Bug up, bug up!

A friend's neighbor is an instructor for DC-10 full motion
simulators. I do not know how or why, but occasionally my friend is
invited to play in the sim. And he is invited to bring his friends,
which is why on Memorial Day weekend I was inside the sim trying to
remember not our veterans but a host of buttons, knobs, and new
terminology like "bug-up", "bug-down", "vert-{up,down}",
"auto-throttles", and the like.

It was the first time I have been inside a full motion sim. The thing
is damn realistic and after about an hour, with perhaps a day-to-night
or weather change or location change, or all changing, one forgets
what the real world is doing and where you are, and your reality is
the sim. We did "normal" take-offs, pattern, and landings (where all
the automation is used and very little hand-flying is done), abnormal
hand-flying for grins, 400 ft ceilings, night, you name it.

This was an Air Force sim and thus one thing we did was chase a tanker
and try to get fuel. I was flying from the right seat, caught up to
the tanker and tried to approach. The -10 flies just a little
differently than my Aircoupe and as I approach the boom, my
side-to-side oscillations got a little wider each time. It was so
realistic that I broke off in spite of my companions yelling "no no
keep trying!" It was too hard to deliberately make the attempt, even
intellectually knowing it was all a simulation.

We rotated seats and all had time in the left seat, right seat, and
engineer's seat. While spending time in the latter I got a bit bored
and asked the instructor if I could play with the switches. "Sure, you
can't damage anything," he replied. That was all I needed to play a
trick on my friend. He was supposed to land in a 400 foot ceiling and
the instructor failed an engine, which he was handling too well. So
first I started dumping fuel. This didn't work fast enough for my
purpose, which was to throw a real emergency at him, not something
simple like a mere engine failure. Then I started switching off
hydraulic pumps. That caught his attention. Later he said the
controls got real imbalanced, the elevator being very heavy and
sluggish but the ailerons still normal.

After several hours of this we all called it quits.

Take home lesson? Know somebody that you can grab a few hours of
full-motion sim time. Frankly, normal flying of the -10 takes far
more intellectual, computer-like skills than kinesthetic flying
skills. Not boasting or bragging, but I got a little glimmer that it
is not as hard as I might think--again, normal operation. It was very
easy to see how a few hours of flying lessons in a C-172, plus a few
sim hours, would be enough to cause 9/11. That, and months or years
of deliberately going mad to commit suicide.

It was disorienting to return outside to hot, sunny weather. It was
one of the most mentally consuming experiences I've been through. If
you get a chance to do this, take it!

Oh, yes. Bug up and vert up? Bug up is setting the desired altitude
bug on the autopilot to higher than your current altitude. But that
alone won't initiate a climb. Then you set the desired vertical climb
rate and the plane climbs to altitude and levels off. With the
auto-throttles on this all works nicely.

--
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - This is not humorous by
itself; but in the context it's a classic by Bill Gates in 1981