Glad you enjoyed yourself it makes a huge difference to the learning process.

Yeah, that's it. It's the difference between waiting to see what the aircraft does (and being surprised by the result), and knowing what it's doing (even if you can't always get it to change its mind in time).

Glad you took my wheelie suggestion - it does work!

Try the hold off next time.

Strange but one test of a good pilot of any light single or twin is whether they can demonstrate a good wheelie - its definitely not appropriate in some circumstances or on some types but that is another story.

Well done.

Would that be for hardware and add-ons or flying lessons? :E

My MSFS experience arguably was neither a burden nor an asset during my flying lessons. Strangely, learning to fly real airplanes made me a better armchair yoke-and-pedals pilot, but no handling skill transfer the other way around :O. Still, besides being fun and a cheap substitute drug, I also find it somewhat useful for headwork, flight planning, radio navigation, situation awareness and R/T if practiced with an "as real as it gets within limits" approach, and it's a nice opportunity to experience free and ultimately harmless but still instructive "oh sh..."-moments, too.

Armchairflyer - the problem is msfs pilots do have a significant tendendency to instrument fly because most screens neither give the 3D perception or the definition.

Its great for instrument flying on the other hand and with fewer caveats.

Its usefull once you have the basics of looking out the window and flying visually.

For an instructor its alot easier working with a blank canvas it always take longer/ more effort to untrain someone than it does to train them from fresh

I've only ever used MS Flight Sim once.
I lined it up at the end of the runway , attempted to take off and the next thing I knew I was impaled on top of the CN tower :p

The only thing I used it for after that was for going through my pre take off checklists, to familiarise myself with where everything was.

I probably could have achieved that with a decent computer screen wallpaper.

Gotta admit that it took (and still takes) me some conscious effort to keep my looking at the instruments to a minimum. Don't know if that's really an FS-induced thing, though (with my new MSFS PC including TrackIR and a big flatscreen one can actually look "outside" quite well :8), or rather my being leery of letting airspeed and altitude unchecked for some time, especially in maneuvring flight.

WRT wallpapers, to my knowledge several people actually hang cockpit posters at their walls for familiarisation and checklist flow practice (not so much for simple SEP aircraft, though).

Armchair

I was quite heavily involved in MSFS development a few years ago with Rob Young and RealAirSimulations.

The flight dynamics engine was atrocious and it was always a compromise to get half real flight dynamics.

We actually got one to spin (The first ever) But that was Rob Young genius!!
There are benefits to using MSFS but mainly for instrument work and preferably on auotpilot ;)

The weird thing is a few times flying a real aircraft in bad weather I had a false sense of security thinking that if I crashed on the runway a notice would come up saying that I had crashed and the game would reset!!!

Pace

Some Auld boy in the commitee decided that the club would benifit from a station with feeback joystick and pedals and MSFS.

Crap day sea Haar in and we decided that we should all learn to fly a helicopter. Tried and tried and apart from pulling full collective and as soon as it lifted sticking the nose down we crashed. Another instructor who had a few hours in a robbie came in at lunch same thing.

Thought sod it lets go and find the helimed pilot he looks pretty !!!! hot the way he handles that eurocopter we must be rubbish.

Same thing for him.

I used to used it to brief the instrument scan bit and vors and ADF but not the visual flying as Pace says.

Apart from that I never saw anyone use it apart from flying under bridges in a 747 and kids playing on it.

@Pace: Nice job then, they really make excellent add-ons (and the new Legacy is faaaaast, too :ok:). As for the "false security" of MSFS crashing, it's rather the other way around for me; for instance, barely failing to get "reset" on an attempted VFR approach in foggy weather or making an airplane-shaped virtual hole in the virtual runway (and killing my merited FSpassengers pilot and all pax on board) after defiantly ignoring ILS visibility minima did add some pseudo-firsthand reinforcement of the obvious message "don't f... with VFR into IMC" (and a tremendous sense of relief that it's just a PC game :O). And there have been many other quite instructive minor and major cock-ups during my sim hours which I don't want to repeat in a real airplane.

Full agreement with you and jock on the (lack of) usefulness for airplane handling improvement, though. MSFS (or any other PC sim, as good as the physics engine may be) is good for headwork (and R/T if you fly online) but useless for airwork IMHO
(although I like flying with Heidi in the A2A Cub :E).

Hitting the plateau
 

Just to keep you fine folk up to date
Another good , solid lesson
Looks like I've broken through to the other side !

Did a couple of simulated engine failures today , made the runway both times !

Armchairflyer

I was the pilot who setup RealAirSimulations with Rob Young as well as working on Fly! with him.
I parted company with them due to my real world commitments and a disagreement on bringing in more graphic designers but full credit to Rob Young they continue to make the best addons for MSFS ;)

Localflighteast

congratualtions on breaking this hurdle ;) There will be others and other dips but the graph is always up even with the dips :ok:

Pace

Thanks Pace.

It's hard to describe how different I'm feeling inside about the whle process, much more confident. I was starting to think that maybe I'd reached the limits of what I could achieve.

My instructor summed it up nicely, he said "for the past two lessons, you've been in COMMAND of that airplane, rather than just flying"