Flying with Altered Time

[currentadventure]

Is it a problem? As a student pilot here on the East Coast and with the short days of winter, by the time I get a chance to participate in the evenings, it's dark on both the east and west coast. X-plane allows you to alter the weather and the time. If I use real weather but change the time so I can fly in daylight, will that be an issue with PE?

Thanks!

[Keith Smith]

Great question. Not an issue at all, the controllers don't know/care what time it is in your sim.

Whereabouts are you on the east coast? I'm running into the same boat as you.

[theskunk]

I do this frequently -- makes it much easier in my opinion.

Raleigh, NC here!

[currentadventure]

Thanks Keith! Does that mean I could change the weather to vfr conditions if it is actually ifr on west coast?

Another North Carolinian here, just a little further SE.

Wilmington, NC

[jdoggchief]

I hope it's allowed to change both the time and the weather, as I've been doing both while working through the VFR ratings. (SNA has had a low overcast lately that prevented VFR operations.) I also changed the time from night to day so that I could see landmarks better.

[Keith Smith]

Yes, you can set the weather (better or worse) and time of day at your discretion.

[currentadventure]

Thanks for the clarification Keith!!

[Mark Hargrove]

If your flight conditions are different from the real world, I think you just need to let the controller know if they issue an advisory that you can't use, or an instruction that you can't comply with.

If I recall correctly, you can see/hear this happen to Keith on a flight he has up on YouTube from BFL to MYF. The actual time-of-day is around 23:00Z (3:00 in the afternoon, Pacific Time). He's flying the RWY 28R ILS approach with another airplane in front of him, and the controller asks him to side-step to RWY 28L -- a perfectly reasonable request for a daytime approach. But Keith, night creature that he apparently is, had started the flight from BFL with his time set to sunset. By the time he was on approach to MYF it was full-on dark. Runway 28L isn't lit, and he had apparently forgotten to pack his night-vision goggles.

He very calmly told the controller he was unable to do the side-step, then equally calmly realized he was going to land right on the a-- er, tail, of the airplane in front of him and did a go-around.

Which was educational all by itself, since I didn't realize you could request a "go-around" as a termination of an instrument approach and immediately enter a regular VFR traffic pattern -- there was a brief exchange with the tower that I couldn't quite follow that authorized this.

Keith -- what did you request after announcing your go-around to get into the regular landing pattern so quickly?

-M.

[Keith Smith]

Mark,

You're right, there are times when altering time of day or whether might lead to a situation where you can't comply with an ATC instruction. In those cases, you simply let ATC know what your abilities/inabilities are as a result. A similar situation exists where you set IMC conditions and can't see the VFR targets that they're pointing out, or if it's simply IMC out there to begin with (our drone traffic isn't sensitive to weather at this point).

Regarding the go-around, I had no desire or operational requirement to fly the missed, so I simply requested VFR closed traffic. What I should've said, in hindsight, was "cancel IFR", but requesting a VFR traffic pattern at the time of a go-around practically equates to the same thing (at least in my mind).

The reason I tend to do night ops in the sim is because it increases workload as a result of the reduced visual references.

[Ryan Geckler]

One caveat that no one has mentioned is the fact that we as controllers will use current Zulu time if we need to give a void time or a delay in a hold. Feel free to set the sim time to whatever you would like, but do know the current Zulu time.