The new office

Here's some pics of the new office.....sorta. This here is the pre-office study gizmo that us f.n.g's use to practice flying like the company wants us to. Prior to the invention of the G.F.S (graphic flight simulator a.k.a Goofus) pilots would spend many an hour sitting in front of a cardboard cut out of a cockpit. There you would pretend to push buttons, flip switches and chair fly all your flight profiles. Now we sit in the cradle of technology and push touch screen computer monitors that actually do something. Every time we push the screen to flip a switch or push a button, the cockpit actually responds like the real thing.....sorta. It has its limitations. For example, we do a lot of knob turning in order to set our v-speeds, heading bug, speed bug, ext. On the goofus, we have to touch the screen to get a box to illuminate, then we repeatedly press the screen to set whatever we are trying to set. Only one dirty finger on the screen at a time too. Because of this, it is time consuming to try and get things dialed in the way we want them.

The Goofus may be awkward to learn to use, but I love the thing. It is light years beyond sitting behind a "paper tiger". I love the fact that we can do just about anything with it. Anything you can get in the sim, we can go over in the goofus. It can simulate all of the failures you will see in the sim as well as gives us a semi realistic platform to learn to fly the glass. If the instructor wants to give us a hot start, all he does is push a button and when we go to start an engine, it'll simulate a hot start. Cool stuff.