PC Flight simulators - how good?
 

I have a nemesis. An annoying chap who has been there and done everything - I'm sure you've all come across the type. Anyway, he seems to think that a one or two PC flight simulators are genuinely good representations of reality. I think they may be fun but anyone who thinks that they represent reality in any meaningful way is a complete chopper. Anyway, here's his last statement. Any comments will be gratefully received;
The above claim seems unlikely in the extreme to me but I'm sure you gentlemen will put me straight if I am wrong . . .

NB MSCFS3 = Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 3

A realistic simulator of the Saudi airforce would surely include the US / UK component sitting on their hands during an adex to give them a fighting chance?

Great.
Get my question moved to a place where the military pilots whose opinion I am after are never going to find it.

Yep. But at least on Jetblast you'll get a minimum of two utterly useless replies.

There's a simple answer.
No matter how good the physics modelling etc - which at this stage of flight sims, on the top of the range programs, is excellent - there is absolutely no aspect of any simulation that engenders the same emotions in yourself, and tere is no simulation whatsoever of the physical stresses.... there's a world of difference between greying the screen out at 6g and actually being anywhere near 2g in reality. (2g is probably in excess of anything I ever experienced, apart from an aeros trip I had shortly after the Be2D was phased out of service).

In the sim if you push forward and go negative g you might get some onscreen effect - in real life your tummy goes funny. There is a world of difference between pushing buttons, flipping switches, and making decisions in front of a screen and doing it with a barf bag in front of you.

Just ask a kipper fleet wet man from 20 years back what stage 2 was like when your tummy didn't feel all that great, or anyone who ever flew a MAD comp <g>

They are all PARTIAL simulations, very good at what they do, but they don't simulate the full experience so will never take the place of genuine flight. That's why we have ground simulators AND training sorties in aircraft/exercises.

Dave

Flight sims are good....

They have taught me quite a bit about flying but it's designed to be a "game" not a learning tool, which makes almost everything simple to understand. You don't learn in-depth about everything

FS2004 inspired me to chase my dream of hopefully becoming a successful airline pilot but you just get bored by looking at a cockpit made up of pixels!

Full Flight Simulators comepletely change that though.....

But as they are £11 million pound, what normal person like you & me has got one??????!!!!!!!!!!!

i really think sophisticated flight sims such as fs2004 or x can help towards learning,particularly for navigation training and instrument flying.

getting some payware aircrafts such as flight one's ATR 72,programmed with Toulouse engineers collaboration,can enhance realism up to a max.

I got it just to get acquainted with the fully functionable FMC with the latest airac.
Also its working overhead panel mimics at 95% the real thing.
nice one:ok:

Take a look at X-plane - www.x-plane.com - there's even an FAA Approved version.

Obviously not FAA Approved if you're sat on a desktop PC with a Saitek joystick, but it's approved for use in conjunction with purpose-built flight simulators.

The desktop version ain't half bad either. :ok:

X-plane is the one..
 

I have to agree on this, x-plane version 9 is without doubt the best sim you can lay your hands on for the pc (version 9 is current). Most folks I know use it for IR training and this seems to work very well for them. You need a decent set of controls though (Saitek throttle/yoke thingy and pedals) and a decent processor and graphics card.
For sweaty hands realism, run it through a Matrox triple head adapter over three screens and a track IR 4 for looking around the cockpit and you have one very good sim.

Well even the most rabid flight simulator enthusiast will agree that the simulator experience falls well short of reality, even for full mission simulators. The stress effects of sustained G cannot be reproduced, for one thing, even if some of the cues can be partly replicated.

As far as physics modelling is concerned the standard equations are well enough known, and modern PC have the processing power to do the number crunching at a sufficiently high frequency.

But I haven't yet seen a PC simulator of the sold in PC world etc category that acurratly reproduces the cockpit displays of the jet it purports to simulate. The display formats that are reproduced are just guessed at by the programmers and even if the programmers had access to accurate information they'd have to make compromises to reproduce minaturised displays on a single domestic screen.

Some years ago now, channel 4 I think did a 'recreation' of the Dambusters raid using PC technology, but without the control loads of an actual Lanc. At the end of it it was claimed that because a modern crew, with a female pilot had succesfully flown out all the training and the actual raid, it proved that a modern crew had the 'right stuff' to be a Dambuster. I think not, it took a lot of physical strength to fly a Lanc, and the PC simulation just didn't simulate control loading.

Just in case anyone is interested in knowing more about X-Plane certified.

The only significant software difference between the certified version and the desktop version is that because the certified version went through the certification process and because of that it will not undergo any regular updates as it would need to be certified again. That means that the game version is more up to date with more features than the certified version. Without checking I believe the certified version is X-Plane 7.x and the game is version 9, so there are significant upgrades in the game version. So with that in mind unless you need a certified device ($100K plus) for training that will get you credits against your hours, stick with the game.

Just so that I do not get called out, I should add as a point of clarity that the software is not certified, it is the whole flight training device (including the software)

A little off the topic but Model R/C flight sims are very good for practice . Model pilots fly using only one sense ie vision so the sim is very realistic

O.K. Here's my opinion:

Flight simulator software has been available since "FS1" was published for the Apple ][ in about 1980. Despite being extremely crude with its wire graphics, it was a start (nobody had ever seen anything like it before) and it gave the average member of the (Apple) computer owning public some idea as to what flying an aeroplane could be like. A few years later "FS2 was published which was a "quantum leap" in graphics technology and gave a much better idea as to the visual cues to be seen from the cockpit of a light aircraft, although landing it was not easy!
In about 1985 a computer literate work colleague, who had absolutely no aviation experience at all approached me to ask about the art of flying. I gave him a disc (yes a 5.25 inch floppy, remember those?) of FS2 and gave him a rough idea as to what to do. He treated it as a computer game and spent many hours, with his computer keybard manoeuvering his aircraft and trying to avoid crashes. Eventually, he saved his position below a glideslope on the centerline of an ILS equipped runway (probably Meigs field with the tower on the left). Then he practiced trying to stay on the ILS all the way down to the runway. It took him a long time to manage to do this on his keyboard, but at least, when he came off, he could reset to his saved position and start again.
After several months practice, I offered him the opportunity to discover what he had learned by actually trying to fly a light A/C.
In a Cessna 152, he naturally had difficulty with the taxying and the R/T work, but after takeoff, it took him only a few minutes to discover that what he could see out of the real cockpit agreed with what he saw on his computer monitor, and he displayed a level of flying handling competance what I would not normally expect before about 5 hours of instruction.

Then we had a break, and I then put him in a fully IFR equipped Cherokee Warrior. After takeoff - with which he coped well this time, he had lttle difficulty in maintaining a desired altitude and tracking down to the local VOR. He then executed a procedure turn to return on a reciprocal heading. Shortly after this, I obtained radar vectors for him to the local "big" airfield's ILS. He followed his headings, established on both localiser and glidepath and then, with a mere 1 hour's genuine flying training under his belt, followed said ILS down to a decision height of 200' keeping both needles beautifully in the middle. A candidate for an initial I.R. test could not have done batter!
In the early 1990's I think, the IMC rating was upgraded. The training requirement was upped from 10 to 15 hours and test candidates had to demonstrate the ability to fly ILS's, NDB approaches and execute holds.
I found it very difficult to get the average candidate up to what I thought was a sufficient standard in the 15 hours, but when I memtioned to them that they needed to get a flight simulation program for their computers, the standard shot way, way up!
Of course since then flight simulation software has continued to improve and become more and more sophisticated. Apart from the uses mentioned above from the early days, pilots training on or converting to a specific aircraft type can use such software to help in these processes as so many of the operations of the systems in these modern aircraft are accurately simulated. Although, your home PC can never give the reality of an all singing, all dancing flight simulator, it is a very valuable adjunct to type conversion training, especially in the early "systems training" stage before use of the full flight simulator becomes necessary.

Please accept large doses of IMHO in the above post!

P.P.

Nicely Put
 

Some very well thought out replies.

Anyone interested might look at the upcoming helicopter sim from Eagle Dynamics - DCS Blackshark. Release date is expected some time this year.

http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/

The developers have some nice video of the navigation systems.

Some reviews of the beta version here

http://www.simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php

Judging from available information, this promises to take PC sims to another level of fidelity / realism (considering of course the caveats made in earlier posts!).

Note: NFI and no first-hand experience here.

Cheers!

X plane Flight sim
 

Facinating thread - and this is a bit off topic I have X plane Ver 8 but could not get the scenery to load - any ideas - XP M/C SP2 3GB of RAM - thanks

I agree with Pilcher that FSxxxx saves a lot of hours of instrument training. It saved me £ 4 digits off my IMCR training, easily. Even with the cheapest joystick it works just fine for this purpose.

The thing is that one should never get airborne without having practiced everything one will be doing, in the sim first. If one cannot do it in the sim, one won't be able to do it in the air (with the radio etc) and the flight will be mostly wasted.

However, few schools would agree with this approach ;)

Fun with Sims
 

If you force yourself to do the real aircraft checklist, use real aviation charts and approach plates, and fly the sim using the most realistic procedures your can, you will learn a ton about IFR. It isn't really about control feedback. Its more about situational awareness and FS 2004 and a couple good add-on programs are a bargain.

If you go to Ebay Motors under "manuals and literature," you will find all sorts of cheap aircraft manuals. I gave up all the fancy controls and only have a joystick. Be sure to trim it up and set the controls damping rate so it flys level unassisted.

level D 767
 

A friend of mine,an ex-767 driver,told me to get the Level-D 767 (only for the sake of precise referencing,doing no publicity) if I wanted the nearest to perfect feel of realism of flying this aircraft on a desktop.
I got it last week.
Even the IRIS works as in the 767.
Power\electricity distribution,bus,everything to the nearest percentage of realism compared to the real thing.
Try it out.

Get IL2 1946....... superb game, do not get the so called complete edition as it was superceeded, but get 1946 which is all the previous versions on one megga dvd....... you even get to fly off and on carriers :) you can pick it up for under a tenner now online.

I thought the fs was pretty useful for instrument training, but hampered ppl training initially, as one tends to spend more time looking in the cockpit than out.

Both negative and positive g can be simulated by taking ones laptop on any child's swing.

A wheels up landing can be simulated by jumping off.


ps, anyone remember pre computer days, involving that toy plane that shot up a line from a spring loaded deck, until it reached its zenith, by which time it had turned 'round in readiness for a spot on carrier landing.

Now that was proper flight simming. :)

(And don't get me started on that helicopter game which used to pivot round a base and could hover, fly backwards and forewards, albeit in a circle, AND WORKED LIKE THE REAL THING.)

Can't help thinking kids of today are missing out.