I was picked up this morning by a pilot friend at just after 4.15 am and we drove to Heathrow and cleared security and by 5.00 am we were ensconced in a 777 simulator. It is one of 15-simulators in a large building in Heathrow owned by one of the major airlines and together with the computerised control system, these cost circa £10 million a pop.
Quite an investment and these simulators are in full use each day from 7.00 am to 3.00 am, hence our early start to be there in the dead period.
My pilot friend did a preliminary run through the controls and then he asked me to taxi out into the runway, using the side controller and leaving a somewhat zigzag pattern we eventually arrived on the runway, and then he took off for the first time, and we did a large circle over London and came in to land. I kept my hands lightly on the control column so that I had some idea of the feel of the thing and what it was like to land a 250 ton plane. The 777 was Boeings first fully digital fly-by-wire controls, fully software-configurable avionics, Honeywell LCD glass cockpit flight displays and the first use of a fiber optic avionics network on a commercial airliner.
In designing the 777 as its first fly-by-wire commercial aircraft, Boeing decided to retain conventional control yokes rather than change to sidestick controllers as used in many fly-by-wire fighter aircraft and in many Airbus airliners. Along with traditional yoke and rudder controls, the cockpit features a simplified layout that retains similarities to previous Boeing models.The fly-by-wire system is supplemented by mechanical backup.
So having explained all this and more about the individual controls, it was then my turn - throttles slowly forward and once the plane is moving you press a button on the throttles and then it really starts to accelerate. A somewhat dismembered voice says V1 and with a pull-back on the joystick we rotate and are airborne, terrific indeed. We fly for a bit trying to recognize landmarks and then it is time to land at Heathrow. It is very easy to over-correct your inputs into the controls and it seems the best technique is to sort of flick the plane into a turn and then move the control back to a softer turn - a sort of reverse Scandanavian flick, if that makes sense! Easy in theory, but much harder to do!!
A reasonably soft landing and then a rather over-enthusiastic application of the brakes - mustn't spill the champers in 1st-Class old boy - and we're shortly taxiing again for take-off and a speeded up flight to Dubai. An assisted landing in Dubai and then back to Heathrow for a landing on automatic pilot due to fog! Once the coordinates were put into the computer and we were flying completely blind until 200 ft above the runway when we came through the fog and landed.
I could write at length as it was a great experience, suffice to say we then had other take-offs (when an engine went) and a landing with one engine, then lost the other one on the approach and had to land a 250 ton glider.
Suffice to say that when we finished at 7.00 am I was knackered with the concentration.
Overall a terrific experience and certainly something outside my own experience, the pilots have earned my greatest respect and anyone who says they are just 'bus-drivers' with the modern avionics has probably never been in one of these simulators, never mind flown the real thing...
