A Microsoft Simulator Pilot Tries Flying for RealPeter A. Stokes

Very nice story, next to getting your private, you might want to enhance your simexperience by obtaining (CH) rudder and yoke...Rob "Holland&Holland" de Vries http://www.emotipad.com/emoticons/Flying.gif"A Bad Day At The Field Is Still Better Then A Good Day At Work"

Great stuff, "Although it took me a minute to correctly pick out runway one nine in the distance" Notice the difference with the game and real, you can sometimes be almost on top and not see the field properly, thats the one thing the FS series dosnt model too well. It's great if it helped you though !Ash

Yes, really interesting to read! I'm about to go up with a pilot friend of mine too (once we get our hands on a suitable machine) and see how much I have digested! :) I doubt I will manage as well as you did though! He also said he will take me for a ride in a SAAB 340 but I don't think he'll let me loose on the controls there... /KristerAbout seeing the runway, I remembered that many complained that in Fly!II the runways are too difficult to see and somebody pointed out that actually it was quite correct. Think I'll have to give the Sim some flying time again! It was after all Fly! that got me into flightsimming in the first place!

I just got to go flying yesterday as well! A buddy of mine from work took me up for the second time in his club's Piper Archer. He's not an instructor, but he's a dang good pilot, so he keeps me in the right seat but lets me take the controls once in a while. No extreme maneuvers or landings, but that's okay by me, actually. :-)I do have a yoke and the pedals at home (soon to add in the Track IR hopefully!) but I haven't read nearly as much as Peter. So my knowledge isn't as good as his, but I felt comfortable with the controls right away, including the trim wheel, which even surprised me a little. In my experience, both the real plane and the sim were equally easy to trim, but then we were getting bounced around quite a bit, so I ended up fighting to trim more than I probably should have anyway. In the end, the real plane probably would have been easier to trim if the conditions were the same.Like I said I didn't get to do anything fancy, but after we landed at Albert Lea, MN for a Snickers Blizzard at the nearby Dairy Queen, he asked me what kind of stuff I was up to in the sim, and my first response was "steep turns".Holy cow is that ever a pain in the butt to do from the right seat. Turning to the left wasn't too bad, and I ended up losing about 10 feet total. We were both pretty impressed with that. :-) And yeah, that sure does feel funky. I'm really glad the airframe stayed quiet the whole time because as it was I was watching my speed VERY closely. I never came close to stalling, but it felt really, REALLY wrong. It always seemed like I was pulling back too hard, but I did pretty well, and rolled out just a couple of degrees off course. So, yay for that one, but then he had me continue in to a right hand turn, and that went all to hell. I couldn't even see the top-right hand side of the AH, so I ended up more or less guessing my bank angle. I lost 100 on that one, ended up too shallow, and pretty much tanked it. When it was over I asked him if he'd ever tried one from the right seat and he actually thought about it for a minute and said no. I said, "don't". :-)We didn't do stalls this time, but we did do slow flight. He asked if the sim did a pretty good job of relating the feel of mushy controls, and I think it does. So when he let me take over after getting configured, it "felt" pretty much the same.Cool as all heck, and I can tell that the more time I get, the more comfortable I'll be. *EDIT* Oh, and the first time I couldn't see the runway until he was already on downwind. This time, I still couldn't pick it out as early as he, but I saw it MUCH earlier. And I actually saw our original destination airport before he did! It's really neat to see "experience" in action like that.I should start putting this stuff into a logbook. :-)

Interesting read from both Stompy and Peter, even if I will probably never get the chance to emulate them.Thanks guys.

You guys that feel strange banking at 30 and 45 degrees should take a flight in a glider. Most turns in thermals are at 45 degrees where as in powered planes the average bank is 30 degrees or less.The times I've had freinds with me that are virtual pilots they all seem to have a difficult time with maintaining level flight. Turns climbs and descents are ok but, maintaining level flight on a given heading has proven itself elusive.I remember being told to look outside the cockpit when I first started my flying lessons. I think the instruments are more familiar to us as virtual pilots than what the world looks like below us.Glad you had fun, now go do an intro at a different location and see how you improve.:)

You know, you just triggered another memory here...we got close to the Faribault airport, which apparently had a bit of glider activity at the time. Those things always struck me as having pretty big wingspans, but even from a good distance the one I saw looked absolutely ENORMOUS up in the air! And yeah, it was banking pretty hard.:-)