As I settled into the Captain’s seat of the venerable workhorse of our fleet, the King Air 350, I could tell that this wasn’t going to be the low-stress routine flight I had hoped for. Even though this was just a short hop, the low hanging clouds and heavy rain indicated that I would be earning my Captain-level pay today, and my co-pilots comments about the odd sounds emanating from one of our two turboprop engines did nothing to alleviate my gut-feeling that this flight was going to be a doozy. Still, when you fly for a living, you fly when and where you’re told to. Gut feelings don’t feed the bulldog, and they don’t constitute a reason to cancel a revenue generating flight. The FO went ahead with our departure plans, working through the pre-flight tasks of getting our ATC clearance and checking the weather.

Those items completed, we taxied to the runway for departure. Takeoff went well enough, but it sure didn’t take long to get into the fat, wet clouds looming over the airport. It looked like we were in for one of those rides where you see the runway as you take off, see absolutely nothing but the featureless inside of clouds for the entire enroute portion, and (hopefully) break out of the clouds in time to see the runway at the destination. We climbed to our relatively low cruise altitude, and I settled into the monotonous routine of scanning the flight and engine instruments. It wasn’t long before things started heading downhill. My first indication that something was amiss was when I noticed that the attitude indicator was showing a right turn, but none of the other instruments agreed with that mechanical observation. Being heavily ensconced in the clag, this was the worst possible time for a vacuum failure and the resulting loss of my primary flight instruments. Bad timing isn’t unique in aviation, however, and denial really isn’t an attractive response to an impending emergency, especially if you happen to be the pilot in command. My training kicked in and I immediately went to partial panel, using the turn coordinator (an electric gyro not affected by the loss of vacuum) and the ultra reliable pitot-static instruments to provide the clues as to what the airplane was doing in 3D space that I would need to stay alive. “Well,” I thought, “at least it can’t get much worse.” That’s when one of the engines quit. The seat cushion has not been created that could withstand the pucker pressure that was being applied to mine at that moment. Low IFR, partial panel, and one of the two engines no longer carrying its own weight: this is why they pay me the not-quite-big-but-better-than-burger-flipping bucks.

The fact that I’m still around to write this indicates one of two things: I either successfully made the ensuing single-engine emergency landing, or is this simply an utterly transparent hook to lead in to my review of the new Flight Simulator X from Microsoft. Given the nearly certain knowledge that you’re reading this on a game review web site you’ve probably already guessed which of those options is appropriate. My flight in the fault-prone King Air was entirely simulated, but that is not to say that it wasn’t pretty exciting. Microsoft Flight Sim has been pretty good in the last few iterations, but the last couple have leveraged advances in 3D graphics accelerators to provide 3D virtual cockpits that quite capably aid in the “suspension of disbelief” that is so critical to simulators. Sure, at some level you still know that you’re safely seated at a presumably stable desk, but with the lights ...