The Boeing 767 is one of the greatest technological achievements in the aviation industry. Flying the 767 is many flight simmers dream, yet a complex machine isn't easy to operate. It's not just a matter of advancing the throttle to get this bird into the air. Each year, hundreds of pilots undergo training to learn how to fly the 767 and current pilots need to review their training on a regular basis.
A DVD aimed at the entry level
publisher: Angle of Attack Productions
price: USD40/EUR30
test system: Pentium Core2 6600, 2GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 7950GT 512MB
I'd like to begin the review to say that evaluating an instructional DVD isn't an easy task. Firstly, quality is tied to price. While an add-on aircraft for Flight Simulator may cost anywhere between $10 and $50, a training course to fly a 767 can cost anywhere between $20 and tens of thousands of dollars. You may not want to pay that much for a DVD, but there are instructional DVDs on the market for $2000 and more and they're worth it. Obviously, you're going to expect a lot more from a $2000 DVD than you would from a $20 one.
The second difficulty is that when it comes to tutoring one thing may work for one person while it may not work for another. There are different concepts on how to present and teach material and they all have weaknesses and strengths.
What I'm going to do in this review is telling you what you get from Angle of Attacks and leave it to you to make a final judgment. The DVD retails at $40, so it's clearly targeted as an entry level instruction.
Getting started: the scene selection menu
With that out of the way, let's get started. Angle of Attack gives you one standard DVD which you can pop either into your PC or play on your TV in a DVD player. If you pop it into the PC, you are greeted by an installer that puts some extra goodies onto your PC. The DVD plays with all standard players, so everything works fine in that department.
The DVD starts up with a copyright protection notice and then goes on to the main menu, which is neatly animated. From here you can either play the movie, or select a scene.
Since we're talking about the menu and scene selection, let's have a closer look at how the information is organised and how accessible it is. The main movie is split into three big sub-movies - well, not quite, there's also an intro and outro, but they're pretty short. Movie 1 talks about the 767 systems and is almost 2 hours long, movie 2 walks you through take-off and landing for about 1 hour and movie 3 shows a 1.5 hour flight in real time so you can see everything you learned in action. So, all up the main feature is a massive 4.5 hours long.
While the movie is split into 3 parts, from the front menu you can only view it as one main feature, it's not possible to start movie 2 or 3 from the front. I would have preferred to be able to access the sub-movies from the front, but admittedly that's a minor point.
You can access the sub-movies via the scene selection screen however. For the scene selection screen you get a little menu over 3 pages that looks like a flight management computer. Whether you like it or not is personal taste. It looks neat and fits well with the 767 theme. Personally, I didn't find it very accessible.
Firstly, while the scene selections were logical, they weren't spread over the features very well. You can select several scenes within the 767 systems & operations movie, but there is only one selection for the flight manager computer (FMC) part which is a whole hour long! So if you wanted to jump into a specific topic on the FMC, you can't and have to fast forward through footage that is an hour long.
Secondly, the scene selection items are often labeled with technical terms, so newbies may get confused with all the terminology. Then again, this is an instructional DVD on the 767, so most people watching this are probably familiar with the lingo.
Overall, the menu selection does its job. I believe it could have done better, but in the end of the day I wouldn't expect more from a $40 product.
Watching the movie: packed with information
Ok, let's look at the meat of the product - the movie. As mentioned above, the whole feature runs over 4 hours. That is 4 hours of instructional material on how to fly the 767 - and I have to say you get a lot of info! This isn't 4 hours of rambling, the information is densely packed and when you watch the movie it goes bang, bang, bang. So, you certainly get $40 value out of all the info presented.
Before I delve into the movie contents, let’s have a look at the overall quality. With four hours on one DVD I would expect the movie to be fairly compressed. I'm happy to say that this didn't have any visual effect on quality - the visual quality is excellent.
The movie also uses a soundtrack. I had a quick look at the AoA forums and several people didn't like the music. To be honest, it didn't really bother me. It's one of those commercial mellow synthesiser tracks with techno like beat, if you ignore it, you won't even notice it. Having said that, I'm not sure it adds any value to the movie, and Chris Palmer from AoA stated that the soundtrack would be dropped. Personally, I couldn't care less about something minor like that.
The presentation of the information is solid and what I would expect from a $40 product. Information is shown visually by showing the Level-D panel, zooming into the relevant bits of the panel, and by highlighting important areas and using a pointer. It is always clear what parts are being discussed.
The only improvement I could see is that sometimes the movie may have benefited from a whole cockpit view before zooming in. For example, when talking about the APU switches, the video is zoomed onto the APU part of the panel, but the viewer has no idea where the APU part is located in the cockpit.
The visuals are complemented with Chris Palmer's voice teaching you about the the different topics. The material as such is clearly presented and his voice clearly understandable. At times, maybe most of the time, it's pretty clear that this DVD is done by a flight sim enthusiast. That's not necessarily a bad thing though, while this may not be the most professional work I've seen, it's certainly professional enough.
The information itself is pretty 'dense', meaning that there is a lot to absorb in a small amount of time. This isn't surprising because flying a complex machine like the 767 isn't trivial and fitting everything into four hours naturally makes for high information density. Chris sometimes throws in random bits of general flying advice. Personally, I find them a bit out of place on a 767 instruction DVD, they are more for beginners. Again, this is just a minor criticism point.
The systems, take-off and landing, an example flight
Let's move on to the content of the movies. The feature starts with a mini introduction movie about what you're going to learn. I find these US style intro movies a bit superfluous, but it's short enough to not be annoying.
The second movie walks you through all systems of the 767. This is a lot of info and I have to say this may be the weakest part of the DVD. Firstly, this feels like someone put together an audiovisual reference section from a book. The way AoA have done this really doesn't have much advantage over reading the reference books themselves. I believe AoA could have done better by using the strengths of audiovisual presentations and walk the viewer through the systems more immersively rather than dumping all the info onto the viewer.
What also strikes me as an odd choice is that the system reference was put in front. The reasoning may have been so that you know all the systems before you fly, but for beginners the massive amount of information is probably a bit confusing. It doesn't help either that Chris uses a lot of jargon. If you're a beginner, you're confronted with a lot of abbreviations and technical systems which can be a bit overwhelming.
On the strong side, the overview is very detailed and there is a lot of information presented. After watching the two hours about the 767 systems you have a pretty good idea how to operate a 767. A whole hour is dedicated to the flight management computer alone!
The next movie walks you through several take-off and landing procedures. This is pretty well done, and makes use of the audiovisual format as you can see what happens in the aircraft in real time. The only minor criticism I have is that an hour of watching take-offs and landings is a bit repetitive. Maybe a bit of extra info at the beginning of each scenario would have helped.
The final movie is an example flight across the US. You can follow the whole flight and see how all systems work together.
Reflecting on the movies, I wonder if it would have been better to swap the order, i.e. sample flight first, system reference last. As I wrote in the beginning, different people learn differently so there may not be an ideal order to do things. The way its done you learn everything you need to know about the 767 first and then go flying. This makes the learning curve pretty steep, having the sample flight first would possibly ease the viewer into the topic.
Summary: great value for money
Ok, time to summarize the DVD. The DVD certainly looks professional, the video and audio quality are great, and you get four hours chock-a-block information about how to fly a 767. Minor criticisms would be that the DVD could be more accessible via a better menu, and there is a lot of technical jargon that may confuse beginners.
Basically, for $40 you can't go wrong with this DVD. I'm sure better info products can be made, but hardly for $40, and with all the info you get on this DVD, it's certainly worth the money!
Four hours packed full of information, great visual and sound quality
some parts could be confusing to novices
Christian Stock
