Faster?You'll never get to that checkride sooner than 40 hours of under the hood, in the goo, or with a CFII looking over your shoulder in an approved simulator for 10 of those 40. You can do 20 with an approved safety pilot while you need 20 logged with a CFII. Don't be suprised if you wind up logging all 40 (or many more) with a CFII. I've never heard of MSFS being an approved simulator but that doesn't mean it cannot help you with learning to fly instruments or keeping tuned up once you get your ticket. There are folks that could take that instrument checkride at 10 hours and there are folks that could take 1000 hours and not be ready. I had a CFII tell me once that he spent 20 hours with an instrument student just trying to get him to fly straight and level and that his student was never able to do it and wisely finally hung it up. I found that shocking, but he was quite serious about it. I also had a friend that took 50 hours before he firt time soloed. Was a self confidence thing. I think most people would benefit from using a PC simulator, whether FS2002, Elite, ASA IP Trainer, or whatever to learn various instrument procedures and as something of an assist in developing an instrument scan. Knowing all you can prior to spending your gob of money with a CFII in a plane and having him have to spend a lot of time explaining things to you in the air that you could have figured out by booking it and going through the brain motions with whatever simulator should speed up the process for most folks. I think the most you could hope for is to be ahead of the game and completely ready for your checkride at 40 hours instead of around 50-55 that I have heard is the average, but don't know that for a fact. Multiply 10-20 hours of real airplane flying with a CFII at around $100 an hour (or maybe more?) and your purchase and use of FS2002 might seem like a fair bargain. On the down side of PC simulator training, I would caution anyone to be wary of learning a bunch of incorrect procedures you are going to have to unlearn with your CFII. Reading a good primary instrument book first would be a minimum starting point. It might also be best to get an hour or two with a CFII before getting serious about doing it on the PC. You're developing procedures and unlearning incorrect ones is far worse than learning it correctly the first time. A sim such as ASA's IP Trainer could be plenty helpful as a starter. Having a talking computer CFII such as is touched upon by Rod Machado in FS2002 is a terrific tool to help you and is an area that I think could be greatly expanded upon. An interactive one that gives you right now feedback on your mistakes or compliments you on correct reactions would be terrific. Where is that program?Feel?You may very well hear from your CFII that "feel" is not what instrument flying is all about. "Feel" is one of the sensations that you will want to chuck right out the window about as fast as you can. I would not look to any PC simulator to help me develope a feel for instrument flying. You are trying to develope skills at interpreting what the instruments are telling you and using that interpretation to translate into motions of your hands, arms, feet etc to move those controls to where they need to go to accomplish what you want the plane to do. You will quickly discover that relying on feel will get you into trouble very fast. This, I think, is where a PC simulator can be of a lot of benefit because there is no feel to speak of at all. The only feel I have with FS2002 is what the springs in the CH Products USB Yoke I have wants to impart to me and that's not anything too scientific. That's also the beauty of it. No feel at all, complete reliance on your eyeball scan to correctly interpret what is going on and then make the correction necessary. All that said, you should have some sort of reasonable airplane to practice instruments with on the PC that doesn't jerk around all over the place with the slightest hand movements and neither should you have one that is so rock solid that you can stick it on a heading and/or altitude and it never moves. No matter how much time you spend on a PC simulator, you are going to be in for a mild shock at what it's like to fly a plane under the hood or in the clouds. Wait til you see what that windscreen looks like when you are in a solid downpour rainshower. You'll just be a whole lot better prepared mentally for what you are trying to accomplish while you develope those stick and rudder responses from what your eyeballs are telling you from the instruments in the real plane. Another thing. I highly recommend you get a CFII that likes to take his students into real actual IFR whenever you get the chance. Nothing you can do will beat that and that experience is worth about 2 to 1 over hood or any type of simulator time IMHO. It's not necessary to have a CFII that wants to fly when it's 200 and 1/2 out there, just an instructor that wants to stick you in real clouds as often as possible. Getting the "feel" of those up and down drafts happening and the turbulence bumping you around while in the goo is priceless. I'm sure that some CFIIs lurking around could toss in a lot of far more meaningful comments than me into this entire subject area.Take care and all the best,Bob, Rogers, Arkansas

Agree 100%. In the soup is way better than foggles/hood.Bruce is right about MSFS2k2 primary contribution is in developing a scan, however the flight characteristics/feel of an airplane are very different. For example, I had a student yesterday while doing partial panel holds kept fixating on the VSI as his pitch instrument. With the simulator I could freeze the VSI and force him to use the altimeter instead. In the airplane I would have been sick from the wave we would have been doing.

>If the ADF works, placard it as inop before the ride. I HATE partial >panel NDB approaches. A nice VOR or LOC partial panel will do just >fine! LOL! For my instrument checkride, I made sure to rent a plane that didn't have a working ADF. Sorry, it's probably unsporting and just awful to admit this, but there was enough pressure already.I'm not sure how much any of the simulators really helps you learn to scan, but what they seem to be very useful for is practicing until procedures become second-nature. Then, when you're flying for real, you don't have to pause for a few seconds and think "let's see, I'm approaching the VOR and am supposed to hold to the right, what happens next?" and while you're thinking the CDI needle passes through center and pins itself to the other side. If you apply real world techniques with some rigor to simulated flying, then you may get more out of your lessons, because your brain wil lalready be wired to do the next three steps. However, I think it works better to get instruction on maneuvers from an actual CFII before trying them in the sim.A very clear and practical set of tutorials on how to accomplish most instrument tasks is contained in the IFR instruction book you can buy from the ELITE web site; the procedures in the book will mostly apply in any simulator. I found that a lot of IFR instruction books were kind of too abstract for a first timer, and I wanted something that was more like a straitforward step-by-step "cookbook" for each procedure. The instrument training book published by ASA isn't too bad, either. Paul