Originally Posted by
Cynical Pilot
Centaurus I think you've missed the point trainingwheels was making. He's not talking about proper synthetic trainers, he's talking about Microsoft Flight Sim or whatever the cool cats have at home these days.
Yes, that's what I was referring to. The type of students who were self taught at home unsupervised by an instructor, flying MS flight sim in their leisure. If you've instructed such students, it's quite evident where they're coming from as they all have a 'natural' tendency to look at the instruments first when flying. All you need to do is look at their eyes when going from climb to cruise, they'll be focusing on the AH to set the cruise attitude rather than looking out the window.
Another common occurrence with such students is flying the aircraft by trim rather than setting the right attitude, and then trimming ..
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When students repeatedly do such errors, it has become a habit that makes it even more difficult to break or 'un-teach'. Any good instructor will not allow for this to continue uncorrected which explains the longer times before solo these days, compared to pre-computer age days.
But I do agree that synthetic trainers are good for a number of things even during the early stages of ab-initio training, as a procedural trainer.