Actually, this was a question that always kept bothering me: how close is a PC flight simulation to the "real" thing? Would it be possible to fly a real airplane with just PC experience? And I especially mean the big ones, the commercial airliners... Well, in 2001 I was able to get a big step closer to answering these questions.

On the occasion of finishing my PhD thesis, my (former) colleagues made me an absolutely staggering present, booking a couple of hours on a real 747-400 full motion simulator at the Lufthansa Trainings Center in Frankfurt. So for about 2 hours on a late sunday evening in July 2001, I had the chance to "fly" a real Boeing 747-400. It really was an incredibly cool experience! Thanks again folks for this awesome present!

 
Piloting the 747 around Frankfurt International, New York's JFK International, and a small airport in Greenland, I did a couple of takeoffs and 7 landings -- all manual, of course, no auto-pilot used. With me asking for a bit of a challenge, the instructor applied the whole spectrum of scenarios: with minimum weight as well as heavy load, at day and night, with other air traffic, with turbulences and crosswinds... Nevertheless, six landings were smooth and clean, keeping the aircraft undamaged and my passengers happy and satisfied! Well, and the seventh, we would at least have survived :-) But this one was under somewhat difficult conditions: with an engine failure and strong crosswind, I slightly missed the runway...
 

 
All in all, I have to say I was really impressed to see this professional full motion flight simulator behave pretty much exactly as my X-Plane simulation at home (or, actually, just the other way around: to find X-Plane behave exactly like the real thing). Sure, X-Plane cannot simulate the physical effects resulting in this feeling of flying, and it only has a comparatively small monitor to display all the information, but the flight modeling is exceptionally good. X-Plane really is as close to the real thing as it gets! Otherwise I wouldn't have been able to straight away fly and land this huge aircraft.