Originally Posted by
Heston
Lightning Mate is spot on. I loathe teaching students who have played on flight sims to any degree. They think they know how to fly and they WILL NOT LOOK OUTSIDE. It takes a lot of time (and their money) to sort out the bad habits they've got into.
There is a world of difference between sitting in your bedroom with a toy and using a professional simulator under proper supervision in the way that it was designed to be used.
Anybody that is serious about learning to fly should avoid sims and spend the money on an air experience flight instead.
As an active flight instructor I cringe when I hear a prospective PPL student say "I have lots of MSFS time !"
The problem with flight simmers is exactly as Heston says. The MSFS guys don't look out the window. When I teach Attitudes and Movements I cover all the instruments and the AI and DI don't exist presolo and I have found that the folks with lots of MSFS often take longer to get good at the foundation skills than students with no exposure to a sim.
I think there is also a more fundamental problem. It is not the flight sim that is in itself the problem, it is that the exposure to the flight sim is largely self taught. There is a reason flight schools don't just give you an airplane and then expect you to figure it out yourself, yet that is in effect exactly what you are doing with MSFS.
My experience is that because there was no structured instruction for new students who had a lot of sim time, they had acquired a lot of bad habits. This was exacerbated by the fact that the sim doesn't closely replicate the whole experience of actually flying a live airplane, therefore they had habits that worked in the sim but not in the airplane.
So the bottom line for me is I would rather have a student who is a blank sheet, rather than arriving with a preconceived set of ideas and habits he/she got from the sim.
Where MSFS has real value is in training for the IFR rating. The flight models are generally more difficult to fly than the real airplane so it builds a good scan but again the most effective use of the sim is completing exercises assigned by an instructor that follow a syllabus that is complementary to the rest of the course, not just random driving around playing with the radios and instruments.