Last night's flight

Last night was crazy. I flew from JFK to SLC, but the headwinds were so strong the plane needed a fuel stop in Denver. We landed in Denver, taxied, fueled and the pilot announces there is a fault that occured during taxi, now they are working on that. We're not even at a gate, just a fueling station I guess. It's like a long road trip in a car and stopping for gas everyone gets up, stretches. I'm close to the front and I can see the captain on his cell phone and he keeps flipping switches. They power down the aircraft, to reset the system so no lights are on. But people's faces glow from cell phone screens. People are talking to each other more.

Personally this makes my trip here nearly moot, I'll probably miss most of the video taping I'm supposed to do. But, I'm not really bothered. I'm just tired and bored. A girl behind me who talks in a really loud voice normally continues to talk on the phone about all this. I can hear her above everyone else. And everyone else is doing the same thing.

Lights start turning off and on. There are chimes every 20 seconds or so. Finally, the Captain says that they are unable to fix the fault so we'll taxi to the gate and they'll be putting us up in a hotel for the night and we'll be off to SLC in the morning. Everyone groans.

We taxi to the gate and someone from Denver gets on and tells us how we'll get shuttled to the hotel. Then the pilot gets on and says that while taxiing the fault indicator turned off. They perform some system test and he says we're flying to SLC tonight. Nice. And off we went. We probably spent 2 hours in Denver.

I ended up getting to my hotel at about 4:30am. I'm tired.

My time in the simulator

I went to Orlando on business. While there I had the chance to fly in a flight simulator. It was the real deal simulating an Airbus 320.

It may have been a simulation but it was so amazingly real. It blew my mind as soon as we started taxiing. I just couldn't believe how real it felt.

I started by taxiing out to the runway. Hitting a few runway lights on the way. If you could have watched me it would have been like watching someone learning to drive a clutch for the first time.

Take off was easy. The bigger the airplane, the easier they are to fly. Landing, is a different story.

After avoiding other airplanes programmed to come right at me, the first thing we did is fly under the Verrazano Narrows bridge. I flew it so low, too low. I accidentally skipped on the water a bit. This would have caused millions of dollars in damages to the aircraft.

I made it under the bridge and then went for my first landing. I did ok on the approach but never really pulled up just before touching down. Actually that's somewhat of an understatement I died on my first landing. The simulator lurches and makes a loud sound and the screen turns red and everything turns quiet.

After resetting, I did a couple V1 take-offs which means that one engine fails at the most critical point during take-off, this means you don't have runway enough to reject the take-off, and you have to continue to take-off. Getting up to speed, the engine fails the airplane starts to veer sharply off the runway and you have to correct for that, using the foot pedals, then take-off. The first time I pretty much cleared out any lights and signage on the side of the runway, but with the help of the instructor I was still able to take-off. The next two times were much better.

I successfully landed twice (very hard landings).

After I was done my equilibrium was all out of whack. I had a headache, was a little dizzy for the rest of the night. It was totally worth it.