Flightsimmers, how many of you here and how do you interact it with real flying?

[jezbowman]

So there are actually some spinable aircraft for FS2004 then? I thought the limitation was in the way FS2004 calculated flight dynamics, rather that limitations in any particular aircraft.

I heard that X-Plane does the flight dynamics calcs in a different way, thus you can take the a/c out of the envelope.

I've been using Fs2004 for IMC practise. My default weather is set much lower than real life IMC minima, so I practise ILS approaches down to 100ft. That's fun! And quite sobering if you screw it up.

What's excellent fun is the way you can replay the approach with the weather lifted. Try flying an ILS in pea-soup and then replay in good vis. No - you really were not drunk!!!

My instructor is an 'old-skool' guy. He's realistic about using the sim. He understood how I used it to practise nav for the PPL and thought that was good, and now he thinks it good that I'm using it for my IMC rating.

The only thing he warned me about was the way that the ADF responds too accuraly, in real life things such as ground contour, hills, valleys, weather and other factors affect the direction of the ADF indicator. VOR's also suffer from errors in the real word that are not correctly modeled in flight sim. A radial is rarely straight is reality, more likely to bend and twist due to reflections, etc... This is called scalloping.