Agreed. He is a mega-nerd.

I didn't even believe him at first that you could even get airplane food delivered to a residence.

I was chatting to a First Officer for Air Malta a few years ago and we got to chatting about MS Flight Sim. His comment was "God, I can never sucessfully land in that damn game".

I've always used LH when going to Malta since!

There’s really a way to get airline food outside of being in an aluminum tube? That would make a great gag birthday present.

I remember taking my young son to visit a BA cockpit inflight (some years ago when it could still be done)... he was a Flight Sim enthusiast even then... and the BA captain told us he found it much more difficult to land a 747 in Flight Sim than in real life.

These guys make the snackboxes that are used by several US airlines, and they have very similar ones you can order yourself individually. http://www.gopicnic.com/

I've tried playing MS Flight Simulator on a couple of flights, it's fun! :P

Nobody screams or anything, even passing FAs seems to be interested!

I was flying along on MSFS on a HNL/LAX recently, and the jumpseating/commuting FO was very interested in the graphics, thought it was quite realistic.

Okay, sad as this sounds I actually did once start playing Flight Sim on a flight from SFO-DEN, and it was back in early 98. I got bored after a few minutes (and felt a bit silly), shut down the laptop, and switched to a book.

A few minutes later, a very loud beeping alarm was heard throughout the cabin, followed shortly afterwards by an announcement that we had to make an emergency landing. (Evidently smoke from an some kind of electrical bus in the cockpit had set off the alarms, and the fire/smoke was extinguished well before a safe landing was made in SLC, though not before the alarms went off a couple more times. It was on a Frontier Airlines 737, if I recall correctly). Only time I've ever experienced an emergency landing that wasn't for some sort of medical reason.

On a vaguely related note, the first time I ever got to fly in the upstairs cabin of a (UA) 747-200, I made sure to watch a DVD of Airport 75. (Fortunately that flight was uneventful.)

Clearly the right thing to do was ask him if he knew about flyertalk and invite him to join...

But that would have revealed my own geekiness!

playing the game w/o a stick is hard. it's difficult to turn using the keys especially when rolling back the plane into upright straight position.

Not exactly "Flight Sim" but the opposite way. Was watching "Volcano" on a night flight, and the Los Angeles tremors seem to time perfectly with the light turbulence over the Pacific.

And it was indeed a NRT-LAX flight. Makes me wonder, was I watching live TV coverage of Los Angeles? If it was real, would the plane even be able to land at LAX?

Had a similar experience, the helicopter crash scene in "Cloverfield" coincided with hitting turbulence mid-Pacific.

Haven't played FS on board a plane but did manage to "fly" a real 737 flight simulator while in Melbourne last fall.

Rented 90 minutes with an instructor from Flight Experience in their static full cockpit 737 simulator. "Flew" SMF-SFO then he asked what I wanted to try next. I suggested Tegucigalpa, Honduras which he wasn't familiar with but after pulling down the departure & approach plates for the airport agreed that this could be fun. It was! We tookoff and landed there five times.

Overall a great experience for the aviation buff; highly recommended!

That movie certainly seemed to have some kind of 'surround effect' on flights. The IFE conked out on me when I was watching the earlier scenes of that movie. I'd had a couple of cocktails by then, too..