Aircraft maintenance is one of the most important things of aviation. Without maintenance, aircraft would be crashing one after another. Each time we fly with an airline, we can safely say that this aircraft has a maintenance record and any problems would have been fixed.
Without Maintenance or Mechanics faults with planes would never be found such as a faulty engine, cracked fan blade, worn out tyre and many more crucial things that in time would lead to Disaster! Hugh Loss of life, and loss of a hundred million dollar aircraft! Therefore to save this, airlines and normal General Aviation aircraft are checked thourohly sometimes every landing or once a week for anything even something minor such as a faulty seat belt, has to be replaced or fixed to provide you with the safety.
Lago came up with the idea to develop a program that would interact with Flight Simulator 2002 only that would provide you with the realism of having maintenance on your aircraft. Lago have incorporated lots of things that resemble real life. Such as a hard landing will damage your engines, full thrust throughout the flight, lowering flaps to early and to fast, taxi to fast will all lead in time to damage or faults that will make your aircraft crash! You can prevent this by opening your virtual wallet and paying the mechanic to fix and repair whatever has gone wrong with your aircraft.
Installation was relatively easy, just enter your code and password and it does the rest. Then a new menu is added in FlightSim ‘Lago’ and this is where we can start and configure the program. The first thing we need to do is create our fleet manager, and select the difficulty setting, the higher the setting the more sensitive your aircraft will become.
Once this is done we have to add our aircraft that we want to be maintained to the aircraft list (or fly while using FSM). Different aircraft are configured in different ways for instance a 7474 is added to a Heavy list, whereupon a Cessna 182 is added to General Aviation. Once this small amount of configuring is complete we can get on with flying!
Now at the beginning of every flight you MUST start the program manually by going to the Lago menu. This is a let down and I think would be a lot easier if it could auto-start, but nether the less it’s only a click of a button! So we get pushback clearance and begin our taxi to the Active, as we are taxiing we hear a beep, this is alerting us that we have done something wrong…so we go back to the menu and select to view our maintenance book. We see that we have a done a small amount of damage to our left engine, caused by a high taxi speed.
This is indicated by a percentage indicator. Before all systems were working at 100%, but now our left engine is at 97%. So we will need to keep an eye on that. Our takeoff is great with no problems, but as we climb out and turn right on our SID, we have another beep and this is because of a high G load in the turn (making our passengers dizzy)….but our aircraft remains ok. At flight level 80 (8000ft) we hear another beep and check the log again.
This can get to be a pain as when we check the log it will pause the simulator, but Lago have stressed this cannot be helped as this is how FlightSim is programmed. Anyway we now see that we have a small amount of damage to flaps, due to a retraction at high speed.
If you’re a good pilot you won’t hear many beeps, if you’re bad well…
Anyway several bad flying hours later, and un-countable number of beeps, we get a warning sign, and it appears we have had a hydraulic failure!!!!!! Well this has been slowly building up, from our high taxi speed, to high climb rate and several over-speeds. So we come in for an emergency landing, and we won’t go into that one!
I don’t know how, but I got it on the ground safely and just manage to taxi to the gate. As we shutdown number 2 engine our flight report pops up, this gives a listing of all the problems and failures you have had in your flight. You are then given a total sum of money devised by flight time at the end.
But then below we see a total de-deduction for basically passenger complaints. So I ended up in debt! Once all the complaints have been paid we get an overall rating, and not surprisingly my flight was rated at…DISASTER! Also shown is total fuel used on our flight which can be useful.
Oh well, anyway unless you would chance taking a 737 back to Heathrow with complete hydraulic failure, and damage to radios, and autopilot. It looks like were stuck in Faro. We then visit the Maintenance section, and choose which systems we would like our helpful mechanic to fix.
But the more damage the more you will have to pay. I couldn’t afford the price to fix everything so I visited the Loan section and took out a bank loan to pay for my aircraft to be maintained back to 100% but we will have to fly more flights, better, to get more money to pay back the loan 
So in conclusion a great program by Lago, very useful for improving your flights, and give you the chance to take control in unexpected failures, or problems. Only problems I found, is the Black Box (where we control out altitude settings) was very hard to work, and the problem ‘ very hard touchdown ‘ appeared just too many times.
Although if you know what your doing, it is possible to adjust every parameter in FSMaintenance to suit yourself. But these are only minor problems and wont effect your flight in anyway. So I highly suggest you try this product, and ill certainly be keeping it on my hard drive for further use. Well done Lago for yet another mile stone in FS history!!
