Elmlea wrote:

It's not so much fun because it's work.  Some of the stuff was fun, but most of the time it was, like most of my job, fun after the fact. That said, every Christmas, we'd do some silly stuff in the sim for charity.  You and your crewmate would pay a couple of pounds for charity, and after your usual sim slot they'd reboot it and set you a defined, timed challenge.  You'd be on the pan somewhere, and have to get airborne in a "cold" jet (i.e. no power applied), go to a nearby bridge, fly under it, find a boat somewhere and strafe it, find a certain target and get an LGB onto it, track down a tanker and shoot it down, then land on a carrier or something.  Throughout it, the sim instructors would ask you questions about the aircraft, and if you got one wrong you'd end up with either a SAM threat popping up that you'd have to deal with or a failed engine so you had to struggle through with one. It was hilariously inventive, watching people try and shave 3 seconds off by leaving some checks out and failing to get airborne, or dumping fuel to get lighter and forgetting to stop and flaming out, etc etc.  All very free form and extremely funny.