games. They're overconfident. They don't actually know much at all about car handling techniques. They have no motor skills that good, fast driving requires. No "butt sense" - reading how the car feels, sounds, and acts as it approaches or exceeds the limits of traction. "I safely handled losing control of my car in icy weather because I played Super Mario Brothers decades ago" is almost but not quite the best example of Dunning-Kruger effect I've seen in an HN comment in quite some time.

asdfman123 4y ago
Ah yes, the time honored internet tradition of intentionally misreading someone else's comment to assert your superiority
scarby2 4y ago
completely agree here. As someone who has done a fair amount of snow and ice driving in some quite unpleasant conditions never once have quick reflexes helped: low speed, correct use of controls (copious use of engine braking, starting in higher gear etc.) and the ability to make small measured corrections have seen me all right. Even then I've come close to crashing three times (would have been a small crash though) twice due to slopes that weren't safe to descend given the conditions and once because a family of deer crossed the road in front of me, i was not able to correct course to avoid them or use the brakes - doing either would have led to me losing control - luckily i was doing < 15 mph and the deer stepped out of the way at the last second.

phkahler 4y ago

>> I bet this was a guy raised on video games. I feel kinda stupid. I played a lot of video games growing up, including a binge on MS Flightsim 4 (I think). When I took flying lessons as an adult, the hardest thing for me was mastering landing. Something about it just wouldn't click for many hours. OTOH I never really mastered landing in the sim either - I didn't really care about that back then and didn't have any instruction at all. OTOH I helped out for years at Young Eagles events and some kids fly for the first time quite naturally, and when asked they tend to say "Yeah, I leaned on the computer".

throwawayboise 4y ago
> the hardest thing for me was mastering landing. Something about it just wouldn't click for many hours ... some kids fly for the first time quite naturally There's probably a big component of natural ability here. Some people are just better at certain things. If you're not one of them, you may be able to train yourself to a competent level of performance, but you'll never be as good as a "natural." It's somthing that takes a bit of self-awareness and humility to admit, and some people never do.

xhroot 4y ago

There was a guy who made a forum bet he could land a Cessna 172 - first try - with nothing but MS Flight Simulator experience. Here: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/34/other-other-topics/prop-bet-can-i-land-plane-first-try-1200028/ https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/34/other-other-topics/pro... And outcome: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showpost.php?p=35915547&postcount=606 https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showpost.php?p=35915547&p...

asdfman123 4y ago
There's nothing magic about flying. At the end of the day it's relatively simple. The difficult part is being absolutely certain you're trained well enough to not crash the thing.
- robscallsign 4y ago
  ... and trained enough to handle any possible combination of inflight emergency, equipment failure, change of weather, safetly handle any last minute directive or change by ATC, etc.

AtNightWeCode 4y ago

This was probably easier than to refuel and successfully land in Top Gun on NES.

marcodiego 4y ago
I like Top Gun on NES. It is better than SEGA's G-Loc and as fun as Afterburner.

deleted 4y ago

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loup-vaillant 4y ago

I wonder how this would generalise. Especially on VR. I have a VR headset, and have played through Half-Life Alyx and a bit of zombie mode in Pavlov VR. My first headcrab in Half-life Alyx was horrible. I panicked, forgot which button to press to release the magazine, fumbled the insertion, forgot to load the gun after having inserted the magazine… but by the end of the game, those head crab didn’t trigger any fear, only a reflex of pulling out the gun, pointing, shooting, and reloading quickly became a reflex. Oh, and I became much better at quick aiming. I’m no speed shooter, but I do land a couple shots per second. Then I tried Pavlov VR. First the shooting range to get used to the slightly different mechanics. And then the zombie mode. This time the zombies were fast. And what do you know, I panicked again. Though I didn’t fumble with the reload this time (I had no spare magazine), and my aiming was okay, I massively overshot. That’s when I thought that people who unload their entire charger really aren’t necessarily vengeance driven bloodthirsty warmongers. They may just lack training. Anyway, I trained a couple times more with the zombies, and it got better. Here’s the thing though: I now have trained VR games to shoot at moving humanoid targets, some of which shoot back, some of which just try to close in to melee range. So now I wonder: if all goes to shit and I’m handed a loaded gun, and suddenly 3 angry people with knives close in on me with visible killing intent, what are the chances that my VR training may cause me to shoot them in the heart by reflex, instead of panicking, running, or negotiating? How far pure video game training can go?

testplzignore 4y ago

As someone who beat Pilotwings on the SNES, I think I could fly a plane. But I would probably crash on the landing and make Big Al very sad :(

daveslash 4y ago

"We've got a story, now, about a mid air scare that _none_ of us would _ever_ want to face" My joke was going to be "Half the lurkers on r/flightsim enter the chat...". I lurk on that sub, and I feel like half the people fantasize of being able to "save the day!" when something goes wrong on the plane. Not fanticizing that something goes wrong... but if it did... the flight would be fortunate enough to have them there to save the day. Though, thinking of having the tower talk someone down always reminds me of It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" ~ "What could possible happen to an Old Fashioned?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWoCLqMq8qM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWoCLqMq8qM [Edit] Formatting.

raptorraver 4y ago

This reminds me of a man who told in some Dirt Rally 2.0 Youtube-video comments how spending hundreds of hours on that game saved his family on motorway. Some incident happened before the car and the man was able to avoid the danger safely with fast reactions and driving experience. This is the story I tell my wife whenever she questions my sim-racing hobby :)