Hi all.I have never had the joy of flying a real aircraft and I really envy all those who fly and get paid for it!!Although FS is a great subtitute to this I really would like very much to know: How do real pilots feel the "flying" with FS?How close is it to the real one? In which aspects?And what would be the greatest difference to real flying?Thanks,Christos

one of the big Differences for me is the pressure on the yoke that you don't get in flight sim with the saitek or ect Michael Moore

Hey Christos, what you are asking for is not an easy Question to awnser! You have to distinguish between many aspects of flying an Airliner! Many of the simulated Add-Ons are nearly 100% system simulations these days and therefore good to get a feeling oh how complex an Airliner can be! Optical the quality is in many cases brilliant and close to real ones!What is missing in any case is the real flying! You'll never have the 100% feeling of flying and feeling an Airliner! Aerodynamics and physical behaviour is difficult to simulate and not close to reality in most of the Add Ons! A light wind drift during approach, thermals, ground effect etc.... many things hard to simulate in FS if its possible to get them done at all! Well I'm not an Airliner pilot but Air Traffic Controller but here comes my expertise regarding online flying ;) And there reality is pretty good these days! Of course the traffic isn't as much as in real and many procedures we apply are simply not suitable for Flightsimming but however many Air Traffic Controllers working on VATSIM or IVAO are doing a great job! Hope that helps a bit! Rgds, Patrick

For me the main difference is the feel between sitting in front of your computer and in the small Cessna 150. There is good models made of planes, such as upcoming NGX, which has good FDE and so on. Of course Flight Simulator has lack of good ground effect model (which I personally found very major problem).But what I've noticed when I started to fly real planes after simming for many years - there isn't that much of difference in flying general. Well, in the beginning the landings were awfull mainly because you're viewpoint is very different compared to sim expecience, also you need to know how to handle the ground effect in real life, and so on. But I was surprised that I got used to it very fast.Novadays I really believe that flying in a sim is not a waste of time if you're planning to have a career in aviation industry. You just need to remember that flying in VFR is not just looking into gauges of the airplane - it's all about looking out of the window which my flying instructor made very clear to me. ;)

Hi - there is also the complete lack of motion/inertia in FS as opposed to real flying. It's not possible to get the true "feel" of flying in a simulator, even though the level-d full motion sims are very close (I've "flown" in a B717 and 737NG full motion sim, as well as flying a C172N for real). There's also not the same "pucker factor" you get when flying a final approach to a landing, where if you screw it up badly enough, and don't go around, can have disastrous consequences (read - you're DEAD!)In real flying, every flight is unique...something is always different, the least of which is the weather.

Well here's my take. Adding to the obvious things people have mentioned.Things the simulator can't... simulate:-Sweating when I'm parked on the ramp or down low on a hot July day.-Visiting with my friends at their grass strips and hangar flying.-Showing off for the pretty girl you spotted on the ramp while preflighting (my personal favorite)... Turns out she has more ratings. :( -Nearly having birds come through the wind screen because you and your flying buddy just had to land at that podunk 2000' grass strip.Getting the pattern? I'm talking about the romance I find in aviation. The little moments that really make you appreciate what it is you're doing. The sim has never giving me that feeling.That being said, the sim can do a lot of great things and at times I'm so into it my imagination fills in the weak spots. To me, one must at least taste real flight to really take it in, and more so you have to be imaginative. My new personal favorite, the Katana 4X by Aerosoft, really puts me in a GA plane. I really loathe light sport aircraft but this thing has the little details like rattles and character that makes me feel I'm in the aircraft. :(How's that for corny?

I don't fly big stuff, but I have a fair bit of experience on smaller stuff, especially sailplanes. So for that kind of flying at least, I would say that probably the thing most lacking (visually) from a flight sim is the 'ground rush' you get when landing, where the sight out of the canopy looking toward your touchdown point initially appears much as it does in FS until you get to just before you need to flare, at which point the detail of the ground suddenly seems to get a lot more sharp and appears to be coming at you very fast. That and the ability to judge your height from your peripheral vision is what is lacking in FS (unless you have a multiple monitor set up, which could possibly simulate it a bit).Beyond the visual aspect, another thing is the lack of turbulence one feels. Even on relatively calm days a small aircraft bounces around a bit in the air, especially before about 5pm, after which the air has usually calmed down a lot, and that is something all flight sim definitely lack in spite of bouncing the view around a bit, because you feel it through your &@($* more than with what you see, so it is a pale imitation of the real way one experiences that. Where powered aircraft are concerned, on the real thing there is a very tangible sense of being pulled through the air from the acceleration forces one experiences, whereas without that, one tends to feel the air current a bit more on a sailplane, their lighter weight adding to that too, where hitting a decent thermal feels literally like someone has kicked the underside of your seat. Flight sims tend to portray sailplanes as not being very 'pointable' too, often depicting them with the nose wandering about all over the place because of that lack of a power source other than gravity for their acceleration, but in fact they are great at air penetration if you get the nose down slightly. Many of them have a much higher VNe than powered GA singles and a much higher G-loading tolerance too (usually plus 7 and minus 4 or so), which is actually very funny if you ever go hammering past a Cessna 150 in your glider at 170 knots and imagine the pilot of that Cessna seeing you and thinking: 'What the hell...?!!'Having said all that, none of that stuff detracts so much from FS that it is not realistic in most other ways, and to kind of throw the oft-raised question of 'could I land a real aeroplane if I can do it okay in FS?' on its head, I would cheerfully sit alongside the vast majority of decent flight sim pilots in the adjacent seat and let them bring the aircraft in for a landing, because these days flight simulators are not so desperately different from flying the real thing that I would think they could not do it, and in many respects it is actually harder in a sim, when you don't get quite so much physical and visual feedback.Al

172 pilot here, the main difference is the "small boat" feel. You do get a sense of the "gut feeling" on take-off on airliners, but the big difference is best described as ocean liner vs small dingy. GA aircraft get tossed around a LOT over land, especially mountainous terrain. It's there constantly too, not just like the occasional "five minutes of turbulence" on airliners. The plane's own "will to fly" is hard to describe and isn't felt in the sim. It's VERY difficult to explain. You balance the plane (or rather adjust and adapt to the forces' effect on it), the seat of your pants' feel. I'd STRONGLY recommend each and every sim pilot to at least try to save up to an introduction lesson at your local flight school, expensive though it may be I guarantee you it'll be worth it.

Another thing that I've come up with that I don't see posted here...I fly a Piper Cherokee in real life. When I want to practice with it in the sim, I usually have to mess around with the sensitivities of the joystick and such. I'm sure that's true with most airplane in FSX. (I hope PMDG will tell us exactly how to set the sensitivities, etc to get the feeling of flying a real NG)Another thing that I saw mentioned, but I have to emphasize is the heat. Down here in ABQ, in the summer, sitting in a Cherokee (doesn't have AC) is literally like sitting in an oven. You start to almost feel sick after awhile, just because of the heat.One last thing, is I must admit it is easier doing flows, checklist, etc in real life. All you have to do is simply move your head, or your hands and feel and flick the switch. Even with things such as VR Insight, it isn't as easy as real life.

I find the ground handling characteristics in flightsim are a little unrealistic. At least with the larger aircraft. I would like to see better modeling of turbocharged/supercharged engines. Other than that most 3rd party add-ons address my other issues.VRTodd

FS will never come close to the feeling we get while flying although some add-ons do come close to the systems programming side of things.What I like in FS is the GA and the older airliners that I'll never get to fly IRL. It's also something I share with my son, he was the one who introduced it to me and we use it as a bonding thing (Much to my wife's disapproval). I don't get home from work eager to jump back in the sim and start flying again, butits nice on weekends to take out the Concorde, B707 and B727 or Aerosofts new Katana for a spin. My son will swear however that FS helped himprepare for his first flying lesson, but who knows....

Yep thats right the yoke sencetives is hard to get to the real feel. I also tryeid many times to set it throu fsuipc or standart settings but some of it is becaus of the yoke it self, i had a more expencive 1 and you are able to feel the difference but stil dident get the 100 same feeling as flyeing a cessna in the realworld or the ATR which i did in the real simulator. Some of it might be becaus of the forces you get in the real plane isent that easy to do in FS whit out some force feed back to the yoke i think. as the plane seems to have to light controls or by adjusting to slower controls. I must say after i tryeid the cessna i was ammased by how the controls feels, when you gets from FSX and to the real thing. For me the real plane is easyer to control then FSX. you realy have good feeling of what the plane is doenig and the forces, but also that when you first try an ATR then jumps to a smaller plane. It was as i said to my parents after i had this tryeing lesson, that the feeling is like having a car whit a very good road grip it is so stabil. Even that we have some good cross wind, and head wind at departure, the speed dosent drop as it does in FSX it drops but not that much.But yes FS need some bacis things to bee real, but nearly no matter which simulator you use it would help you to learn som basic things. The experince i have before the flight in the real cessna was flight simulator, i must say i handeled the cessna nearly all the time, he controled rudder at departure as that is a tricky thing, and when we had a bit of G-forces + only the few feet to touch down he said i have the plan. so i was ammassed by how much i could do the first time. Best regards Lars N.

I fly a C172, although usually fly instrument flight. I agree with the other posters, and will add an analogy.Flying compared to simming is a bit like comparing going to the super bowl to watching it at home on a wide screen tv. Now, you can make the screen bigger and higher def ( a bit like what computer you have for fs), and you get to see what most at the game don't, tight shots and replays, commentary, you get it all. That's like simming. But actually going to the game, well if you've ever been, then you know what I mean.I know that's over simplistic. Really, simming is cool, as long as you don't expect to actually fly. And it's a great hobby.Bruce.

FSX is great for pre visualizing routes to be flown, or area of geography I'm unfamiliar with. It's good to practice instrument procedures as well...I have my ppl asel and got it in a cherokee. I have less than 100 hrs but the main things missing are:1) bumps and turbulence feeling (sometimes gets me sick in my stomach on a hot day when flying over lakes vs farm fields)2) Tactile feedback (tuning freqs, manipulating knobs/switches etc3) air traffic that can be hard to hear depending on your altitude, your crappy equipment etc etc4) performance characteristics: sometimes I don't even fly a plane by the numbers in FSX - just firewall everything. Can't do that irl lol!5) And all the other things that occur IRL, birds, density altitude, icing, engine abnormalities, equipment breaking in flight, instructor pressure to perform lol!

Here's a video of some 737 NG-700 training I did at Alteon training center at the Atlanta Hartsfield Airport in 2005...My primary training before this was the original PMDG 737-700 software....As stated before in other posts, the yoke & rudder takes a lot to get used to because it was way different than my CH yoke & rudders that I previously had. The PMDG software made it all happen. Thanks PMDG, the training that you provided made all the difference in the world.Regards & can't wait for the NGX..I'll be in Atlanta again...:( Regards,jen noulethttp://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-975186236656918365#