The flight industry is in crisis!
And I’m not just talking about the increase in gremlin-related accidents.
Airlines are suffering from a pilot shortage.
Boeing has projected that we’ll need over 800,000 new pilots in the next 20 years.
But the FAA is expecting a downturn in the number of commercial pilots.
Personally, I’m not traveling much right now,
but I’m also not looking forward to the day I end up
sleeping on my luggage in LaGuardia because my pilot is being shuffled between airplanes
without so much as a bathroom break.
But there is hope on the horizon for the pilot shortage:
flight simulators!
Major airlines are changing the way they train pilots, and they’re reaching out to the
makers of flight sims to do it.
That’s not particularly unusual – after all, flight sims got their start
as training products, not video games.
This is the world’s first flight simulator, created in 1929 and used extensively during
World War II.
For decades, flight sims were used purely as training instruments – until the 1970s, when
Sega released Jet Rocket.
It won’t get you closer to your pilot certification,
but it will train you in dealing with eyestrain.
But the flight sim most people know is Microsoft’s.
It was part of Microsoft’s suite back when that was almost all productivity software.
So if you wanted to sneak some fun on company hardware,
Flight Sim was one of your only options.
For a lot of modern fans, this franchise was their entry into the world of aviation.
Drew: I was at my uncle's house, probably
the era of like, Microsoft Flight Simulator 95, like for Windows 95.
And he is uh, himself a private pilot….
Jenna: This is Drew Scanlon. He's a hardcore flight sim fan,
and also some guy from the internet.
Drew: He loaded up for me and I think I flew underneath the Golden Gate Bridge in a Learjet at like
300 knots.
(laughs)
And from then on, I was- I was hooked.
I thought that was so cool.
Jenna: Drew’s not alone in this experience;
Alex Fitzgerald is another lifelong flight sim fan:
Alex: Yeah, it was probably Windows 98, ah that was running
on my grandfather's computer at the time.
And he had it installed as a thing to play around with.
He was an aeronautical engineer.
So he worked on flight... flight systems testing,
ah, was actually kind of afraid to fly himself, which is pretty funny.
And I just remember seeing him play one day with the joystick and all that, like, what's that,
that looks awesome and fun.
So I hopped on and tried it and then I, you know, fell in love with it.
Jenna: For Drew and Alex, playing a flight sim was a formative experience, the first contact
with a lifelong passion,
like when I got my first digital solitaire victory
and now I’m here!
Flight sims provide a safe and easy way to slip the surly bonds of earth
and touch the face of god
– and kids love doing that.
Regardless of how they took their first trip, flight sims fans are among the most dedicated
communities out there,
going literally above and beyond to chase the feeling of the real thing.
The drive to give simmers the greatest depth of immersion has been at the heart of flight
sim advancement for decades.
It’s literally the origin story for X-Plane,
one of the most popular flight sims on the market.
The creator, Austin Meyer, was an aeronautical student working on getting his pilot’s license.
Marty: During that time, he was using a flight simulator.
I won't mention the name, but he was using one of our competitors products and was very
unhappy about the flight model and the way the airplane actually aerodynamically behaved.
So he went out and he wrote his own flight simulator.
Jenna: Meyer continued to develop the software, releasing the first X-Plane in 1995.
Both X-Plane and Microsoft Flight Simulator went strong until 2006.
But then Microsoft went 14 years without a new release,
largely because they didn’t want
to make a new sim unless there was a technological reason to justify it.
You might look at this and say, what is there possibly to improve?
But for the team at Microsoft, it wasn’t about making a sim that looked better.
It was about bringing the actual world into the game, to transcend the boundaries between
realistic, and real.
While flight sim was languishing in the back catalogue, Microsoft was working on some big,
new technologies.
According to the Head of Microsoft Flight Sim, Jorg Neumann, Bing Maps was the impetus
for the new franchise entry.
The ability to teleport around the world was inspirational:
Jorg: We reached a level of photo realism that was so interesting that the idea
was born: let's try to do this planet-wide.
The maps are procedurally generated, so the planet is only as accurate as the information
Microsoft has collected.
Which means some areas, like the jungles of South America, are less accurately represented
than others.
For a sim that’s aiming for true-to-Earth realism, that’s an issue –
One they’re trying to solve with big data:
Jorg: Oh no. (laughing)
Can’t do this manually, there's 2 trillion trees... (laughter)
I guarantee you right this moment, there's planes flying overhead in the Northern Hemisphere
taking pictures.
We use our machine learning algorithms to understand the pictures, to classify it
to build the trees, to build the houses,
and to essentially refresh the data on a continued basis.
Jenna: But any time you’re working with big data, there are bound to be some issues.
Some of the bugs are only noticeable because the maps are otherwise so accurate, like the
uncanny valley but for literal valleys.
For the most part, though, fans are pretty pleased with the level of realism.
Drew: I did fly under the Golden Gate Bridge in the new one as well, just to, you know,
(laughing) close the loop on that.
But I also- I wanted to see, you know, how a route would go that I was familiar with.
And so I would I took off in a plane, you know, a Cessna 172 that I'm really familiar
with, and then flew it along a route that I was really familiar with to see how it compared
to real life.
And it's, it's the best that I've ever seen a simulator.
Jenna: The game’s geographic accuracy is more than just a technological flex; it has a huge effect
on the immersive experience of piloting, because it allows players to use visual flight rules.
Basically there are two sets of regulations for civilians flying planes;
There's visual flight rules,
where you use visual landmarks to guide you, or instrument flight rules, where you
rely only on the instruments on your flight deck.
IFR flying is more difficult, and it takes more training, but it’s the main way previous
flight sims were constructed because, well… [echoing “2 trillion trees”] it was too
difficult to make accurate, real-world landscapes otherwise.
VFR makes it easier for you to barrel roll over your old high school, but there's
more to it than that;
Drew: if I'm flying a route for practice that I want to fly in the real plane,
Microsoft Flight Simulator is pretty good at showing, you know, the mountain in the
right place or the road where it really is in real life.
And those are visual checkpoints that you actually use in a real plane, you know, looking
out the window.
So knowing how long I'm going to be in the air, what to look for, whether I'll be able
to see that checkpoint from, you know, a prior one.
Those are the sorts of things that you can't really get the sense of until you practice
it in a sim.
Jenna: But the ground is only half the equation when it comes to visual flight rules:
Jorg: As game makers, you typically focus on the terrain.
Why?
Because we run over the terrain, drive over the terrain, whatever we do on the terrain,
it's always about the terrain.
But the planes live in the sky.
Jenna: It doesn’t matter how good the ground looks if you can’t see it because of fog or a storm –
and that’s the whole point of real-time, accurate weather simulations.
This means storm chasing a la Twister might be a thing of the past.
But that's actually probably for the best.
Sebastian: The most important, the single most important
factor of today's flight is going to be
the weather.
Jenna: Temperature, air speed, turbulence, the amount of yaw you need to navigate a heavy wind –
every aspect of piloting changes depending on the weather.
Sebastian: Because it's much better than just having,
I don't know, clear sky and it's always the same thing, right?
Here, unexpected just like the real world.
Jenna: Exactly.
Incorporating real weather isn’t just about accuracy.
Despite their name, flight sims aren’t trying to capture the experience of flying –
they're about immersing you in the experience of piloting.
For sim fans, it’s not enough to just press a button and soar through the sky like Superman.
Minutia like real-time weather pushes the game towards the aspect simmers are really looking for:
Complexity.
Sebastian: And I think when a sim is very realistic, it captures that complexity.
It doesn't mean that it necessarily becomes harder, but I think it becomes much richer.
Jenna: Piloting is complicated,
with thousands of tiny factors that affect the flight, second-to-second;
a truly immersive flight sim needs to reflect that complexity.
And that depth of experience is why it’s so hard to master piloting –
and so rewarding.
Jorg: I think a lot of people just genuinely, genuinely love planes- are sort of in awe of them.
They want to understand them.
And the simmers, the people that have been with a hobby for, oftentimes,
some, in many cases, decades,
I think mastery is the number one driver.
Jenna: This is why so many flight sims fans go all out on their hardware rigs.
It’s the next step of immersion – a yoke, throttle, rudders, and, of course, a cool
pair of aviators.
Which is probably why all this stuff sold out immediately after the game was released.
Using cockpit tools adds a layer of physical stimulation that mice and keyboards
just can't compete with.
But as close as they are to giving you the experience of piloting, there are some sensations
they can’t yet provide.
Marty: A friend of mine who's been in the flight simulation business for many many years,
And has got thousands of hours, and he went out to take flying lessons for the first time
and he got in the airplane
and he's started down the runway and he, he had to stop and pull off.
He got so shook up.
He said, I was totally unprepared for the vibration, for the noise.
And for the motion, he said, You don't have any of that in Flight Simulator.
But the funny thing is, he said, once he got past that, then the simulator training
really helped him.
Jenna: Until we get full-body haptic-feedback-enabled gamer chairs,
you won’t be able to get the full experience of flying a jet
without stepping into the cockpit yourself.
Which is exactly what a lot of flight sim fans do.
Once you have the fancy software and full blown cockpit set up,
there’s one way to increase the depth
of your immersion:
Get your pilot’s license!
Jorg: There's the people that play the flight sims, often times in their youth, and fell in love
with aviation, either because of it, or as a sort of, as a reinforcer.
And quite a few of them turned into real world pilots.
You hear those stories, a lot, like a lot, lot, lot...
Jenna: This isn't case with a lot of other games OR sims.
Like, I’m sure there are some folks who planted their first tomato after playing Stardew Valley,
but that’s nothing compared to dedicating thousands of dollars and years of your life
becoming a pilot.
This is a prominent enough phenomenon that releasing a big, new flight sim
might actually help solve the pilot shortage.
The people who make flight sims certainly think so:
Sebastian:And I would say the more the quality and the more realistic a simulator becomes, and the
more, um, emotional it gets because it's just so great to see and to, to live,
the more I think it may drag people into actually becoming real world pilots
or at least trying to fly plane.
Jenna: Aviation companies are also resting their hope on flight sims solving the pilot shortage;
Jorg: We are working with some organizations now that are
focus on bringing aviators to the future.
And they are so excited about this, about this product because they think it can inspire
a whole new, a whole new generation of fliers.
Jenna: That’s all well and good, but do flight sims actually have the power to turn simmers
into real, licensed pilots?
According to simmers who became real licensed pilots…
yup.
Drew: I think the first time I played a flight simulator, it sort of made the possibility real.
Um, and that, that notion just sort of cemented in my head like this, this IS a possibility.
And so I think just getting any kind of hands on time with, you know, a real or virtual
plane, you know, for someone like me, you never really forget that.
Jenna: But maybe Drew is a unique situation,
I don’t know if Alex actually--
[record scratch]
Alex: Without flights sims I don't think I'd become a pilot.
Jenna: Okay! Well,
I guess there's finally a problem SOLVED by video games.
So who knows, a whole new generation of future-pilots
might be taking their first virtual flight
under the Golden Gate Bridge right at this very moment.
And I, for one hope so.
Because the floor at LaGuardia is...
very uncomfortable.