Well I went down to the Expo today, met some interesting people, got some freebies, and of course went in the 777 sim.
Firstly I sat in on a 'Gas Turbine Theory' lecture, and saw a F27 Friendship and DC3 motors in action.
I then had a chat with the Ardmore Flying School, and asked about getting my PPL. After my meeting with them, I concluded I would get it ASAP with the current 'no interest' student loan situation.
Next I had a look in the hanger, and saw to my surprise an Embraer Bandeirante in the old ANZ link colours. I never knew that ANZ ever flew these and was fascinated by it. Anyone know of a good one for fs2004?
At around midday, I caught the bus over to the Air New Zealand Simulation Centre, and sat with a group of about 8 others inside the US $45,000,000 Boeing 777 cockpit. The instructor asked if anyone in the group had any previous simulation experience, but before I could put up my hand, an Indian dude and some American guy jumped into the pilot/copilot positions, and I sat one back behind them.
The instructor loaded us up at 23L at NZAA, and let the guys take off the triple-seven and fly her around the Manukau Harbour.
It motion was incredible, with the cockpit tilting and moving as the sim controls were pushed around- as you would expect for 45 mil. The instructor then showed us the power of the computer running the thing, switching instantaneously to different weather, time of day and location. He then set us up on finals, and asked the guy in the pilots seat to land it- haha- he didn't know what he was doing, and in the instructor had to set up an ILS approach for him

I could have done that...
The only bad thing about the sim was the unbelievably crap graphics out the windows, like something out of FS95

I asked what software the sim was running, the instructor didn't know what I meant, and explained instead that the sim focuses more on the flight dynamics of the real aircraft that the realism of the outside world. Oh well, it would have looked much neater with fs2004 running like FlightExperience have!
Another thing I learnt was that pilots never spend more than 4 hours at a time in the sim, only flying the take off, accent, 10 mins of the cruise, and approach at 1x speed. The rest is done in fast forward, with the 10mins of cruise used to simulate some sort of midair emergency. Boring!
Unfortunately I did not take any photos, maybe next time
