Is there anthing to be gained by using a flight simulator?
 

Simple question. When learning to fly is there anything at all to be gained by using a flight simulator such as MS Flight Simulator, or similar? If so what in your opinion are the benefits of doing this? Can anyone share there experiences with me?

Cheers,
Danny

Can't speak for ab initio PPL training but MS FlightSim definitely helped me prior to my IR course. Instrument scan and practice of tuning nav aids gave me a head start.

In my experience I found FS to be a hindrance more than help when it came to practical flying. At this early stage of flying, VFR in a small two seater is nothing similar to flying the heavy iron on your computer screen. I found that I was too dependent on the instruments and wasn't looking outside nearly enough as I should have been i.e. I would check the AI or the VSI or tell me if I was straight and level or what angle of bank I was rolling. It took a while to stop this and to look at the actual horizon outside the aircraft. Don't get me wrong, there are some + points. It is no doubt handy to know your 6 primary instruments and what they do. FS should also give you an insight to what makes the aircraft fly and the effects of manipulating the yoke on the control surfaces.

If you do intend to use flight sim whilst learning to fly stick to GA aircraft, I believe Flight One has a very nice model of a C150/152, and there is some good payware software available for other small aircraft also. Running through the pre-start checklists here is a good idea, as is practicing various principles which you will be required to perfect i.e. the trim wheel etc.

Vatsim is a great resource for brushing up on RT. You will learn alot of new phrases this way and will help your real-world confidence also. I know alot of people getting flustered when using the PTT button, but I think FS solved this for me anyway.

Sorry for the ramble, but to summarise; be careful about getting carried away with big planes and auto-pilots - its not required at this stage and will only serve to draw your eyes inside while on real flights.
Stick to the things you will be doing in real life, fly small planes with significant weather. Learn to operate them as close to the book as possible.
Fly online to take advantage of some of the great virtual pilots and controllers out there; a free resource is very rare is this industry.

Best of Luck!!

I was flight-simming for many years before finally getting round to getting my PPL. From the very first days of what became Microsoft Flight Simulator, when it was just white lines on a black background, and the scenery consisted mainly of Chicago Meigs field and a few miles around. Also have flown every combat sim going from WW1 to WW3, off line and on line.

Anyway I would say overall it helped me, I got my PPL in minimum hours. None of the sim time really helped with the physical side of flying, in fact I find real (VFR) flying much more natural than sim flying, you can see all around rather than looking through a small rectangle, and the seat-of-the-pants feedback is far better than just purely visual.

Where it helped was the procedural side, I did cross country flights on the sim before real life, and practiced making radio calls at the right time. If you have the photographic scenery it also gives you a good idea of what to expect as you approach an area you haven't visited before, though Google Earth is good for that now as well.

Ryan's advice is good, and I second it.

I would like to reinforce the idea that using the free time of the computer to save paid time in a plane, is a good idea up to a point. It extends to an even more basic level, while taking helicopter training, my instructor told me that he uses Google Earth "flying" mode to familiarize his students with the local terrain, to save flying time in the helicopter. Another form of simulation...

In the old days, we'd learn takeoff and landing technique by watching endless circuits of the other students, in between our lessons. You can learn a lot that way, but very certainly you can only learn so much. You have to get in and do it yourself too! I think the same can be said for simulation in any form.

Simulation has its limits, and values, keep it all in context, and you'll do fine...

Pilot DAR

When you consider aerobatic pilots carve out their routines using their hands while on the ground you realise that even the most basic flight simulation is useful.

I used to be heavely involved with some leading 3rd party addon companies for MSFS as well as testing for MS itself.

MSFS is an excellent tool for IMC/IFR training

It is an excellent tool when using Photo real scenery prior to a VFR flight.
It is a good tool for the basic principals of flight.

It lacks true feel and doesnt simulate the true dynamics of flight well!!!

Certain flight sim addon companies have worked around some of the gaping holes in the flight dynamics engine and made the xperience closer to real life.

I agree that it is lacking in pheriferal views and restricted by a flat screen.

Overall very useful, addictive and fun

Pace

It is not lacking in pheriferal views if you are using the right equipment.TrackIR multi monitors etc.
Also very helpful the use of rc models and FPV Flight.

For all the time I spent staring at a 10x15cm photo of an instrument imagining doing checklists and things, I would most definitely say yes!
Would have been a boon to even have a poster size picture so the thought of an interactive learning aid is luxury.

The quicker and more natural your scan and actions are the less time you will spend paying to do it. Develop a flow to all checks in all phases.

The actual flying of the sim is of little practical use but the value of the time saved by having routine is immeasurable. Well, perhaps not entirely immeasurable. Commercial pilots use cardboard cut-outs of entire cockpits to practice procedures and checklists so there must be significant savings.

The value is again felt when training instrument procedures.
Go for it and have fun.

Instructors don't like "ex FS" students because they allegedly spend the whole time looking at the instruments.

However, I think flight sim experience, particularly with FSX or other stuff which has pretty good scenery, is very useful, up to a point.

It won't teach you how to land, how to do stall recovery, etc. But it is damn useful in teaching navigation and general situational awareness. I used to fly my X/C flights on FS2000 before flying them for real the next day and found that very useful.

For instrument work, FS is fantastic. Never ever go airborne to fly any procedure if you cannot fly it on a sim. Going airborne is an almost total waste of (your) time and money if you haven't learnt what has to be done first.

I have personally seen MSFS be used to great effect when teaching students basic cycles during VFR flying phases, but the actual flying in the sim is of little benefit.

IFR.... I fully support everything everyone else has said.

Hello!

Depends, I would say. I do mostly instrument instruction, and from what I see, the girls and guys who practise at home on their PCs or Macintoshes (using X plane) perform better than those who spend their evenings in the pub.

It's important however not to fool around with the sim (like trying to land a Concorde on the aircraft carrier) but to spend the time actually working. Doing R/T, reading checklists, following procedures and practising the difficult stuff like NDB interceptions and holdings.

Greetings, Max

I can understand that in some ways for ab-initio training, perhaps also because the ex-FS student will be largely self-taught and possibly learned bad habits, whereas a completely fresh student is a "blank canvas".

One additional tip: If you are at the point where you use FS to get familiar with the workings of radio navigation instruments, put the sim in "slew" mode. This allows you to "fly" (more like "hover") anywhere without worrying about those pesky laws of aerodynamics.

Turn the aircraft around the vertical axis and observe what happens to the ADF and VOR displays for instance. Or put it some miles out on an ILS approach and let the aircraft climb and descend in position. Repeat closer to the threshold.

Agree with most comments so far.

The main thing I found it useful for was understanding aviation terminology and how the instruments and controls work, definately a big help.

Some people take it a bit too seriously however... once read a newspaper article about some bloke who converted his spare bedroom into a 747 flight deck and was charging people to come and "fly" it in MSFS... :uhoh:

Smithy

I hope he had a current vCPL and vAOC :}

Sorry to disagree but even with Track IR it is lacking in pheriferal )hope thats spelt right :O views.

If you look straight ahead and move your hand into view fom the side you should see movement from your hand at about 90 degrees right and left of straight ahead.

Tilting your head right or left changes that view range dramatically.

I have not been involved with or used MSFS for some years.
Track IR was in use then so unless there has been a huge improvement I cannot agree with your comment.
Multi monitors as are complete home cockpits are in the realms of the hard core simmers and not joe Bloggs with his one flat screen single monitor.

Pace

pace

I Was talking for combination of all this good staff.
Most people i know include my self all have multi monitors,projectors etc
Also i d like to say most of understanding for if is any help or not from flight simulators,is coming after the first 2-3 real lessens !
Personal i found most FS`s more than helpful in all aspects.
Just my opinion of course!

I use a full scale 'simulator' based on X-Plane and photo scenery to supplement my microlight student's air time. Of course it doesn't count towards their flying hours, but I only charge ground school rates so it's cheaper than flying (and not weather dependant). I've found it helps some of them learn some of the mechanics of flying and with modern photo scenery they can practice navigation techniques.

I've found some people don't slot into the fantasy and treat it as a computer game. These people don't benefit much at all. People who do slot in to the fantasy, however, can learn a lot. A big training benefit is the ability to pause the simulation and explain where they are going wrong. The biggest disadvantage is that they don't learn airmanship and lookout.

Would unsupervised time on a desktop simulation help? I can't answer for big stuff, but down at the lightweight end of flying that I inhabit, I would say that it does as much harm as good, so you'd end up paying an instructor to correct the bad habits you wouldn't have developed if you hadn't used the thing.

They're fun though. :)

MB

Just curious and a bit off-topic, but what's the going rate for a genuine hull of a (retired) PA-28, for a flight sim enthousiast to built his/her stuff into? Right now it's in storage, paint in good nick, from the firewall all the way to the rudder attachments (rudder itself is gone, so are the wings). Help onsite would be available to chop the front portion off.

I would agree that simply sitting in front of a PC, not having done any real flying at all, is not going to be terribly helpful.

One needs to slot oneself somewhat into the "protocol" of flying and flight training, and then a sim can be very useful.

But if someone is looking at making their PPL easier and done in fewer hours (in the min 45 if possible) there is no better way then to find a mentor, who takes you through the basics of planning a flight and then flying then plan for real. I've done a little bit of that and it seems to have worked well, with the chap having passed his ground exams before he even did much flying, and he will probably do his PPL in 45hrs which is itself a rarity. Just doing a PPL in 45 hours represents a saving of £ thousands over the average time/cost of a PPL. And a mentor can also get across some "airmanship" stuff e.g. looking inside the tanks before going flying :)

Actually flying a plane is really easy. Any monkey can fly a plane. It is all the other stuff (like landings) which takes the time. And some of the more subtle stuff which is IME poorly taught in the PPL e.g. trimming for the desired airspeed in all phases of flight is hard to learn from a sim because of its unrealistic pitch behaviour.

A sim with decent scenery can increase the enjoyment of flight training too. Early on, there is much emphasis on flying circuits, which most people find simply exhausting. At times, the training just seems to go on and on, with "tech" planes, missing instructors, cancelled lessons due to weather. But with a sim, one can do as much enroute flying as one wants, as early as one wants to do it. It could just help keep someone in the pipeline.

For me it has helped in some way, like IFR practice and some procedures on certain types of aircrafts. But it's a cheap way to do some ifr.

and the most important thing, it has taught me how not to land an aircraft.:ok:

We are banding the word flight simulator around too loosely.

A flight simulator is what its wording suggests ie anything from the aerobatic pilot using his hand to paint pictures in his mind of the manouvres he will carry out in a competition to an all dancing full blown 3 axis simulator used by the big boys.

MSFS always worked best and was most realistic on autopilot and in the IFR/IMC invironment.

For handflying the models were far too twitchy acted like a puppet on a string had literally no accurate control forces or changes in stick rudder movements and were unable to model aircraft behaviour out of the box of normal operations.

One flight dynamics Guru Rob Young of RealAir Simulations played with the FDE and with a mass of tricks simulated spinning and created a better "feel"
The visuals and weather are pretty well modelled but for total immersion not as good as the old flight Unlimited which although not graphically brilliant was dynamically so.

The problems with it was that MSFS was everything to everybody. All the addons loaded the graphics and brought the sim to a stuttering halt.

MS dropped out and who knows how long the sim will go before going out of date like the other sims Pro Pilot, Fllight Unlimited etc. Only X Plane is in current production but I never used that one.

Pace

No one to forget Nasa Astronaut's they practicing before re-entry in a small laptop!!

Just my 2 cents,

if you get the latest x-plane (which has the best flight dynamics of all the stuff around), you can really use it to get some procedures and automatic tasks in your brain (especially if you start flying online which is pretty similar to the reality -> of course it depends who you find on the ATC side but usually they're good). Of course you can learn some basic principles (throttles, yaw, pitch, roll effects), and if you get some realistic scenery (usually for free or you can make your own for your area using some free tools) if you can also practice some vfr navigation. These are the pros, cons are that you don't get any feeling from the controls (at least not in a normal user configuration) so you won't learn that, but you can always spend some time and build a cheap and effective small cabin with plywood, force-feedback controls and a cheap motion platform which will really make it a different story (and really usefull when weather sucks).

So definitely: x-plane + real scenery + ff controls + motion platform = great fun and learning ;)

fabio

I wonder how much those cost? :eek:

To the OP, it seems to me a lot of people are saying that it doesn't help you develop a good lookout - indeed some are saying it can hinder it - and that is something that is really, really, really important. Crucial IMHO. So maybe to start with flying your PC isn't an advisable thing to do.

BTW When I started flying I had tried flying my PC and had crashed it all over the place. I found real flying, with all the sensory inputs it has, reasonably easy *because* of those inputs. Sensations of G, wind noise, the vario (I fly gliders), the great view from the front seat of a glider*, not to mention the noise from the back seat!

*when first flying my own glider I wondered who the f:mad:k was following me around. Then I realised it was my tailplane!

Another vote for X-Plane. I sometimes use it to 'fly' into unfamiliar airfields before taking the real plane there.

As for training - I believe a sim used wisely can definitely help. Learning the instrument scan, running checklists, etc. can be practiced in the sim (in X-Plane pretty much all switches in the cockpit are 'live', so can really practice the whole sequence from engine start to shut down). You won't learn to fly an airplane, but as many things in aviation are procedures, you can practice them here for free and in your own time. I don't think the 'not looking out' argument holds much water. You will have to practice that in the real a/c during real flight training anyway.

cats_five

Money is lets say a Home Cinema.:)

About a Good Lookout is even better.
Pilots learning the importance(if they know where to fly online VATSIM IVAO for example) to have in mind the picture of what is going on by radio!
A very important task that most private pilots don't have in mind.

For ab intio instruction Microsoft FS has IMO negative value. The biggest
problem is students using MSFS fly the instruments instead of looking out the window. This plus a subconcious idea that you can hit the pause button when things are not working out, make me cringe when I hear students talk about their MSFS "experience". You do not prepare for university by watching television, similarly if you want to prepare for your flying training get into the books and learn the basic theory and techniques.

However, MSFS has quite a bit of value for practicing IFR procedures.
By that I mean putting it on autopilot and flying all the IF profiles.

Thanks all for your constructive replies and opinions. I realise it will be no substitute for the real thing, however I was hoping to use it more to help me to remember to do stuff in the right order and at the right time. Take off checks etc.

I will be flying gliders and as soon as this weather improves (fingers crossed for the weekend) will be getting myself airbourne asap.

But until then I was just hoping to utilise some of my evenings productively.

For flying gliders I would have thought it of very little value until you are an aspiring XC pilot when Condor is probably the toy of choice. For ab initio flying, lookout is paramount, instruments (ASI) are used a bit (but you learn to fly by attitude to control speed), the radio is very little used (possibly never used), and the pre-flight checklist takes an evening or less to remember. Gliding is a very pure, deceptively simple form of flying.

The other issue flying a PC simulator is lack of rudder pedals - in a glider you *have* to use them along with the stick to fly co-ordinated turns. Suspect that getting into the habit of just needing to waggle the stick would be hard to get out of.

A more productive thing to do would be some reading - almost anything by Derek Pigott will contain useful information. Ask your club what they recommend.

Hope you enjoy your flying!

I once took somebody for a flight and I asked them if they'd ever done any flying before. They said they hadn't (not even as a passenger on an airliner). Showed them what to do, handed the controls over and they flew beautifully. After landing (which I did!) I asked them again about their experience and their comment was "no, I've never flown an aeroplane but I fly MS-Flight Sim loads!".

I must be doing it wrong then!

I found Microsoft Flight Sim a great help towards obtaining my ppl with the VOR & ADF tracking, The frequency's on my version where a bit out of date tho!

chris :ok:

i think it would be a great help for IR practice. I did an intense IR programme so did not have the time to spend hours messing around on flight sim x trying to learn how to use it and then fly it accurately.:ugh:
However i know for a fact if i had invested a few hours in learning how to play the game before I started the course that it would have been a huge benefit during the course for

• learning about the instruments
• practice for flying approaches
• descent mangement

Retired Shell
 

Hello..I have started on a flight sim. I want to progress further by getting a retired or discarded shell of a light aircraft like a C152/C172 etc.
Basically it is to help in my atc training for new ctlers. As a long time serving ctler I find the MS Flt sim very useful. Now I am planning to make it more realistic with a discarded shell. If the price is right I would like to buy.
Ofcourse I will pay for the delivery charges.:ok:

Aside the instrument side of things - the latest MSFS FSX scenery is very good - before visiting an airfield for the first time I fly the approaches to all possible runways just to get familiar with orientation, RW layout, OH joins, RW turn off points etc and I can vouch for ABZ, PTH, DND, INS, FIFE, OBAN being very realistic compared to what you actually see on approach and on the ground.

I used Microsoft Flight Simulator X alot before taking my first flying lesson. I wouldnt neccessarily it gives you an advantage on your first flight over someone who hasnt. But now I have about 11 hours which isnt alot but I find it great now to practice doing everything properly such as circuits and turns and climbs so being familiar with FS before I think will help you be able to practice well after.

Can anyone give me an idea of what you need for a simulator (apart from the obvious computer) and an idea of the costs involved?

Could be useful to practice instrument flying.

I endorse the previous comments that FSX is more useful once you know how to fly. Extremely useful when visiting a new airfield or route. Good also for practising steep turns and stalls. I find it fairly useful for landings even.

Most problem I have with it is that even with the photographic scenery its much easier to work out your position in the circuit in a real a/c rather then FSX.

Remember to do all your checks and R/T even though there's no one there to respond!

- The flight sim package itself of course. Retail price 45 to 60 euros, depending on the version.
- At the very least, a decent joystick. I use the MS Force Feedback 2 - 2nd hand available from Amazon for 100 USD upwards. The force feedback stuff is strictly not necessary but will probably increase your ability to trim properly a bit.
- A set of half-decent speakers

That's the bare minimum. You really don't want to have to fly the plane using the mouse and keyboard alone.

From that point on, the next investment would probably be a proper yoke with some prop/throttle controls, and rudder pedals. The Luchtvaart hobbyshop just around my corner is doing a special combo right now for 226.05 euros.

AviationMegastore.com

As Christmas/birthday gifts, there are various add-on packages available. These usually fall into two categories: more realistic scenery and different airplanes. Retail from about 30 euros upwards but there are also free add-ons available on the internet. And there are interface add-ons available on the internet that do a real-time download from Google Earth.

As for hardware, the sky is the limit. Multiple dual head graphic adapters plus screens or beamers, more panels with avionics buttons and so forth, to the point where people build full 737 cockpits themselves, including the overhead panels. Some are even experimenting with putting them on a hydraulic platform so that the whole contraption moves realistically.

Flight sim costs
 

I built myself a cockpit layout based on a Beechcraft Baron and it includes a yoke, rudder pedals, throttle quadrant, radio panel, switch panel and a few other bits and bobs. I use a top of the wozzer computer and monitor which give me a very good frame rate and graphics when using FSX Gold edition. Most of what I have come from Saitek and works very well.
By removing the yoke and throttle quadrant and hooking up my homemade collective and control stick, I have a fun helicopter simulator as well.
Total cost, excluding the PC and monitor, around 600quid.

Go and enjoy.

:ok: