I dreamed last night that I was piloting a Boeing 737. Now because I drive the PMDG 736 in my Flight Simulator life, I’ve got a fairly good handle on the checklist, FMC and procedures.
Unfortunately in my dream everything went wrong. I started out lined up on the runway, and immedately took off. Hit TO/GA, gear up on positive rate of climb, flaps up at 1000′, so far so good. But it seemed I hadn’t set up the FMC, and the panel was missing several useful buttons, including ALT HOLD and CMD A. And suddenly the yoke seemed to lose control authority. After some interesting gyrations and PIO, I realized that there was about a five-second delay in the control response. So I finally managed to get things stable and started hand-flying in circles while trying to get the computers organized. For some reason there was no trim, either, so I had to keep pressure on the yoke.
But I finally managed to get a route entered into the FMC, and luckily the VNAV button was still there on the panel, so I managed to get the plane somewhere and auto-landed (how I did this without CMD buttons I don’t know). To much applause, I might add.
I wonder if this is a metaphor for life :-)
Whatever it signified, I feel inspired to do some “real” sim-flying.