PPL and Flight Sim
 

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?

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. :ugh: 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!

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.

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.

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 :ok:

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:{

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!

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

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.

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!

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

Air law is the worst one.

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

Agree about Air law.:ugh:

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.

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.

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 :ok:). 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 :)

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. :hmm:

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.

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.

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.

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

For added realism:


Tie yourself down to the most uncomfortable chair you can find. Find a smelly oil can and place it on the desk next to the PC. Turn the speaker volume on until it deafens you. Don't forget your headset!

Very true Molesworth1 :ok:

But for full effect, also:

• stand outside in the wind and rain for half an hour before starting, trying to keep a paper checklist in reasonable condition.
• jam something in your door so it won't shut without inhuman force
• label anything you could possibly use to get some purchase to adjust your seat with "no hold"
• stick some dymo tape over various lower parts of the screen saying "U/S"
• smear dead insects & mud over the rest of the screen
• remove any semblance of CofR or POH from the vicinity
• have a box full of random bits of plastic and metal to rattle from time to time for no apparent reason ....

:rolleyes:

Gotta love flying :)

Don't forget the annoying security guard with his x-ray machine and silly ID requirements at the door to your study. Only to find that last time you left the "master" switch on and now the battery is dead. (You DO shutdown the simulated aircraft properly after a session, do you?)

Hi AOB9,

first of all, congratulations that you finally took the big step and start to move from the PC to the real airplane. You will find that using both of them will have it's merits and will help you in your training, as well as the skills you have acquired over the years will not be in vain.

My own experience goes back to 1983 when I did my PPL and had my first flight sim on a device called the Sinclair Spectrum. Since then, I have worked in the field, the last 13 years as an editor for a german based mag. (So Pace, it's well possible I know you :) if you've been working with Rob and his great folks, or better you are one of them.)

First of all, FSX or 2004 are like ANY training aid. If you use them "unattended", that is without a syllabus or at least a teacher to tell you how to use it, things will happen exactly as you describe. You will acquire "bad" habits, out of lack of knowledge. If, however, you are using it in combination with the real life checklists and procedures you now use when flying your real plane, and the sim is brought up to a certain level, you will find the help invaluable. Many flight instructors sneer at this, but in that particular case, I beg to differ out of experience.

I stopped flying for real in 2001 and restarted last year to regain my SEPL and will also regain my IR eventually. I never stopped flying the sim however, it was (and is) work after all, and this did help me a lot when I restarted. It did help that there was a professionally made addon available for the plane type I am flying (and own now) and that I have a photo-realistic scenery for the whole of Switzerland and Southern Germany, where I was training.

What did help was that I could train the procedures and checklists, memorize speeds and do the VFR navigation parts before each flight. Both only work if the model and the scenery are up to speed. If you are training on a C172 which is close enough to the FS 2004 variant, then you are fine there. What will help is if you do get the photoscenery for the part of the country you fly in, especcially if you later on want to train the navigational flights. There are such sceneries available, pm me if you can't find them.

If you do this, there is no need to unplug your joystick and pedals. Treat each FS flight as if it were a solo flight session, use the original checklist and if you want to go a step further, get Track IR, which for VFR is a very good tool.

I can tell you that last year I did a demonstration for a colleague of mine who is an FI and who knew not much but prejudices against FS. I borrowed a system running Switzerland Pro X on a 42 inch TV with Track IR and demonstrated it at an FI meeting in that school. Since, they have acquired an equal set up and are using it to great success to prepare their students for cross country and for other things.

Now that I am flying again regularly with my high performance single, I still will prepare and fly each flight to places I have not been to and I do find it will give me a lot of free capacity during the flight itself. The key to this is, as I said, the condition that you use the absolutely same checklists and procedures as in real life as close as possible and that you don't shy away from getting the best appropriate addons for what you need.

So do enjoy the experience of getting your PPL, you'll see how great it is once you are there. If there's anything I can help, feel free to pm or ask here.

Best regards

AN2 Driver

Papa600 says "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."

Yes, I agree with you there, I get great enjoyment doing IFR and ILS approaches on the B738. Also the scenery and airport add-ons for Ireland ( where I live) are really improving which really does add some realism. My PC is Intel Core i7 based so it's fairly heavy weight.

As already stated though I will be staying away from light aircraft on FS for a while.

As a side topic. I was in Cork City today under the approach to Runway 17. I just wanted to get up there and join them. I've really got the bug now, I can't be helped.

One way where flight sims could be used to accurately replicate the flying training "experience" would be set up a booking program. So before you can flash up your flight sim you have "book" your aircraft at least one week in advance.

The booking program will then generate the following response.

- the time selected is not available, the only availble time is 0700 on Sunday.
(even better would be if it was synced with your calendar so it would only offer booking times that conflict with important allready schedualed events)

When your time arrives you sit down in front of the computer and "book in"
The computer than generates one of the following responses

-the aircraft that you requested is not available due to an unservicability

- your choosen instructor is not available however the one with bad BO and halitosis is

- The wind is 1 knot ever the schools maximum permitted

- Your aircraft is late returning so you lesson will be 13 minuites long

or if you are really unlucky you will get a blue screen and the following note

XYZ flying school has ceased trading with immediate effect.

Who said flight sims were never going to be usefull in preparing students for their flying training :E


-

Thank you AN2 Driver for your detailed post. You certainly do appear to go against the grain in this thread and give plenty of justification for your particular stance. As stated in my previous post I agree that photorealism and powerful P.C's have made FS a very"realistic" environment. Certainly in my case, if I were never to begin flying for real I would continue to invest in FS, such is my passion for aviation. I will certainly PM you if I need any particular assistance and thanks for the offer. I will fly on Sunday ( Lesson 3) and intend to have a chat with my instructor to determine how he positions himself in relation to FS and PPL. I'll keep all posted.

BTW, I don't normally venture away from the "Rumours" threads where I mostly observe ( too many "experts") but I am glad I found "Private Flying" , there appears to be a fairly active "non expert" community here.

AOB9,

if you talk to your FI, the very interesting thing to determine is how much experience the guy has with sims or is he just one of the plenty who is against them just because everyone else is as well. As I told you, I have had a few demonstrations with FI's and most of them walked away from those with a 180° backtrack on their previous hostile attitude. Most of them who had previous "experience" with MSFS bought the package, installed it, tried it for a few minutes flying on the keyboard or a £ 5 joystick and threw it away.

It is the same with airline pilots. There are quite a few these days who do use high fidelity addons such as the PMDG aircraft to supplement type transitions, such as to get a feel for the systems and procedures before they go on the FFS to train for real. There are some institutions, such as Tupolev Design Bureau, which use elaborate rigs in the official syllabus.

The most often voiced concern is that PC Pilots will be glued to their instruments all the time. That is indeed a danger for those who never venture beyond the 2D cockpit. However, the latest incarnations of MSFS (2004 and X) do have quite elaborate 3D cockpits and for VFR and ititial stuff, those should be used exclusively, if at all possible with a Track IR device. The difference is profound.

I do agree with many who think that a certain brand of simmers will take a lot of liberty in forums such as these here and therefore create a hostile environment for the rest of us who take these things seriously, who use them as tools for our daily work and to expand our experience and horizons, not to make believe something which is not there.

But I do stand to my statement that NO training aid, even a full flight sim, will ever be usefull without instruction. I reckon this is where most of the negativism comes from. People who buy MSFS as a "game" and afterwards think they can actually learn to fly on it. That does not happen. Neither can you learn how to fly in a multim million dollar FFS without an FI present to tell you how.

I hope to address this issue in more depth in the future. Now that I have got some FI's listening, I would like to have them incorporate these tools better, again as a supplement, not replacement of existing tools and methods.

So what I can suggest to you is to once let your FI have a 1:1 look at what you have on your PC and to take it from there. Most of the time, this will make one heck of an attitude adjustment.

Best regards
AN2 driver.

Exactly and since it is unlikely you are going to have your instructor sitting next to you in your den while flying your sim, you should not IMO be using the flight sim as a "learn to fly device for the ab intio pilot".

My experience as an instructor has invariably been negative for abb intio students who have alot of flight sim time. Without motion and wrap around visuals they invariably become dependant on the instruments, so the instructor has to break them of this and other bad habits. I do not even feel they have much use for cockpit famil, checklist practice etc. IMO more value is found in sitting in a tied down aircraft and practicing the checklist and other drills. For ab intio students you will always be better off using your time studying the POH and your flight training manuals rather than playing on the sim.

Doea that mean flight sims are useless for flight training, absolutely not. They are very usefull for practicing instrument flying procedures that have allready been taught in the conventional way. I tell students to leave them on autopilot and work on the procedural aspects. I can give them
a series of execises and then they can print of the track history which I can use to give feedback. They can also be an effective (but painfull :ugh:) way to work on your basic instrument scan. Since all home flight sims are harder to fly than a real airplane, particulaly with a bit of turbulence thrown in, accurate heading and altitude control is a real test of your scan

My experience was that my flying training improved my simulator flying, but things didn't happen the other way around!

However, I found that photographic scenery and topography were really useful for learning navs. Even now if I'm off to somewhere a bit out of the way, I occasionally get out the old stopwatch and run it on the sim first.

BPP,

Not only should you not but you can not. I'd agree with you that for the flying skills per se the sim time BEFORE you start to do it for real doesn't do much, certainly not if you use a 2D panel. That is for instrument flight only. Once you ARE in training however and get the instruction and KNOW what the real thing looks like and use a 3D panel with a Track IR or similar device, things change a lot.

The benefits of motion are debatable, the warp around visual is much more valuable, especcially in VFR. I'd even go as far and say that you can achieve almost the same effect with a reasonably big screen and a eye tracking device, which will react to the student turning his head and turn the pic with it. With one of these and the relatively recent 3D cockpits as used since FS2004, the dependency on instruments will greatly decrease, as the actual view is pretty close to what you get in the real thing. Don't take my word for it, try it if you have the chance. I did not believe it either until I got the device myself, but it's about the difference between a no visual ATC810 instrument trainer and any fixed base trainer using a wrap around.

Again, I agree with you unless you get the EXACT or very close model of the aircraft you actually use in training and use the 3D panel. There you can do checklist training very efficiently, as you will need to do the same movements and watch in the same general direction as you would on the real plane. Plus, of course, you don't have to "simulate" using the switches, you can actually throw them over and over again and see the results.

As I said, many pilots these days use such third party models even when transitioning to heavy irons. MD11, 747-400, 767 and several more, there are addons around which can really help you there. For the light planes, the Carenado Series are probably the best to be had.

That is absolutely true. It does again depend on a lot of things, the sort of controls, the screen size (if they are smaller than real it gets even worse) and again, the model. But in a way, that is not so different even from real expensive full flight Level D sims. Even these are on occasion a lot harder to fly than the real one. I'd say the degree of difficulty decreases from the PC based devices to full flight sims and the real plane. I have had to do a lot of review work in the last 20 so years and have had a chance to fly a great number of products as well as their corresponding full flight sims and on occasion the real thing. With almost no exception I found the real airplane the easiest of all, followed by the full flight simulators. I do recall my first MD11 full flight session as well as A320 and was amazed how few trouble it gave me, yet it also confirmed to me that you can get quite a familiarity with a panel and it's functions if you can try them out in peace and quiet of your own office before you step on the "real" thing.

I do think it is very important to point out that any sim can do only as much as the student and the instructor will do with it. You could let a student loose in a Level D type Cessna 172 sim without instruction and see what happens. He will eventually learn to fly it, but he'll probably have quite similar problems as if he had been flying a home sim without instruction. No program will ever replace a skilled and pedagogically aware instructor. But with guidance, it may well help along the way.

As you are an instructor and several others are reading here too:

I'd ask you to take into account that people who do sim before they take the big and costly step to go in the real realm of the pilots tend to be some of the most enthusiastic of all. In the present day and age, private flying has enough people who despise every single one of us (see the other thread about drop outs) so we can do witout inadvertedly or explicitly singling out more people. Unfortunately I have seen this happen in the past. Simmers who were given their first flights or started their instruction came away totally frustrated and angry, because the FI had been going on during the whole flight to demonstrate to them how wrong everything they've done in the past was and ranting about their toys at home for the duration. I would say that this kind of attitude serves nobody. In the best case, the student will start anyhow and overcome this after a while, in the worst case, he'll give up there and then or look for another school. I am NOT saying that to anyone in particular, but as a general observation by someone who has worked in the field ever since the first sims arrived and flown actively parallel to that.

On the opposite, I was and am about trying to formulate an initiative how to motivate more simmers to take this step. I will try to develop a program for ab initio guys with extensive sim experience with an instructor and a school who's interested to go that way and also use a sim as supplementary tool during training. In the days and age where schools, flying clubs and even full FTO's are all suffering from lack of applicants and the ranks of PPLs and higher are getting lighter, I guess we should be welcoming whoever is willing to accept the challenge and do the real thing.

Best regards
AN2 driver.

AN2

You will know me ;) I was one of the 3 who started up RealAir (The Pilot one)and parted company with them after a couple of years

Pace

I think a sim is a great way to supplement one's learning. I used FS2000 (as it then was, with fairly crap scenery) with add-on scenery for UK airports and surroundings, and I used to do x/c flights on it the day before doing them for real, comparing the scenery against the map as I went along. It was a real help.

It's no good for learning landings.

It's brilliant for instrument flight. One should never go airborne for any instrument stuff until one can do it all on a sim.

Today's FSX is a lot better than FS2000 was. My son has hundreds of hours on FSX and flies the real plane very well too.

I spent some time in FSX before my PPL, it gave me an understanding of the basics (turns, climbs, cruise) and instruments; so sped me through those lessons I guess. Other than that, it's nothing like the real thing in my opinion.

Avoid joysticks with a 'twist rudder' control - I naively used one and it played silly buggers with my real rudder control!

AN2_Driver said:

I'd just like to highlight this point: Not only in trial lessons, but very much so on PPrune, it seems if you have used a flight sim you are generally admonished as if some sort of naughty schoolboy :=. (BTW it's not limited to flying, try telling an instructor at a driving experience day that you've "driven" the circuit on a computer based game/simulator!)

For me it's analogous to my job as a software developer. TECHNICALLY it far better all round - both for me and my customer - if I install software on a brand new server all of its own. But in the real world, the server WILL have been used before and will have other pieces of software on it. Technically this is a worse position for the customer, and there may be all kinds of extra problems I have to solve as a result, but in the real world as a supplier that's my tough sh:mad:, the customer is king!

I don't think anyone's disagreeing that it's easier for an instructor to start with a student as a blank canvas, and I'm certainly not advocating an approach which dictates the use of a PC flight sim before genuine lessons (though I may have found it beneficial in some areas :ok:), but it's an instructor's job to teach.

I may be bad at flying because I've learnt some bad habits on a flight sim or it might just be that I'm simply incompetent, either way I'm paying an instructor my hard-earned cash to teach me so even if they don't like it they'll need to find a way to get me flying. I would personally find it more than a little bizarre for the guy I'm paying to teach me, to admonish me for my current inability to do what he's supposed to be teaching - whatever I've previously done that may or may not contribute to that. If I'm not grasping it, surely it reflects as much on their ability to teach as to me, maybe that's what they're defensive about?

So if you are thinking of flying but can't decide or haven't yet got the cash I'd say don't be scared off maintaining your enthusiasm and using a flight sim by instructors or posts on here - if you enjoy it, do it. But I don't think many people will RECOMMEND it as the best approach to learn. Remember the instuctor's opinions on here are just that - opinoins - and yours is valid too! Each to their own.

Happy Flying :)

AN2

I think you know who I am ;) Worked with Rob Young on getting more realism into aircraft handling initially jointly on Terminal Realities FLY! and then set up RealAirSimulations with Rob as one of the founding 3.

Before that worked with the other dynamics Guru (Graham Waterfield) on one very famous little aircraft. No more said on my identity please :E

Pace

As the author of this thread I have returned with another query.

My PPL lessons are going really well and I have to admit that Flight Sim is a really useful tool when used as described by a few people on this forum. However, as also described it has it's limitations. One of the most irritating is the unrealistic "eye scan" in 3D mode. It's too slow and it's very easy to lose track of reference points etc. One or two people here mentioned TRACK IR as a more realistic alternative to the hat switch. I have looked into this but as with many things there are more options,models and configurations than I can shake a stick at. Of course cash is a factor also, I don't want to spend any more than I have to.

I would appreciate some feedback from anyone using this system. Is it worth the cost and what configurations are you using?

BTW I currently don't have a multi-screen environment. I have a 24" widescreen on a fairly new Intel i7 860 based PC with a modern graphics card, Windows 7 64bit and 6GB RAM. I also have smaller 19"second screen which can easily be set up if required. I won't be investing in more monitors, I have to draw the line somewhere.

Thanks for reading.

I use TrackIR with FS2004 and VFR scenery and very good it is too.

My version came with a clip with three small reflective strips which attaches to a baseball cap.

With a very small movement of the head and your eyes still looking straight ahead at the screen, the field of view changes as you would expect with the corresponding head movement. Actual head movement is amplified to result in an greater 'apparent' movement on screen.

I found TrackIR made flying circuits much easier as you can quickly look around for your visual references almost as you would for real. Approaches and flares improved too. If you have airport scenery then even better as taxiing is much easier.

I found the whole Flight Sim experience hugely beneficial when I was training for the PPL, especialy the nav work. When I then went on to my IMCR my club wanted to me use a ropey old simulator for an not inconsiderable amount of money per hour. My FS set-up at home was significantly better, I could practice instrument procedures all day, and the end result was I found flying the approaches for real much less stressful as I'd done them so many times on the sim.

I was actually someone critical of these tracking devices before someone trust one in my hands and said "go try it out". Took it home and never disconnected it.

The difference to the hat switch is massive. Not only will the Track IR device scan the exact point where you point your head at, but it will do so very fast. If you have the possibility, go try it out someplace, you'll see what I mean within the first 10 minutes of flying.

The only side effect it may have is a stiff neck after some gruelling sessions :)

And a 24 inch monitor will do nicely, no multi setup needed. Actually, Track IR does to a large extent away with the requirement for one.

Track IR is very good indeed, I got a second hand one off ebay for about £50, makes the experience much better being able to glance over your shoulder or look around the corner on a curving final rather than panning around with a hat switch and great for dogfighting online in Rise of Flight ! (about the only sim I've ever found that flys quite realistically!)