Abnormal Situations

[Jay W. (1016093)]

On 9/9/2018 at 9:25 AM, Andrew Heath said:

How does one determine that in an objective way?

I have been controlling on VATSIM a long time and most of my time has been spent controlling in troll central... New York... so admittedly I am bias. As a result of my experiences, what I can say with a certain fact is that the percentage of emergency occurrences in the online environment is much higher than in the real world. The main reason for this is pilot error... i.e. "my autopilot failed" when in fact the user just failed to know how to operate it correctly,  or "we are stalling" because the user tried to climb too high, too early in their flight.

Ultimately we are trying to simulate a realistic environment, and when emergencies are being declared at a much higher rate than the real world, then we are failing to simulate the real world correctly.

What I can promise is that we will use stastical analysis of the number of emergencies declared over the first year and, if those numbers do not match the occurrence rate in the real world, then we will change our policy.

But for now, I am not sure anyone can convince me that having a policy other than VATSIMs is a good idea.

We know that most aircraft have some form of random failures. Is it not possible to get the client to give data to you as to whether there is a failure within the sim as opposed to a made up pilot error?

[Andrew Cofone]

I disagree, I think there should be some way of letting controllers know that the aircraft you are flying may have a failure. A lot of 3rd party developers are simulating wear and tear and failures. Doesn’t mean you will have a failure, just a heads up to the controller that it is a possibility verse say flying a carenado plane where failures won’t happen.  I also agree the controller should have the final say if the failure or emergency will be entertained.  If they are swamped with traffic I get it, no time for emergencies. Basically you can’t aim for a realistic environment if you start limiting real life scenarios. 

[1011342]

Controllers don't get such a heads up in the real world.  I wouldn't want one here.  As far as I'm concerned, if it's a machine being flown by a human, it's subject to some sort of failure.  Whether that failure gets announced and I have to do anything about and how realistically/well the pilot deals with it is part of the randomness and magic of being a controller....  

[Eric Nondahl]

Might be interesting to use some kind of Emergency Token System distributed via chance. A "lottery" is a fair way of distributing things that have a limited quantity (and emergencies should probably be limited due to the unfair nature / impact on other aircraft.

It could work something like this:

• Every member has a low chance to receive an emergency token over time (maybe a chance per flight hour or something?)
• There are different types of emergency tokens that can be received, i.e. engine failure, medical emergency, loss of GPS, etc
• Members can opt-in to use an emergency token on a flight when they want to simulate that emergency type
• ATC is allowed to give emergency priority like the real world, since the tokens are evenly distributed.
• If needed ATC could have the ability to allow or disallow emergency token use as they wish.

Pros:

• Allows prioritizing emergency like the real world
• The most experienced pilots have more of a chance to get a token, so more likely to be realistic
• The token drop chance allows network designers to control the impact of the system

Cons:

• Creating a token system for emergencies doesn't really match the real world. However, this is a compromise and would add realism without getting out of control.

Edited March 31, 2019 by Eric Nondahl
typo

[aeroniemi]

Even controlling at Gatwick for quite some time, I've only seen 2-3 emergencies; I don't think people overusing them is really an issue. The ability for ATC to end any emergency, as found on VATSIM is important to manage that rate; if people know that they might have it denied, they're much less likley to do it intentionally.

[veselko (1018510)]

Abnormal situations are part of real life aviation.

Even if you as passanger don't see these, they are always possible.

They should be simulated, but only thoes that are realistic(no hijack).