I have to say that as a practising 767 Captain I have found 767PIC to be a really useful tool to practise for base checks, or even fly a few short sectors to practise standard calls and procedures when not flying very often.
Yes, there are many differences, but in general if you mastered this program from one end of the instruction book to the other you would be very comfortable watching two pilots fly the thing for real.
I regret not having a more realistic overhead panel. PIC's lacks many items and places things like the EEC's on the centre panel when all of our's are in the roof. (Also GPWS overides). Yes, the airconditioning panel is also out, as if I remember without firing up the game at this point, the pneumatic panel is 767, but the airconditioning is 757. (I'll get back to you on that one.)
Handling is down to what preferences you set your joystick to. You can make it feel like a Carvair (Only the older simmers will remember those!) or an F15!. In reality the 767 handles with about the same hand forces as a Cessna 150/Piper Warrior, yes really! It is a 'very' responsive plane to handle and very easy to overcontrol, both in pitch and yaw. Those of us who fly both the 767/757 have to take a second or two to mentally prepare how much pull force to rotate with when jumping types. After four months on the 767 I thought the controls had frozen when I first flew the 757 again!
All in all for a flight sim program I am really impressed with 767PIC, but the fact that you are putting an entire room into a small screen will have it's limitations.
As far as the ILS autoland is concerned, apart from a tendency to follow the localizer one dot left of centreline all the way down, and the fact that the brakes are totally unrealistic courtesy of MSFS2000, then it does represent real events. However it would be nice to have reverse thrust, or have I not found a way of doing that?
Also I for one appreciate things like the automatic selection of ILS frequency for a chosen runway. Don't forget that I am not practising single crew operation, only standard two crew practises. Things that I would have done in the cruise, or asked the non flying pilot to do will not be appreciated when having to be done myself at some late stage.
Up until now I have used the program on a three year old laptop, but having just gone out and bought a bells and whistles desk top I am looking forward to seeing how it flies on that.
I'll let you know.
[ 18 December 2001: Message edited by: Alberts Growbag ]