Become a Pilot With Rod Machado

General Tips for Passing Any Checkride

THE QUESTION

DearRod,
         I am having a lot of problems with the FS 2004 air transport rating training section of the flight training, specifically, the ILS approach section. I stay right on the glide slope, at the correct speeds etc , and come over the threshold with your voice saying, "Your too low!" I flare and land the aircraft only to hear you giving instructions for crossing the threshold. At this point, you say, "Since you have crashed, I am ending the lesson." The point I am making is that I HAVEN'T"crashed." It's just that the lesson commentary seems to lag well behind where the actual aircraft is during the lesson.
       A similar problem occurs with the descent and power management lesson. I cross the last beacon at the right altitude (6000 ft), turn left for the next marker and descend correctly, but when I start the procedure turn to get on to the ILS, although the map shows I am on track, Your voice always terminates the lesson at this point because you say, "You seem distracted and this is not going well...."
    I assume that these "glitches" are in the computer programming , but would be grateful if you could suggest some kind of " fix" for them. Thanking you in advance
       Sincerely

MY REPLY

Greetings:
To be frank about it, there can literally be "tens" of reasons why you might be having trouble passing that ride. Most likely there is some other computer program making demands on your CPU thereby interfering with the proper operation of the software. I suggest you shed individual background programs running on your system (if appropriate and only if you deem they won't interfere with the proper operation of your computer) and see if this makes a difference. This has been my experience with problems like these.

For example, if a virus program is doing a background scan while you're operating the sim, this can prevent the sim from operating properly. Then again, I've had folks make similar complaints about not passing a checkride and, upon further inspection, I found that they never took any of the previous lessons nor have they ever read any of the preflight groundschool briefing material provides for nearly all the lessons. In fact, this is probably the single biggest reason why folks have trouble passing the ride. The fact is that folks can and have been passing that ride so I don't think the problem lies with the program.

I hope this helps.
Best,
Rod Machado

THE ANSWER BACK

Greetings, Rod,
Many thanks for your prompt and courteous reply to my query reference the faulty running of some of the lessons in FS 2004. I took your advice, disabled the background anti-virus and spyware programs, restored all the FS settings to the "default" values, for the duration of whichever lesson I was currently in (at the moment it is still the descent and power management lesson), and the lesson commentary now seems to be synchronized OK. Failures in the lesson now seem to be solely the result of my own slowness with the descent calculation and my seeming inability to tune the radios for the next leg! I WILL crack it, eventually, so once again, thanks for your help.

Regards