Oviously, there's no "rule"..   

BUT.. if you're going for realism.. you gotta sit through it. That's part of the real flight too.. and a big part of the satisfaction in finishing a long flight, is that you toughed it out.

Consider that if you're fatigued (from just droning along in a cockpit), that your attention span and "sharpness" are off a bit. You have to force yourself into "landing mode". If you just "sped" your way there.. you're still fresh and sharp. That takes away a big part of the challange. And if it ends in an instrument approach, all the much MORE.

I'll take that cockpit realism one step further.. by not allowing myself to use any chart, or knee-board, or notepad, or whatever, that I didn't remember to set within reach before firing the engines up. This includes pulling up the map (which pause the sim), even to get a tower or nav frequency. If I didn't get all that stuff ready.. I'm out of luck..lol   

Oh.. and bathroom breaks too. If I'm not flying a cabin class airplane equiped with a lavatory.. I gotta land before relieving myself 

All that might seem silly.. but what's the point in simulating being a pilot, if you don't suffer all the inconveniences.. ?

I  prefer to sit through it in real time, but if a compromise is needed, I'll save the flight and re-open it later, where I left off.
Sometimes this leads to finding myself in a totally different weather situation, but not often... I usually don't sit down at the sim unless I have the time to at least fly one leg without stopping.

Steve M wrote on Feb 20^th, 2010 at 4:15pm:


I've noticed that speeding it up can cause crashes as well. Interesting, it seems so far that most people stick it out and don't speed up the sim, not necessarily what I expected.

The opinions here have changed my approach to longer flights. You guys made some great points. I've changed my plan of flying from NY to Europe to a tour of Europe. I started off in the very north of Scotland and will be making ca. 2 hour hops around the continent, always starting at the airport I last landed at. This makes it more realistic, as I will be flying the actual amount of time and not zipping through it at 8x speed, and it's something that will be fun to do.

Thanks for the feedback.

None taken 

Now... I'll try to figure the point in setting up a visual simulation, only to check on it now and then 

For my long haul flights sometimes reaching 10+ hours I set the autopilot, takeoff and fly to altitude, and then go about my day checking on it periodically.

I have a fleet of aircraft based all over the US and Virgin Islands. My long haul fleet is mainly based in Minnesota with other smaller aircraft located at International Airports along the way.  If I want to say tour Hawaii I fly out of Minnesota and then land at Honolulu where I take one of my smaller planes based there to do some sightseeing.  Then after I'm done I land back at Honolulu with that smaller plane, refuel my long haul and then start making my way to another stop or back to Minnesota.  If I want to fly the plane I have based in Hawaii again I have to fly back there again to fly it.  I try and keep it as realistic as possible while also not neglecting reality.  Current long haul fleet I have is a 747-400 in Boeing Colors and an A330-200 in Airbus Colors that I pretend are private aircraft.  The longer the range aircraft the more time I have between landings.  Tough part is finding interesting places to fly too.

Anyway that's my story on how I fly my longer flights.

I've done a couple marathon trans pacific flights in small fighter jets, usually I'll be at the controls the whole time, and if I set the speed right I can stretch fuel consumption till I reach the next island, kinda a trade off between a high enough mach number to shorten the flight as much as possible and a good throttle setting and altitude to conserve fuel, usually mach 1.2 at 70-90% thrust and an altitude between Angels 10 and Angels 30 will get the aphasim phantom a couple hours of flight time, just perfect for the Guam-Wake leg, which is about the longest.

When I fly my 737, I'll put in the autopilot, minimize the ATC window, sit back, and wait until they tell me to do something