Moving Beyond the pilot's Operating Manual

[2ndsegment]

I am happy again with the AI. I have made flights to Kabul from Basra and Frankfurt am Main from Bagram. The mountains did not deter me. I could explore full payload and full fuel load although --- I then decided to challenge the Sierra Madre. First from a long flight over the jungle and then over the high plateau from SBGL, Rio Janeiro to Santiago as Arturo Merino Benitez International, SCEL. That done I did Estancia Nueva from Lubecka Airport, SAJO up the coast instead of down to SCEL. Just because you can jump to FINAL one day and not get a "You do not have enough fuel to jump to FINAL" does not mean you can always gross up to what can be flown off the departure runway and miss all the obstacles. It's a play of wind, mountain wave and ATC clearances with no XPDR operating for me.

[2ndsegment]

I was missing one tag, the natural law view which changed neural network into more than an associative memory. My uncle a life insurance salesman had a neighbor who claimed to have invented an associative memory. It formed the basis for neither deductive nor inductive logic. Instead it sort of just played forward from one association to the next. In that way it needed no sensor inputs nor did it make reports of any kind. In that way it presaged the first IBM PC which had no keyboard and no display. I looked at a Hewlett-Packard PC version like that in 1993 and that is how I came to receive a Christmas gift of the PC of my choice in 1994. My gift did not include a spread sheet or a copy of a word processor which to me was a big long tunnel hooked to a keyboard that produced completed documents in multiple copies stapled and -- you know, a Wang. The printer I was allowed to include did not have a printer driver. I had been avoiding computers and even calculators since 1981. Then when self driving cars began to be announced, I especially avoided them. I avoid at all costs contests between brute force and common sense and science or mathematics.

Gyros had found a competitor in accelerometers. Ring Laser gyros completely eclipsed the reliability and accuracy of constant temperature inertial navigators. Radio navigation using satellites was far beyond beacons, VOR/DME and LORAN eventually becoming near ubiquitous as GPS. I now even have a few year old GPS mechanization on my Garmin Forerunner. My grandchildren "learned to fly" on my FIRE tablet using the onboard MIMS accelerometers almost 10 years ago.

So what am I doing even considering the AI on the new Microsoft Simulator? Ummm! I didn't know it was there. Why not just trim and autopilot setup like I used on FS-X? Give a nod to EAA and learn to fly a GA aircraft not a War bird as in Combat Simulator 3 that I avoided in 1994 for my first PC any way just to what?

Stories about ghost multiples fooling the AI that had exotic sensors and also about owners sitting in the back seat and hitting a divider at a fork in the road sent me further away not nearer. Even the 737 MAX AI was not intriguing. Now gravitation, there was something intriguing with how it varied over the earth and how something stretched might actually be capable of sensing differences at the two ends. Instead, now I have found an Airbus A-340 that climbed a blast wall when the 4 engines were operated at maximum in contradiction of certification for only one engine at maximum at a time and the airplane was parked facing the wall and unchocked. I had seen news that A-340 pilots tended to takeoff very flat and found "ouch!!" that reefing the Boeing 747-8i off the runway led to a tail strike. I knew about tail strikes but mostly on landing and specifically with the DC-9-50 flight test. John Lane an ex-Marine service acceptance pilot on the Skyhawk had discovered that tendency.

John Lane and an El Toro Marines Major Ezell at "Top Gun" did not like me. It was an instinctive thing that first appeared when I chose the weapon delivery system on the A-4M to exclude the A-7E and it's ILAAS system as inferior in SATS takeoff payload and unable to demonstrate sufficient deadliness to give it the nod. I was cautioned that "if a bomb ever fell on one of their guys they were coming for me." My brother-in-law was also a U.S. Marine after I drove him in my truck to Marine Recruit Center, San Diego after he had enlisted. One day because I did not want to buy life insurance from him after he said, "You should be made to suffer ordeal!" Perhaps he was thinking of SEAL training, I did spend some time on Juno Beach, Florida and my son became a PADI certified diver.

[2ndsegment]

I like to see myself as real in terms of timing. What happened with my taxes in 1978 after I sold my only house I saw as an audit. I decided to fly close to home like the other EEA guys. I still faced my lack of flying hours in a small private aircraft. AI flights to San Marcos 25 miles down the road just did not pan out so--why not grab my untrusty Freedom 2.4 that MS-FS 2020 forced me to assign all the buttons and sliders on. Why not test the AI on the Japan flight with all the hoopla? All right--nothing to lose. The AI just flys straight off the runway and continues on ignoring the course as shown obviously on the 2D map.

The Freedom 2.4 with my new lessons from Arizona , on this sim, about choosing a fixed throttle and sighting a constant glare shield to horizon height held a lure I did not chase the airspeed. I learned that from the flying lesson as FS-X had faded for me. Really bumpy up there and the wind out of the gaps between islands was anything but divine. So I sometimes have to wake up the joystick as it seems to go asleep or is it the wireless dropping out? I got to see Mount Fuji on a cloudless day. Then as supper time came I had to (ESC) and let the sim pause to make salad and pour my drink of water mixed with about 1/3 fruit juice. It rejoined the flight just as I had left it after that and the time to the fish course being ready gave me a short passage over the spine going out to the sea on the shoulder of Fuji.

This morning I read about the passing of the chairman of Fanuc robotics who had pioneered some of the NC machines. He had placed his company on the shoulder of Fuji. No mention was made of GM-FANUC that had created a joint effort in a new building in Troy, Michigan. I once had walked over that way as part of my keeping it real. I got diverted by a new Lucas facility and turned in there to chat about some robots I had seen in a German VFW brochure. The receptionist suggested I talk to Kipp. He sent me to Tom Werner at Vickers and he after awhile sent me to Sperry where they had a very noisy printer.

After dinner I woke up the sim before first waking up my joystick and classically the failure mode of zero latency gave me a windscreen full of terrain and uncertain as to just which way was up. Now the latency as I watched the screen go to "you have damaged your landing gear." I did not realize that is what had happened until this morning as I was trying to establish a heart rate of 100, constant while jogging with variable strike for higher and more steps very short for lower. I had jumped first to the FINAL after a takeoff and on a second to APPROACH to get logged and watching it land in AI on the wrong runway off in the dirt to the left side. Next time I will wake up my joystick before pressing the screen button for FLY and restarting the sim from a pause. My keyboard pause button only switches from cockpit view to tail on outside view as if I used ALT on the main and END on the numeric pad.