One day, I might like to learn to fly an airplane. Right now, though I am going to buy a flight sim.
Are there any flight sims for the PC that are actually useful to the pilot in training, or are the flight sims out there mostly amusements.
Thanks in advance
Ficer67
I took a friend up in a helicopter once. He assured me that if anything happened to me he’d be able to fly the helicopter because he was an expert at one helicopter video game or another. I assured him he could not, and that he would die.
I’ve only played two ‘flight sim’ games. One is Red Baron, and the other one was Microsoft’s Flight Simulator. So I’m no expert on the games. One thing I found was that it was harder to land in Microsoft’s game than in real life. Another thing is that you don’t get the ‘seat of the pants’ experience. Bank an airplane or helicopter, and you feel in the increased g. You feel turbulence. You have a better view. That being said, I remember when my dad was going for his IFR ticket in the early-'70s. He rented a device that was basically an instrument panel and yoke from a ‘typical’ GA aircraft. He let me play with it, but I’m sure it did him more good than it did me. ISTM that the MS game with a yoke and pedals is probably a good IFR training device.
Other than that, I’ll defer to the experts who will be here shortly.
Bit of a hi-jack…
Johnny, have you ever read the book ‘Chicken Hawk’ ? You might like it. It’s about heli pilots and the training of them for nam. The hardback copy had some good diagrams of the controls for a Huey.
Made me think twice about how difficult it can be to fly. Learned a lot too.
I read it years ago, but I don’t remember it.
Helicopters are not particularly difficult to fly. Unlike fixed-wings they won’t ‘fly themselves’ (one of the first things you learn is that helicopters are inherently unstable). But you learn the hardest thing first, and once you have the ‘muscle memory’ the rest is easy.
I am a perpetual flight student in real life and a long-time flight simulator enthusiast. Let’s start with the fact that everyone that flies the big jets does training in simulators because that is the only real way to experience certain conditions safely. Private pilot PC based sims have been approved by the FAA for real training hours for a long time as well but mainly for IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) instruction.
I was reading about this very topic not ten minutes ago in a flight simulator magazine. Microsoft Flight Simulator X is very, very good but using it as a training requires some discipline. First off, it requires a fairly new computer and is very resource intensive. Brand new with a great video card would be best. It has an entire flight training program that I think is outstanding even having gone through the real thing myself but the most important thing is having the discipline to do it the right way and not treat it as a toy. MS FS X has everything you would do in real life including air traffic control so you could use it do learn the most difficult things about flying a small plane but you can’t get the hands-on feel of course.
The is a book that teaches how to use MS FS X as a training tool but I can’t remember the name. Pilots tend to scoff at this idea but I am fairly certain that the FAA is approving MS FS X for certain types of logable training hours. The key thing is to be disciplined and get a 100% honest effort in the tutorials and then design training flight yourself that you behave in exactly as if your life depends on it.
I should add that a PC flight sim can’t teach you how to feel that the landing gear is 6 inches above the runway but I never found that all that difficult anyway. I found talking to air traffic control and reading instruments quickly and accurately difficult and you can learn that just fine on a PC flight sim. If you are disciplined like a mentioned earlier then you can learn entry patterns, stall speeds, and the best speeds for climb out plus how to use the radios. You won’t get the hands on feel but I think that it works great if you use a PC sim the right way. Let’s face it, all of the 9/11 hijackers had 0 hours experience in real jet airliners and they did just fine with sim time (unfortunately). A small plane is much easier to learn than that on a sim.
Also there are special “flight simulators” that are very usefull for IFR (Instrument Flight Rule) pilots. Because a lot of IFR work is knowing the procedures and is mental work. These special programs probably don’t even have a “window view” they are guages and such.
Brian
This is what dad used during his IFR training when I was a kid.
PC Flight simulators are excellent for ‘procedures’ training, and not so much to teach you the stick-and-rudder flying stuff.
For the VFR pilot, you can practice checklists, when to communicate with the tower and ground, preparing flight plans, VFR navigation, dead reckoning, using ADF beacons and VOR radials to verify your VFR navigation, etc. Before going on a solo cross country, you can prepare your flight, sit down at your computer with the map, and ‘fly’ the course.
The simulator is even more useful for IFR practice. You can actually use your regular IFR charts and approach plates from Jeppesen or whatever and practice flying trips in Flight Sim. All the approaches and beacons are where they should be. You can practice holds, precision approaches, and all the rest.
I believe that you can count MS Flight Sim time as part of your instrument requirement for a private pilot’s license, so long as you are doing it with a flight instructor. It’s that good.
If you can log simulator time as legitimate flight hours, does it count against you if you crash the simulator?
You can’t count it as ‘flight hours’. You can log it as simulator time, which counts towards part of the instrument requirement for a private pilot. You still need the same 45 hours in the air, or whatever it is these days.
Out of curiosity, is there a specific type of controller that the pilots here would recommend? I’m seeing a lot of USB yokes and joysticks, but I’m assuming that one or another is preferable for a more realistic experience.
I’m just a simple private pilot with IFR rating, so I may not be the best qualified to answer, but I’ll agree with what’s been said above: using a flight sim (I’m still on MSFS 2004, because I just don’t have the system for FSX) is pretty good for practicing your procedures. When I fly in MS, I have a tendency to do a lot of VOR to VOR flying, because I don’t do much of it anymore in the real world, what with GPS. Pattern entry is good, too, particularly from someone like me that flies 99.9% of the time from a very rural, uncontrolled airport (for those of you simming, create a flight out of Cypress River Airport in Texas - yes, that’s my home field.)
As such, unless you have the big bucks to invest in a top-of-the-line system, and spend lots of bucks on a very realistic simulator room, like some have done - IIRC, there is a very accurate mockup of the STS somewhere - it doesn’t really matter what you use. I have a pretty typical combat flight sim joystick with throttle attached. About the only “splurge” I made was to buy a set of rudder pedals, because that’s one of those things you get used to, and twisting the stick just doesn’t feel right for rudder control.
(Not to veer off topic, but since I’m also a railfan and railroad sim guy, there are people who purchase old locomotive control stands and rig them up in the same manner as the flight simmers. One company has a portable one with projection screens and an actual locomotive cab - like, the sheet metal cabin itself - that they transport to conventions. Pretty neat stuff.)
I got a large fraction of my instrument training in a Link Traner. I thought it excellent in learning to read and respond to the instruments. However, it had no correspondence to actual flight.
I recently flew a flight simulator belonging to a friend and found it quite unsatisfactory. There was no feel and vision was restricted. On landing there was no way to look out of a side window and get a sense of how big your landing pattern was.
This, of course, doesn’t apply to the multi million dollar simulators used by the military and airlines for pilot training.
Well, now I know…
I just bought microsoft flight simulator X so I will be playing/practicing on those planes & helicopters.
On a whim, I also bought the space shuttle expansion, so I may be an astronaut one day.
Thanks for the words guys!
Ficer67
When I took my first real-life flight lesson in 1999, my instructor found it astounding that he could say “climb to 6000 feet at 500 feet per minute and turn left to heading 300” and I could do it with nearly the precision of an autopilot on my first lesson and repeat for everything he said like that. That was from years of messing around with PC flight simulators and MS FS X is light years beyond those. That isn’t to brag however. I struggled on the simple preflight procedures because I had no experience with that and he kept making me do it over and over until I could even get into the plane. I also struggled with things like S-turns and figure-8 turns because no amount of PC sim experience can teach you that. There aren’t enough points of reference.
I will throw this in also because a lot of people have misconceptions about beginning flight training. It is rare for flight schools to require any type of commitment. You basically just call one and tell them you want a lesson and go even if you have never had one before. General aviation is hurting for students and they make it as easy as pie to get started. The industry loves new students because many if not most instructors are trying to build time on your dime so that they can get a paid gig in the airline or corporate world. The rest of the instructors do it as a hobby because they just love flying. You are actually doing all of them a favor by signing up so don’t be hesitant.
There are often discount first flight lessons but the full rate is usually around the $100 an hour mark all inclusive for both the plane and instructor. In reality, flight lessons are much longer than an hour because the clock only starts when the engine is running and there is plenty to do before and after that. Flight instructors make ridiculously little money so they have to do it because they want to fly with you. Logged flight hours are good forever so your investment never goes away but completing a private pilot certificate will cost between 6 - 10K and take a bigger commitment. That is no reason not to get started in the smallest way however.
This is just a matter of getting used to the controls and to the limited field of vision. Get a flight stick that has an 8-way hat switch on it. This will toggle your vision in 45 degree increments. You basically just learn to swivel it around all the time like you’d swivel your head around in a real plane. After a while, it feels pretty realistic and you can start flying by reference to the ground pretty easily and picking the right distances in the pattern. I can pretty much hit the pattern exactly where I want to, make good rate-1 turns onto base and final, and nail the runway every time, just from gauging my distance to the runway visually.
They’ve got the geometry down perfectly. When I fly my home field in flight sim, it feels pretty much just the same as in real life. I felt familar taxiing on the ground right away, and the various views from the plane are dead on. Rivers are where they are supposed to be, the runway recedes exactly right for the speed you’re going, etc. I’ve actually flown to a number of places in my province in Flight sim purely by dead reckoning. Find a familiar road, follow it to certain U in the river, pick up the big lake at your 2 O’clock, fly till it’s straight out the side window, and you’re there. That kind of thing.
But when I first started playing flight simulators and used a joystick without a view toggle, I felt the same way you did. Like flying with tunnel vision.
Incidentally, you can get multiple-monitor setups that I think FS-X will support. Matrox makes a triple-head video card, and I imagine you could arrange two of them to the sides and put the side views in them. I’ll bet that would be really immersive. But you’d have to dial the graphics way down, as there’s no way a Matrox card is keeping up with refreshing three monitors in anything like a high level of detail.
But with the prices plummeting on LCD monitors and computers getting more and more powerful, I’ll bet you every serious gaming rig will have triple monitors for side views in many different types of games. A first-person shooter like Call of Duty would be amazing if you had peripheral vision. Driving games would be way more fun.
That’s probably less than five years away to the mainstream, as a guess.
Well, I speak as a FS enthusiast (MSFS 2004) with no real flight experience whatsoever. If the original question is “Would FS experience help?” then I guess it probably would. When it comes to the “Does anyone here know how to fly a plane?” bit from the movies then I suppose I’d do better than the average layperson - meaning I could possibly delay crashing and burning by a few minutes.
FS is good for procedures. I have a rudimentary understanding of FMCs, autopilot use and so on. But actually flying a real A/C? No.
To the person who asked about FS controllers, I use a Saitek X52 (throttle and joystick with programmable buttons) and CH rudder pedals.
Oh, one other thing - for FS fans, Vatsim is a fairly realistic ATC setup, and you talk to real people doing the controlling. You need a FSUIPC addon called Squawkbox, plus a headset/mic to make it more enjoyable. You could also train to be a controller - I’m currently doing the lessons for ZNY - New York ATC.
I find a PC flight sim to be good when flown on autopilot while practicing IFR procedures. There is a Dash 8 cockpit for FS2002 which is very good. The majority of the switches work and the important bits like the flight management computer and flight director are almost spot on.
