PPL and Flight Sim

[AOB9]

Advice from the experienced please!!!

I started my PPL training recently. Having spent many years on MS Flight Simulator (2004) I decided it was time to do this for real. I quickly learned that I had developed some really bad habits over the years on my PC. My instructor reckons that PC based simulators are good for instrument training but don't give enough feedback to be of any real benefit when flying by the seat of your pants.

I have therefore decided to stay away from the Cessna 172 on my PC and stick to flying jets purely for fun.
Does anybody have any opinion on this, can Flight Sims add anything to the PPL Students training needs?

[mrmum]

MS flitesims for PPLs

Broadly speaking your instructor is correct, I find that students who have spent a lot of time on a PC sim, generally look inside at the instruments way too much when put in a real aircraft. A few years ago, I would have said without any hesitation, that they were useless for anything except instrument flying practice, maybe even detrimental for visual flying in a light aircraft.
However the world moves on and now if you have a good graphics package (and a big screen), they may have some benefit for procedural scenarios, looking at nav. routes/features and airport layouts.

While it's great that initially using a sim. has got you interested and enthused for flying, thus eventually into a real aeroplane, so we shouldn't totally rubbish them, used to excess they will usually give you bad habits which have to be unlearned in the early stages of training, which will add to the cost. So I would say your thoughts are pretty much right, lay off the C172 sim. program until at least you've got all the basics mastered in the real world. Good luck and enjoy!

[robin]

Spot on

Flight Sim was designed as a game and still has much of an arcade game about it.

What it doesn't teach you is a good lookout - vital in PPL training - and much about VFR flying in the UK.

I agree with your instructor and you will quickly see the limitations for yourself - dump it except for rainy days.

[Jan Olieslagers]

I had many years and many hours of FS and it made it very hard to learn to fly for real. For one thing I was constantly looking at the instruments, until my poor instructor put a sheet of paper before them in despair.
Worse, I never learned to feel anything with my pants' seat - neither flying too slow nor how to properly synchronise a turn.

[172driver]

Disagree with the above - to a point. You cannot learn to fly an a/c with a PC-based sim, but you can develop certain routines, such as the instrument scan. It helps a lot to be instinctively familiar with the cockpit layout - you just known where to look for what. A sim is also great for instrument training - and yes, you *will* need this even as a PPL, no matter what the 'stick-and-rudder-and-always-look-out-the-window' brigade tell you, especially if you intend to fly a bit further than the nearest 100 quid soggy sandwich.

Personally, I have X-Plane, which also exists in an FAA-approved training version, not familiar with MSFS, so cannot comment on their relative merits. I sometimes use X-Plane to have a look at approaches into unfamiliar airports and perhaps fly a couple of them before actually taking the a/c there. While this may not be what you do right now, it's that's something you will hopefully be doing soon!

Enjoy your training and happy landings

[AOB9]

This is precisely the problem, relying too much on the instruments. It's a real pain in the butt, for me as much as the instructor. I'll kick the habit though, I'm sure it will be fine. I reckon once I get used to using the instruments "for confirmation" as opposed to flying by them I can return to FS for some practice.

edit......actually considered x-plane 172driver, but learning my way around a new software program would add to my already burdened workload. Besides, the amount of cash I spent on FS2004 add-ons over the years would pay for a small plane.............almost

[Jan Olieslagers]

The well-equipped instructor has some black circular pieces of rubber in his bag, 3,5" dia, to cover the instruments. Ask him to apply one or two at a time - not all at once as has happened to me, too.

As for the FS realism: I remember this chap who simulated flying into grass runways, and had his wife standing behind to shake his chair on touchdown. I could never imagine asking such favours of my ex!

[AOB9]

I can imagine my wife pulling the chair from under me alright........to get me away from the "frigging thing", her words not mine.

[cats_five]

Think your wife is right - it sounds like you are spending far too much time & money on FS. You have identified the problems it is causing you with real flying, but you want to keep on doing it... Suggest you leave it alone at least until you are solo. I suspect you already know all the bits it can help you with inside out.

Instead.... There are the joys of air law, navigation, met, human factors, principles of flight and the rest to keep you busy. If you can't navigate a car without a GPS now is the time to start working on that. Ditto if a synoptic chart is meaningless.

[AOB9]

Oh Yes; I can't wait to get stuck into Air Law. Is the curriculum deliberately designed to get you yawning so early on? Although I do appreciate the importance of it!

[Genghis the Engineer]

Air Law is a sort of early penance for sins yet to be committed. Anybody claiming to enjoy the subject should be treated with grave suspicion.

There are some reasonably inexpensive computer based training packages out there for this and other groundschool subjects. This will probably do far more good than flight sim.

G

[trident3A]

Air law is the worst one.

[24Carrot]

Later on, pre-flying your nav sessions in the sim can be helpful.

Agree about Air law.

[AOB9]

I cannot ignore the masses, this is why I asked the question and I'm well pleased with the response.
So, for now, Flight Sim is parked, pedals and yoke unplugged.
Besides as cats_five points out, it's not as if I haven't enough to keep me going.

[Janu]

I dumped flightsim a while back, I haven't used it for several months! It wasn't as appealing anymore, real word flying is just 10 x better and the desktop PC is just no where near as realistic. Might give it another bash when I'm up to NAV. It was definitely of some use though, saved me a lot of time learning all the panel displays and their different functions.

[Kolossi]

I agree with Janu that once flying for real (14 hrs, air law passed), the appeal of FSX diminished and I haven't had a virtual flight for quite a while now.

I have to respect the consistency of response of instructors on pprune re sims, but IMHO I found using it for 3-4 years before starting the real thing immensely helpful. I didn't just "play" with it though - I can see that if you just yank the stick around until you don't crash any more you will learn a lot of bad habits.

But I used the "tutorials" in FSX, which I found very good (other than the appalling cheesy "humour" of the "instructor") and if followed progressively involve learning helpful things such as pitch attitude to maintain speed, throttle for path etc. It also helped that I had a PPL friend to ask questions of and provide advice.

When I knew I was planning to do the PPL and that it would predominantly be in a Cessna 150/152, I got hold of the JustFlight C152 for FSX (luckily FREE during a promotion ). That helped a lot with familiarity of where the instruments would be, so when trying to get my head around the new concept of checklists (sorry, dolists!) at least when I read "check suction" I knew exactly where in front of me the gauge would be so it was one less thing to worry about.

Another thing I feel it helped with was familiarity with controlling a yoke with my left hand and throttle the right - I am VERY right-handed, so this needed some work. I also got over my initial confusion with the rudder pedals behaving the opposite of my instincts when on the ground.

So I "Survived" a couple of years simming, and according to my instructor didn't develop any noticeable bad habits. I'm not a "flying god" of course, but then I'm still learning, and certainly wouldn't have been any better off WITHOUT flight sim, and I think without it I'd have been that much more mentally overloaded and unlikely to be as far down the path to solo as I am now.

Enjoy your PPL, studying air law isn't fun, but knowing you've passed it will be

[john1million]

I used to 'play' FSX quite a bit up to a year ago and I got bored of it, I used to only fly the light aircraft.

Three months ago I started taking lessons in fixed wing microlights and just out of curiosity a couple of weeks ago I reinstalled FSX and gave it a go. The result was that I was struggling badly and couldn't orientate myself or anything and gave up really quickly.

Now I have started to fly for real I can't see myself wasting my time on FSX again.

EDIT: I just read back my post and realised the last bit was a bit harsh. I don't consider the time I spent on FSX in the past a waste as it was great fun and doing the tutorials did give me some good information.

Also, although I haven't done any real radio navigation yet I have read a couple of books on the subject and it seems to be a fairly good representation of what I expect to find in the future when I eventually give it a go.

[BackPacker]

Also, although I haven't done any real radio navigation yet I have read a couple of books on the subject and it seems to be a fairly good representation of what I expect to find in the future when I eventually give it a go.

One of the things that I found FSX very good for was anything that had to do with IFR flight. Flying on instruments, but also all sorts of radio nav.

The "slew" mode (where you can just position the aircraft wherever you want in the sky, independent of pesky things like aerodynamics and gravity) is very, very useful for understanding what the different needles (ADF, VOR, ILS) do in certain situations.

I also used the autopilot a lot when doing IFR flights so that I could concentrate on the radio navigation part. Doing NDB holds with crosswinds for instance, with the AP in HDG mode.

Oh, and you can setup and fly an ILS approach, first on autopilot with nil wind, then manually with nil wind, then with a howling crosswind. And break out of the clouds - coincidentally... - exactly at minima. You can't choose those conditions in real life.

But as far as pure flying skills is concerned, no. It's not just a matter of the "seat of the pants" feeling, or the view to the sides that's missing, but also the flight model of FSX is not very good at the edges of the envelope. Particularly the stall/spin behaviour is nowhere near realistic.

[papa600]

I'm a PPL and a Flight Simmer and get great pleasure from both but don't really relate the two directly. Flight Sim can be many different things to many people and I wouldn't class it as an arcade game by any means. Buy one of the commercial add ons - Embraer 190, B737 etc and you have to use some pretty detailed procedures to derive the full experience of "flying them". If you have a reasonable PC with good graphics it can be alot of fun flying "commercial" aircraft from A to B under ATC control while downloading real time weather etc.

AS a PPL - I have found it useful doing approaches to various "new" airfields which are normally pretty detailed in FSX and realistic in terms of taxi ways, runways and terrain.

It's also an excellent tool for instrument practise and preparing for IMC etc.

[Pace]

I used to be heavely involved with MSFS addon companies and did a lot of work with flightdynamics guru Rob Young of RealAir Simulations.

Firstly MSFS with the correct addons is a very useful tool. I totally disagree with other posters above.

Watch aerobatic pilots simulating their manouvres using the most basic simulator of all "their Hands" and you may realise that getting things clear in your head rather than in an expensive aeroplane will save you a lot.

Sitting at home sorting out NDB flying saved me a fortune.

Some of the photo scenery and weather depiction is so real that fly the sim route and then the real route and you will know exactly where you are as you will have been there before.

I always used to feel that the sim was most realistic on autopilot and for instrument flying.

The biggest problem was the flight dynamics and puppet on a string handling.
Rob young went a long way to try and improve the flight dynamics although the flight dynamics engine in MSFS was complicated and flawed.

It was a matter of compromise. We got a half decent spin out of the sim but it was frustrating to see one area improve for another to decline.

Used properly it is an excellent tool to keep you currrent when you are not flying as long as you appreciate its limitations.

Pace