Originally Posted by
JustinHeywood
Mick, I’m totally unfamiliar with modern flight sims. A couple of questions,
Justin, just to be clear, when the Captain's flight sim data first came to light I too was totally unfamiliar with modern flight sims. I was not a simmer (and wouldn't even categorise myself as such now). But I suspected that many people commenting publicly on the recovered data files were similarly totally unfamiliar with the home flight sim set-up used by the Captain. So I dragged out an old laptop that still ran Windows 7, bought Microsoft Flight Simulator 9 (A Century of Flight) on eBay, bought a copy of the Phoenix Simulation Software B777 add-on online, and started trying to get my head around how the whole thing worked.
Originally Posted by
JustinHeywood
1. Is it necessary to ‘fly’ these things in real time? I.e you say that he (Zaharie) couldn’t have flown the 777 to fuel exhaustion in 72 minutes on his sim. Is it not possible to ‘fast forward’ the flight so you’re not sitting there doing nothing for many hours?
Good question. Yes, the base sim program (FS9) has a time compression function. However, when you use time compression, apart from anything else, it runs the "in sim" clock at the relevant faster speed. Those time stamps are "in sim" times. By using time compression it may have taken the operator less actual time to fly those 72 minutes in sim, but that doesn't change the fact that there's only 72 minutes of elapsed in sim time in total.
Originally Posted by
JustinHeywood
2. How do we know that the aircraft was ‘manually’ relocated to the southern ocean?
Whenever the sim aircraft is manually relocated, typically by using the Map function, it causes the program to automatically create a temporary flight file. In that flight file there are a number of parameters that describe the aircraft's orientation, velocity and acceleration using an orthogonal X, Y, Z axis framework plus pitch and bank data plus the direction of flight is also recorded using X, Y, Z values. In normal flight the X, Y, Z and P (pitch) parameters will typically all have non-zero values. Whenever the aircraft is manually relocated though the program is simply not sophisticated enough to recalculate all those values so it zeroes out most of the velocity parameters. So, whenever you see P/B/X/Y/VelBodyAxis = 0 with non-zero values for the various AccBodyAxis and VelWorld parameters, you can be pretty confident that the aircraft has been manually relocated.
You can actually see the impact of this in sim whenever you manually relocate the aircraft; when the simulation restarts at the new location there's a fleeting WTF moment as the program adjusts.
This particular quirk was first noted by Victor Iannello and Yves Guillaume in a paper they co-authored in 2016.
Originally Posted by
JustinHeywood
3.is there a source for the statement that other details on his sim have been withheld?
We know from the analysis of the Captain's flight simulator set-up conducted by the Malaysians that there were 671 .flt files found across the four hard drives found with the PC being used. We've only ever seen partial data for half a dozen of those so I think it's fair to say that a lot of it hasn't been made public.
And I'd hastened to add that "never made public" and "withheld" likely have two different meanings.