For a big Birthday, I had 2 hours in a GA from my local big Airport EGNX. 

The guy giving the lesson definitely had his mind on totally different things than giving me a 2-hour lesson. But really that turned out to be a good thing because he never even asked if it was my first time in an aircraft or anything...yer it was that bad, but turned out good.

Now bear in mind it was my first time in a GA let alone piloting it. He took off and with a few hundred feet asked me to turn on a heading of XXX and level off at xxxxft.

Once levelled off he asked me to turn on a different heading to overfly my house and the city of Nottingham. After that, we headed out towards Derby. All this time I have full control of the aircraft the only thing he did was the richer as he said he likes to have control of that!.

Coming back to East Midlands ATC told us to hold for a Ryanair inbound to land. The "instructor" told me to turn onto a heading and keep my ALT, basically go round in circles for 10 mins. Turning and keeping the aircraft hight the same and not slipping. Finally, we were clear to land and I came out of hold onto the glide slope and around 1500ft he took over and landed. He asked me if I had enjoyed it and that was it.!!!!

I found doing all the manoeuvres I did far easier to do in the aircraft than in the sim. The sim made it that I know what I was doing. The real aircraft you can feel unlike the sim so the aircraft you feel changing and moving through your body making it far easier to fly than the sim. 

So from my first and only 2 hours flying a real aircraft, I would say the sim is incredible for teaching you how to read and learn what the instruments are showing you. Flying the real thing was for me far easier because you feel it before you see it on your instruments. I have to say I nailed the turns/leaving off, not slipping etc. I came away with the feeling that it was really easy. I was amazed at how easy it was. 

But I do think real pilots don't use the instruments as simmers do, that's because in the sim we don't feel the aircraft so we get used to relying on the instruments.

 

Edited December 13, 20187 yr by Nyxx

49 minutes ago, skelsey said:

The one area that I would say the sim is very poor at replicating is landing -- there are very few models which behave anything like a real aeroplane near to the ground and you can get away with (and even have a lot of success with) a lot of things in the sim which in real life would result in bent metal (at best).

I would certainly agree with this. PC screens are very poor at replicating what you see and what you concentrate on when making a landing, especially peripheral vision to help judge the flare since they don't portray being sat on the ground very well at all although to some extent, things like Track IR can improve this a bit.

An instructor actually told me a pretty good trick for landing on grass strips, many years ago, which unfortunately is something you can't really replicate on a PC, and that is to pick your aim point, keep looking at it, then the moment you start to see details of the grass, look straight up the field to the horizon and commence your flare, judging your hold off  purely off peripheral vision. I was skeptical at first, but doing that really genuinely does make for a good landing in real life on a grass strip, and you find that you can really grease that thing on beautifully with this technique, so it's a shame it doesn't transfer well to a PC flight sim.

But, once you know what what a decent landing entails, you can sort of blag things a bit in a sim and kind of do something a bit similar with the help of a bit of imagination, but without that 'ooh I can see blades of grass' ground rush which you get in real life coming onto a grass strip, it's not quite the same. Frankly, if landing an aeroplane was as tricky in real life as it is in the average flight sim, I think the graveyards would be full by now lol. There just isn't the level of feedback to your senses in a flight sim that there is in a real aeroplane when it comes to landings, and I would put big money on most sim pilots probably finding it way easier to land the real thing than a sim version, thanks to the vastly improved situational awareness you get with the real thing.

Edited December 13, 20187 yr by Chock

Chock has succinctly covered not only why a desktop flightsim is only good for understanding aircraft systems and not ifor learning to fly a real aircraft. Unfortunately, one just doesn't get enough sensory feedback in a sim to allow it to correctly simulate complex activities like landing, stall recovery, etc.. It's also why I laugh at those discussions about which sim and which aircraft have the most realistic aerodynamics. It's equivalent to thinking that either Amazon Alexa or Apple Siri would make a good wife.😉

14 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

 It's equivalent to thinking that either Amazon Alexa or Apple Siri would make a good wife.😉

Anyone who has ever been divorced might actually prefer that option lol. Or as my friend once said to one of our mutual friends who was considering getting married: 'Why don't you just cut to the chase; find a girl you don't like and buy her a house'. 🤣

This is one of the reasons why sims are better for flying airliners than they are GA.  They typically are much more geared towards managing a flight deck than hand flying an airframe..  The guys who have flown will relate, but one of the biggest disappointments is flying GA for real and then coming back to your sim to do the same thing - you really do get a massive physical and mental sense of what desktop sims lack.  It's literally one of the biggest disappointments once you discover it.  (even with A2A) 

This is the reason I only do tube flying in sims.  I will (realistically)  have nothing to compare it to in the real world (as a pilot) and airliners feel much more convincing in desktop sims than GA's do . 

You can go to school to become a commercial airliner pilot and your first time flying an actual aircraft will be with passengers.  Everything else is a simulator.

I have a difficult time maintaining situational awareness in an unfamiliar traffic pattern espescilly flying an aircraft with squarrly slow speed characteristics like the v tail Bo. This is in large part due to lack of perifrial vission and the need to pan. Very hard to fly a squared off pattern without constant reference to instruments.

Hi Vic,

One quick tip - which works with both RW and FS - place your heading bug and/or CDI on the runway heading... Makes it easier to visualize where you should be turning to and should only take a quick glance... This is especially true when flying high wings - as you can't see the airport while turning...

Regards,
Scott

There’s lots of talk of “simmers look at instruments too much”.

It is a potential trap, but if you’re aware of it - which anyone who’s been paying attention over the last 20 years will be - you can avoid it.

Simmers should ideally learn to virtual fly using real-world resources (textbooks, video training etc), rather than just making it up in the sim.

Finally, I think VR is a game-changer in terms of recreating reality. Even with track ir, you don’t get the situational awareness that you do with a VR setup.

11 hours ago, OzWhitey said:

There’s lots of talk of “simmers look at instruments too much”.

I don't think it's unique to simmers,  although I think being a simmer does make the behavior more prevalent.  When I learned to fly in 1988, my instructor always told me off for looking at the instruments too much.

4 hours ago, ErichB said:

When I learned to fly in 1988, my instructor always told me off for looking at the instruments too much.

Mine too. In fact, his exact words which finally made me stop doing that were: 'Look where you're bloody well going! There might be another pilot nearby who's an even bigger word not allowed than you!'

4 hours ago, ErichB said:

I don't think it's unique to simmers,  although I think being a simmer does make the behavior more prevalent.  When I learned to fly in 1988, my instructor always told me off for looking at the instruments too much.

You were flying VFR I guess, so is different.

I find the same difficulties when I took some tests training flying lessons, although the instructors were impressed by the flying skills, they keep telling me, this is VFR look out..

I never told them I used simulators until we landed, I wanted to have training as anybody else, the last instructor though looked at me during flight and told me, you must have done this before, are you sure you don't have a PPL and are just joking with me? I had to confess then I have been using simulators since 1994, he laughed and said I knew it..

He let me land that day the Cessna 152 by myself while he assisted with the power settings, one of my best experiences so far :).

S.

Edited December 14, 20187 yr by simbol

5 minutes ago, Chock said:

Mine too. In fact, his exact words which finally made me stop doing that were: 'Look where you're bloody well going! There might be another pilot nearby who's an even bigger word not allowed than you!'

Your and my instructor sound very similar.  I trained in Cape Town (FACT) and my instructor was Dutch tho 🙂

On 12/13/2018 at 7:45 AM, Chock said:

Anyone who has ever been divorced might actually prefer that option lol. Or as my friend once said to one of our mutual friends who was considering getting married: 'Why don't you just cut to the chase; find a girl you don't like and buy her a house'. 🤣

Alan-

That's from Willie (Nelson) amongst some other nuggets towards life.  A sage of our time.

C

6 hours ago, Chock said:

Mine too. In fact, his exact words which finally made me stop doing that were: 'Look where you're bloody well going! There might be another pilot nearby who's an even bigger word not allowed than you!'

On my first dual cross country with my instructor we were on the way back to home airport at Ft Lauderdale, and he said. " If the engine quit right now, what airport would you head for?" I grabbed the Sectional off the top of the cowling, and started unfolding it, or trying to, and looking at the VOR's I had tuned in, and basically was in a slight panic. ........  Finally he grabbed the controls, and put the C 152 in a steep turn to the left, and pointed out the window straight down, at the airport directly 2000 feet below us.  

Lesson learned.