overstress,
Hippy read my mind. Those are the things I would look at initially.
It's pretty funny
that you can't land the sim, but there could be a number of reasons to that, I'll try to list some (in addition to what Hippy said):
- the plane you are using ? most MS default aircraft are horrible, (and I'm sorry to say that most freeware a/c are equally crappy) and have little to do with their real-life counterpart. Their handling is WAY too sensitive and usually they're also too powerful. To really measure the correlation between your piloting skills and the sim peculiarities would be for you to try PIC767 (the program I've been babbling about), or even better (you being a Bus pilot): the PSS Airbus Professional A320. There are many active Bus pilots taking part in the PSS forums over at:
www.avsim.com and telling folks how to use the bird. They claim that the plane is as close as it can get with a desktop sim. The same goes with PIC767. Those are the programs to judge the sim by. In short: SOME planes are just UNFLYABLE, and if you happened to try one, then you'll get a VERY wrong picture about it.
- controller sensitivies ? Too sensitive and the a/c are all over the place. Each airplane has its own RIGHT values for every controller, and to get these right, one just has to harrass other simulator pilots who are type-rated IRL and ask what settings they find closest
- realism settings. If these are put to the "easy, non-realistic" values, real pilots WILL have trouble understanding the a/c, will seem to fly on rails and performance-wise just "not there". So put the sliders all the way to right.
- Weather (did Hippy mention this). Clear all weather and try again.
hope this helps,
Tero
ps. you ARE using MSFS2002 right? The other sims are just not on par with MSFS. Although, and this would interest some of the anti-simmers here, X-plane (a desktop sim) was given FAA approval to be used as a motion-sim software, as a training tool all the way to ATPL. Those who are "in the know" claim that MSFS will perhaps get this certification already for the next version. Remains to be seen.
Interested? see:
http://www.x-plane.com/FTD.html