This question is related to a previous thread -
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=74217 (Not sure if i did that right). I know this question is ripe with “It depends” clauses but work with me. If someone simmed a particular plane (lets say a relatively easy one) in Microsoft Plane simulator (or whatever its called) and could ace every take off and landing and generally became very proficient through all the possible scenarios, What are the odds that they could successfully land same plane in ideal weather conditions? Obviously there is an enormous kinesthetic component to operating any type of machinery. I know there are a million different variables so I’m just curious about your informed guess at an average. How would this compare to someone who has never flown a plane or simmed, and was being told by a professional pilot in the seat next to him how to land?
If all he had to do was land the thing, I’d say the odds are pretty good he’d at least be able to walk away from the landing. I’ve never done the sim thing, but I’d imagine the sight picture is much different IRL than on the computer screen, and I can’t really tell you how important the visual picture is when you’re in the pattern, and especially on final. At least someone who’s never done the sim thing before will have a blank slate to work with; someone who’s done a lot of sim work may have trouble adjusting what he’s actually seeing with what he’s expecting to see from the sim. If I had to bet, I’d put my money on the guy with the trained pilot in the seat next to him.
If you’re talking preflight, checklists, takeoff, entering the pattern, comms with tower, etc., then I’d say the sim guy is in for trouble.
I flew planes long before I flew sims, and I’ve got to say that mastering a sim would give the person an advantage in trying to fly a plane. It would be like a guy mastering the Kama Sutra manual without ever having had sex; he’d certainly have a leg up (no pun intended) but would find the reality to be almost unimaginably different at first. After a few attempts, the experiences would start to integrate.
Just a little side not, if your looking for a good flight sim, i suggest falcon 4.0 . this is a very in depth game proven by the 2 1/2 inch manuel (which was actually written by an F-16 pilot). This is a very good game. i picked it up for around 10$
…But one could argue that this is what flight sims are for after all – sharpening skills and awareness for real-world situations. What other reason could there be for having flight sims for flying commercial passenger jets? Ya can’t dogfight in a 747, Chester. And military pilots spend a lot of time in the sim tank, though that’s much different than flying on a PC.
However, I know that a sim isn’t the same as a plane. If I were on a plane where the crew was dead, the radio was out, but there was a guy who had lots of MS Flight Simulator experience, yeah I might hope to survive the “landing.” But you’d better believe that during touchdown I’d be having desperate sex with somebody, even if the only other passengers were elderly nuns.
FWIW, one or more of the commercially-available flight sims includes a certification process for getting a pilot’s license. You use the part of the sim that’s intended for training, finish it all successfully, and (then and only then) receive some sort of coupon for a free real-world test, or discounted lessons or something.
That’s not correct. Flight Sim 2000 has a ‘pilot’s license’ mode that basically takes you through a simulated training course, but you get no credit for a real pilot’s license, because FS2000 is not an FAA approved simulator. And you would need to be playing it with a flight instructor in order to log time anyway.
If you want to learn to fly, forget Falcon 4.0. I agree that it’s a great game, but it’s strength is not stick-and-rudder flying, but simulating the complex systems on an F-16. For just fun flying, I’d recommend FLY!, or MS Flight Simulator.
The simulators will help, but you can also develop bad habits. Here’s where they come in really handy: Go sign up for real flight training, then use the simulator after each lesson to practice the procedures you were taught, like checklists, instrument scans, etc. Flight sims are perfect for procedural training. Practice turning the radios on to ground, tower, etc.
The sim work military pilots do is mostly EP’s, or emergency procedures, how the plane reacts (handles) to different emergencies (e.g., loss of hydraulic pumps, loss of engine(s), stuck flaps, etc.) and crew coordination. I’d assume the same goes for commercial/ATP pilots. Also, these are real sims, to-scale and usually motion-capable. My point is that they’re not sitting in there practicing takeoffs and landings (without emergencies, that is).
I really don’t think some guy, who’s never flown a real aircraft before, never felt how the plane reacts to aileron inputs, rudder inputs, different power settings, trim, flap input, never actually seen the real landscape and flight environment… I really doubt he’d be able to put the plane on the ground without damaging it.
Many moons ago, I worked for Looking Glass helping to make “Flight”. It was a different flight simulator than some of the ones mentioned here, in that it worked using an advanced physics model. That is, some sims are basically a point… you exert force x on the joystick, we add vector y to your velocity. This said ok, that means force x is added to the foot pedals which pulls a cord which attempts to move an aerilon and the forces on that aerilon are such and such which would then exert such and such a force on your plane as a whole creating a net acceleration along vectory y, etc. (I don’t know jack about planes or flying, just programming).
Anyhow, this was considered quite an advance at the time. Back then, we were talking with various officials that it was going to be licensed so that someone could count hours on the sim towards their real pilots license (at something like a 10 to 1 ratio). I don’t know if it ever happened, but I think it at least demonstrates that the concept has some validity.
Basically, if the sim is good enough, and sims what it is you want to sim, then of course it gives you the experience you want. Most sims probably aren’t good enough, but some are.
Good enough for what? Getting a Private Pilot’s license? The only way I could remotely concur with this is if you’re talking the whole setup… yoke, power lever, and rudder pedals. I don’t know if these are commercially available, but I did see this setup (or something similar) in my old flying club. A little joystick ain’t gonna cut it, IMO. And I’d have to see some sort of cite, or something idicating someone at some point took the idea of crediting sim time toward a Private’s… AFAIK, nothing like this exists. What various officials were you talking with? FAA? NTSB?
Keep in mind, my only experience with sims are 1) in the Navy, and 2) MS Flight Sim, which, on my Compaq, was so slow it was useless. I had to return it. So I can’t say I’m familiar with sims; I just don’t buy the idea of a computer joystick being adequate to replace all the control inputs in an aircraft.
flyboy,
I got no cites for ya. There may have been a reason why I never heard any more about this. I mean another reason besides leaving the company fairly early in the design phase.
At that time, the plan was to ship the game with foot pedals and some kind of yoke/wheel thingie.
Feel free to disbelieve. As you can tell, I was not privy to the real decisions… just adding the bit I know.
Short answer - I doubt it.
Long answer…
I started playing on a flight sim (with yoke and rudder pedals) shortly before I started actual flight training.
Apart from maybe giving me a basic idea of hand/foot coordination, I can’t say it was very relevant at all.
Once you find yourself confined inside a real cockpit, with the real ground down below you, I think the sim stuff would pretty much go out the window (so to speak). I know the first time I got in a small plane, the minute we fired up the engine I knew it was no joke. All that power scared me, and I’m still very respectful of it.
I have no desire to find myself in the hero situation where the pilot is incapacitated and I have to take over the controls in an unfamiliar airplane.
BTW: My favorite flight sim is X-Plane, about which I can’t say enough good things. It was originally designed as an engineering tool, and later modified into a sim. It’s not much for graphics, but the flight modeling is the best I’ve ever seen. I fly Piper Warriors in real life, and this game is the closest I’ve seen to simulating the real thing.
[Butthead voice] Heh, heh, heh. He said COCKpit…[/Butthead voice]
There have been a number of efforts to get PC-based flight simulators approved for real flight training. It may in fact happen, but only under very controlled conditions.
HOWEVER, even approved simulators can only be used to log simulated instrument time. It doesn’t count as flight time. For example, here in Canada we have a requirement of five instrument hours for a private pilot’s license (that being time spent flying solely by reference to the instruments. To do this, we fly under a ‘hood’ which is a type of headgear that restricts your vision to the instrument panel and nothing else). An approved flight simulator might be usable for this purpose, and typically only a certain percentage of that time can be ‘simulator’ time.
So, out of the 45 flight hours it takes to become a private pilot, you might save 2 or 3 hours if you could use your flight simulator as an approved simulator, which at this time you can’t. Oh, and the only loggable simulator time is time spent with an instructor rated for the type of training you are doing.
So, you could go and buy yourself a 5 million dollar Frasca full-motion simulator and install it in your basement, and you can’t get credit for one minute of flying time towards your license unless an instructor is there with you, and even then you can only count it towards instrument requirements.
That said, Microsoft Flight Sim will help you a lot if you are currently taking lessons. As I said before, the real gains from simulator flying are procedures - checklists, emergency procedures, etc. I do a fair bit of IFR training in FS2000, practicing holds, writing down clearances, working the radios, getting comfortable with an HSI and RMI display, etc. That’s truly valuable stuff.
One of the most important techniques you need to learn when instrument flying is a proper ‘scan’ of your instruments, so that you can check all critical flight issues while maintaining control of the airplane. Flight Sim is great for practicing this, because you can set it up to fail instruments at random just like an instructor would. Only, an instructor will fail your instrument by putting a big suction cup or something similar over it so you can’t read it. The problem with this is that you KNOW the instrument has failed. It’s a lot tougher to recognize a failure of say, a gyro instrument that has lost power and is slowly spinning down and precessing, or a Pitot-static instrument that has gone south because the Pitot tube or static port iced over. That type of failure has killed a lot of pilots.
The U.S. Air Force thinks enough of Flight Sim that every student at the academy has to buy a copy.
My take on the OP… (I am an IFR rated pilot, and have tinkered with PC sims, but not a whole lot)
If the sim-pilot was really good at flying the PC simulator, and in real life (IRL) was in “ideal conditions” I’d say he’d stand an excellent chance of bringing the plane down to about 50 feet or so - lined up with the runway and at a speed to make a landing. But getting throught that last 50 feet and to a stop would be chancy. I say this because, if I were in this situation, I’d try to fly an ILS approach, just like you would on the sim. Since you’re proficient with the sim ILS approaches, I think you’d do well IRL down to 50 feet or so, where the sim experience would begin to depart from reality. I’d worry that you’d have trouble with pitch/power/airspeed control, and not really know how to flare the airplane to make a smooth landing. I’d guess an 80% chance of walking away from it, maybe 50% chance of not bending the airplane.
The guy with an instructor pilot (IP) sitting next to him, and no sim-experience (but a decent amount of self-confidence) would probably fare better, IMHO. That’s because you said “ideal conditions” and that would allow for the IP to actually give you quite a bit of time (say a couple hours or so) of flying lessons before you actually tried to set it down. You’d probably make a few “missed approaches” for practice, and the IP would be able to point out your trouble spots, and offer specific corrective advice. Then, talking you through the landing would probably not be too much of a challenge.
Would experience in flying remote control model airplanes be any help in learning to fly real planes? (The kind with throttle, ailerons, rudder and elevator control)
ok, I’m a case study here…
I’ve loved flight simulators my whole life, MS Flight Sim, Red Baron, Warbirds, Falcon, you name it. Props, jets, the works.
Then I decided to get my private pilot license…
My flight sim experience gave me a huge headstart in several areas:
-The instruments were all familiar and I was comfortable using the cockpit
-Maneuvers such as coordinated turns, rudder use, constant-rate turns, turns-around-a-point, S-turns, were all natural and I nailed most of them on my first try.
-From playing Warbirds (highly realistic online WW2 sim) stall recovery was very natural, as was unusual-attitude recovery.
-Direction finding and plotting routes.
However, landing was NOT easy or natural. In flight sims, I could land a P38 with one engine out, my rudder shot off, and missing my nose gear, onto a turning aircraft carrier without a second thought. However, for the life of me I could not get a perfectly functional Cessna 152 to settle down onto 9000 feet of runway until about my 6th go-around attempt. While I knew the theory of what I was supposed to do, the feel of the aircraft took practice before I wasn’t constantly over and under-correcting everything I did. Also, I have yet to find a PC flight simulator that accurately simulates what wind or ground-effect feel like.
So, given enough go-around attempts, I think a sim-savvy person would only be able to land on their first attempt if they were extremely lucky. Give patience and enough go-around attempts I think they could do it safely eventually though.