Originally Posted by
Pace
They are different! for a start and this is a big important bit the sim has no inertia the real aircraft and you have tons of it.
Sim really are glorified MSFS with a real cockpit and they go up and down and left and right.
I would concur with MJ. He and I might make a safe landing if we were not fighting over who had control
Pace
I would be absolutely astounded if the simulation didn't reasonably faithfully handle the inertia - Otherwise windshear exercises in the sim would be trivial (you would momentarily loose speed then like magic be back up to the previous airspeed).
I am not a training captain with x000s of hours and only have the sim hours I did for my IR (basically a procedural simulator) and a couple of joy rides in an a 320 sim at LHR. I found the procedure trainer quite a bit more twitchy in pitch than a real light aircraft (probably due to the lack of G feedback from pitch changes). But the A 320 reasonably OK (as it does have some reasonable feedback of G changes). While I have no idea if the a 320 has a 'game/captain' switch that makes it 'easy', in the configuration I was provided (sitting on a taxi way engines running FMS loaded with a SID and the destination), it was reasonably straightforward to taxi out, departure, follow the SID, due a bit of airwork and then manually land off the ILS (in VMC, but it was loaded so I could track the localiser and glideslope) and purely visually.
The main thing I remember about the throttles was 'when the aircraft calls you a retard it is time to close the throttles and flair' - I have a suspicion on the Airbus the 'manual' flight still has auto throttle to manage your speed on approach as it seemed very easy.