how to improve LOOKOUT? or Flightsimmer Problems...?

[raviolis]

Played GranTurismo or Daytona for years, but didn't develop a habit of driving over curbs at 150 mph when I'm in my car

Seriously... FS is a good videogame, but take it for what it is, a videogame ! Up in the air it's so different, the noise, the vibrations, everything really, that you can't even compare the 2 situations.
I guess FS can give you good instrument scanning skills, just make sure you don't abuse of them. It took me 1 lesson to fix that, since if I kept looking at them I would eventually feel sick ! Also, as soon as you realise that the traffic in the air is real, and it can hurt you, your instinct will make sure you are looking out of the window quite a lot !

If problem with FS is lack of rudder, you can get one of those joysticks with the twisting grip that acts as rudder. It won't get your feet working, but will get your brain to think about it. Once in the cockpit, you'll feel the pedals and it'll be quite natural to use them.

Good luck

[acuba 290]

at the moment i hate FS and want to forget it and just delete from my brain. FS is a big ****, which makes PPL study for me a huge problem and i need more hour training to get all FS instincts away, that's my reality at the moment

[mad_jock]

Don't worry about it, as i said its a very common trate with PPL students. With FS experence and without.

Next time you go for a lesson take a pack of post-it notes with you and tell your FI of your concerns. Then go and do a bit of revision with everything covered. An hour or two at this stage sorting the problems out will save you hours later on if you can nip it in the bud.

But the main thing is to have a laugh at yourself and enjoy the challange. If you get all wound up and tense. You will start gripping the controls with the old white knuckle death grip and the whole thing will be 10 times worse. Let the plane do the flying, you just look out the window and give it a poke in the right direction.

Enjoy your not the first and you won't be the last.

BTW watch out for all these tail dragger types. They will use any excuse to get pilots to fly a tail dragger. They know fine that they will ruin your enjoyment of flying tri-wheel training aircraft, and start you down that slippery slope to becoming a PFA owner. With the resulting change to wearing cords and checked shirts and knowing what all the different grades of oil do.

MJ

[Windy Militant]

MJ
Oi I resemble that remark! What's with this grades of oil you mean there's more than straight 80?

acuba
Don't get disheartened we've all been through the "My brains still on the Crosswind leg but my planes on Finals and I can't catch up with it" Blues.

My instructor used many cunning ploys to get me through it. These included Flying a Circuit without looking in the office at all. If he caught me peeking he'd bat me round the head with his knee board. (No mean feat in a Terrorhawk)

It is possible to do this using only visual and audible clues. You know the attitudes. You know the sound of the engine and you can hear the airflow. If I can do it then so can you.

Another thing is if the circuit is really getting to you ask your instructor if you can do some general handling. There's nothing like batting round the sky chasing clouds to remind you why you wanted to do this in the first place.

[bencoulthard]

Don't beat yourself up Acuba, I suffer from this too, I promised my FI that I wouldn't use FS2004 but I have had a thought.

Guage failures after take off, FS lets you fail any guages at a specified time. What about failing them all 1 min after take off?

My instuctor covers the guages sometime but he didn't last lesson and I forced my eyes outside more.

The other option is put it on that full screen mode with no dash onscreen.

I dunno if these will help but my logic says it might.

Ben (eyes outside at all times) Coulthard

[Mad Girl]

Originally Posted by Windy Militant

My instructor used many cunning ploys to get me through it. These included Flying a Circuit without looking in the office at all. If he caught me peeking he'd bat me round the head with his knee board.

Oy!! My instructor flicks through these pages - stop giving him ideas - It's bad enough being nagged through the lesson without being physically abused as well!!!!

If it's any consolation, I only used FS2004 for 1 week, when I first started lessons and when I knew I was being taken from lesson 4 - 6 in one session - for reasons I won't go into.

I managed to get from takeoff to landing on FS2004 in a week and on my first flat session my instructor was dead impressed with what I could do in the real thing.
Only problem I had is in that short space of time I'd started obsessing on the instruments. Once he'd realised that I was using the attitude indicator to see if I was level (and various other little foibels!!) - Little circle discs of paper started being shoved on instuments - I don't look anymore.

To this day I'm still flying left wing down and can't hold attitude pictures in my head but still enjoy my flying (despite the constant nagging from him next to me) - ENJOY

[IO540]

Once he'd realised that I was using the attitude indicator to see if I was level (and various other little foibels!!) - Little circle discs of paper started being shoved on instuments

I'd like to know what exactly this stupid procedure achieves.

There is nothing wrong with keeping half an eye on the AI.

There are cases where you have to: flying towards a sloping horizon (e.g. a mountain/hill ridge) or flying between areas of high ground where there is either no natural horizon or the natural one is misleading. Not to mention the rather common poor vis/haze; today I flew 400nm in legal VFR conditions but there was no natural horizon up front. Only at FL070 could one see properly.

There is too much of this "sort the men from the sheep" mentality in this game. It's no wonder that the airfield scene is such a bunch of anoraks. Most normal intelligent people won't play ball with this WW2 "we beat the Germans this way, young man" attitude for much longer than the first lesson.

[Whirlybird]

IO540,

This has nothing to do with sorting men from sheep or anything similar. It's proving to students that in good VFR conditions they can fly without instruments, purely with reference to the outside world, and fly well. Certainly in helicopters, many don't believe it - and I know f/w pilots are the same. They chase the instruments, and fiddle about with the controls all over the place since the instruments lag, and if you can finally get them to look out the window and trust themselves, they find that it works and they CAN do it.

Of course there is a time and place for using the instruments, but not all the time, and to the exclusion of looking outside.

[mad_jock]

Windy it sounds like you haven't made the grade for inner circle of the PFA.

You have to make sure your checked shirt and cords clash.

Walk about the hangar with a bucket of oil after your latest change asking opinions on it's quality and if it could do another 10 hours.

When someone offers you some oil to look at. Take on a wine tasters look. Get your fingers in it, sniff it, taste it and drip it with light behind it.

And grow more facial hair.

Then you may be invited to a test season where you will have to be able to grade and age oil samples by feel, taste and smell. Then be able to remove and refit a factory hydralic press fit bush using only an old socket, a vice and the original fitting.

BTW this is all just tongue in cheek and I am just jealouse because thier knowledge and experence is learned the hard way and they deserve the title of Aviator. There is something very special about building your own plane, maintaining it and flying it.

IO540 I think you are a perfect candidate to become a SEP/MEP class rating instructor. Heaps of knowledge to give. A very broad experence base to draw on. And I think you would enjoy it as well. And I think that you might not improve as a pilot but you certainly would be a different pilot afterwards


Please don't take this as a flame I have alot of time for your opinions on the whole subject of teaching flying and the current system (and GPS )

MJ

edited to remove smilie which wasn't what i wanted

[DFC]

IO540,

We do teach people to fly by numbers from the very start. If that was not he case with you then I can see where you have a problem.

However, there is no need to tell the student to remember that they need 6 degrees of nose up to perform a certain manoeuvre while maintaining a good lookout because they will probably turn round and ask;

"In this 6 degree nose up attitude, I see the horizon is the same place in the window as the compass. Would it not be simpler to just put the outside horizon beside the compass and keep the lookout going rather than looking inside and then outside constantly?"

As for flying with no horizon - utter tosh unlesss flying in IMC or at night or cross chanel beyond sight of land (hence the cross chanel checkout including instrument practice)

Once he'd realised that I was using the attitude indicator to see if I was level (and various other little foibels!!) - Little circle discs of paper started being shoved on instuments

I'd like to know what exactly this stupid procedure achieves.

In the ideal world, the basic trainer would only have an ASI, an Altimeter and a Compass. Then there would be no need to cover certain instruments.

You may have done limited panel during your "IR". Did you tell your instructor (or the examminer) that it was a rediculous practice?

Regards,

DFC

[IO540]

MJ

Thank you for the back handed compliment but if I was instructing I would not make enough to pay even 10% of my ex wife's maintenance costs I've never worked it out but I think she costs as much as a King Air.

Also I have zero ME time.

I like your comments about oil sampling I actually think one could make a good sitcom, based around some airfield and a flying school. There would certainly be enough utterly comical characters, plus tons of sexual harrassment of students, to play with. The stereotypes are so easy to define in this business.

DFC

Not sure where to start on yours, so I will pass this time.

[Whirlybird]

IO540,

I actually think one could make a good sitcom, based around some airfield and a flying school.

I've been thinking about writing just such a sitcom for years. When I stop spending all my time letting students try to find ever more interesting ways of killing me, and maybe you don't have to pay maintenance any more, wanna collaborate on a series?

[mad_jock]

You could start with a Hotel Babylon style book on a bankholiday weekend life of a flying Instructor. Set in a grass field strip with a FISO with a rotary school next door.
Local STRUT group and a bit of controlled airspace nearby with a MATZ in the oppersite direction.

Only problem I could see is the huge legal bill of the multiple people who will recon that the characters where based on them. Then again it might be quite easy if 10 poeple recon the Basil Faulty CFI was a sladerous copy of themsleves.

Hang what do you mean sex harrasment of students. I am getting flashbacks.... and there Pink.
(Actually hows she getting on these days?)

[VNAVSPD]

I was an avid flight-simmer before I learned to fly, but my problem wasn't with needle chasing, but depth perception. I really struggled with judging distances and I always percieved something as being closer than it actually was. My instructor used to get so frustrated because I was always looking for my check-points miles ahead, when they were actually just under the nose.

I think this comes from the fact that MSFS uses a wider angle of view that that which is seen by the human eye (in order to fit more of the scene onto the monitor).

[IO540]

Whirlybird

It was actually my girlfriend's idea to do a sitcom. So any royalties will have to be shared with her

One problem is that a lot of the "in jokes" won't be understood by non-pilots. OK, everybody will get the one about the PA28 fuel valve being in the perfect place when the student is a woman in a short skirt, or the one about the flap lever.... and people do get to know each other rather well in a C150, like it or not.

But so much of the rest is quite specific, I think.

For example we might laugh when the instructor says (in front of a bunch of people waiting for a pleasure flight... OOPS I meant to say a "trial lesson" because a pleasure flight needs an AOC) that one plane has "gone tech" (a wonderful term for one bit too many having fallen off so not even the friendly JAR145 outfit next door will sign it off) so we have to use another one. But most punters wouldn't get it.

Same with the plane spotters, laboriously recording tail numbers and (if they can get close enough) airframe serial numbers, then going home and recording the stuff on some website...

Maintenance is not a problem; just means I can't move up

[BEagle]

"(Actually, how's she getting on these days?)"

Pretty well, after a medical scare not so long ago.

[mad_jock]

Good to hear BEagle. tell her to send me a text.

IO you wouldn't even need to get that low in the humour deptment. You wouldn't even need to get off the gound.

The humour in the air would be for a select few but the ground humour would be never ending. A bit like The office. And to be honest you with all due respect don't have a clue about the cock ups and other upsets which go through your normal flying school ops room well away from the students .

edited for IO very good point

[IO540]

The question is whether this sort of p1sstaking expose would attract more punters into GA, or reduce their numbers below today's pitiful levels...

I don't doubt the other stuff MJ - I did hang around one school for a bit and saw enough going on.

[Whirlybird]

"In this 6 degree nose up attitude, I see the horizon is the same place in the window as the compass. Would it not be simpler to just put the outside horizon beside the compass and keep the lookout going rather than looking inside and then outside constantly

DFC,

Thank you for that. I used the idea yesterday. I had a trial lesson student who told me he'd be fine because he'd been practising on a helicopter simulator, and he thought he'd be a natural anyway, as he had really good coordination and drove a digger. Oh dear! And there we were with 15-20kt winds. Well, he'd find out.

So off we went, and I levelled off and told him about the cyclic, and how to note where the horizon cuts across the compass and the helicopter windscreen. "And I can use this too", he said happily, pointing to the AI. "No", I said. "Now, why would you want to? If I told you to keep alternating from looking outside, to looking at a tiny little instrument that lags so is difficult to read accurately, you'd soon work out that it corresponded to the outside world, and you could look outside all the time and enjoy the view to, wouldn't you?"

Well, he got the point, and flew very well considering the conditions. But within five minutes he was saying in amazement that it wasn't at all like his simulator, and much harder than a digger. Well, surprise, surprise! Anyway, he likes a challenge, and wants to do the course, so I'll be seeing a lot of him from the looks of things. So, DFC, thanks.

[mad_jock]

yep your right edited