Full Motion Flight Sims - My Tour and Pics from KDAL

[AlanH]

I know many of you here do things like this for a living, but for people like me who don't work in the aviation industry, this was one of the coolest things I have done.

Met some friends for lunch a few weeks back and one of the guys works for Southwest and invited a couple of us down to his office at Dallas Love for a tour. I was just expecting to walk around and take pictures, had no idea we were going to have the chance to fly a couple of the CAE Flight Simulators. They were in the process of getting ready to move everything over to a new building minus the 733 sims they no longer need. Was really happy to get a chance to fly their original "Lone Star 1" 733 sim and what a difference between that one and their newest 737-700 with the glass cockpit.

My friend and I took turns flying a couple of the sims, my last flight sim experience is FS2004 with a MS Sidewinder 2 joystick many years ago, while he is an avid flight simmer. I feel like we did really well, neither of us crashed, maybe a couple hard landings including one that slid of the side of the runway in severe weather. After a couple real attempts, we then decided to have fun, like having a white out snow storm departing Las Vegas and nearly clipping a mountain and low flyby of the Vegas Strip including flying between the Wynn and Encore Hotels. The hardest part for me wasn't the flying but steering with the nose wheel, the movements of the simulator didn't feel right on the ground.

[AlanH]

737-700

[AlanH]

737-300

Final pic we are on 13R at Dallas Love and the far building beyond the 3 planes is the (soon to be former) Flight Training Center where we were.