8 hours ago, zmak said:

He was really working that yoke hard on short finals

When I fly either in P3DV4 or Xplane11, I always like to manually set my surface winds at an angle to my approach path at just 1 knot, but with gusts around five knots or maybe a tad more.  As a real life student pilot I find this replicates real world landings and the effects of chop quite realistically.  I usually turn off turbulence because I find that less realistic except in rare circumstances, if I want a real challenge.

I have to say setting winds up this way has made me a better student, less focused on "instrument hypnosis" and more focused on seat of the pants approaches with the autopilot off once I commit to decision height, which is as soon as I see the field.   Our sims are more capable than we think and that is why my CFI, after an hour long interview on my first flight, gave me the aircraft until about five seconds before touchdown, in which we shared the yoke and pedals so I could follow the subtlety of his movements.  He was a young CFI, half my age, but already an ATP and had a few thousand hours, give or take, aviation was simply who he was and I have found several CFI's in his mold, including experienced simmers and/or pilots here.  Learned from everyone here, especially threads like this one.

My favorite air magazine was flying magazine, and I am posting the link to their 50th edition here again.  My favorite reading was always "I learned about flying from that"....

https://books.google.com/books?id=SOUUuRXEFmoC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

John

54 minutes ago, John_Cillis said:

When I fly either in P3DV4 or Xplane11, I always like to manually set my surface winds at an angle to my approach path at just 1 knot, but with gusts around five knots or maybe a tad more.  As a real life student pilot I find this replicates real world landings and the effects of chop quite realistically.  I usually turn off turbulence because I find that less realistic except in rare circumstances, if I want a real challenge.

I have to say setting winds up this way has made me a better student, less focused on "instrument hypnosis" and more focused on seat of the pants approaches with the autopilot off once I commit to decision height, which is as soon as I see the field.   Our sims are more capable than we think and that is why my CFI, after an hour long interview on my first flight, gave me the aircraft until about five seconds before touchdown, in which we shared the yoke and pedals so I could follow the subtlety of his movements.  He was a young CFI, half my age, but already an ATP and had a few thousand hours, give or take, aviation was simply who he was and I have found several CFI's in his mold, including experienced simmers and/or pilots here.  Learned from everyone here, especially threads like this one.

My favorite air magazine was flying magazine, and I am posting the link to their 50th edition here again.  My favorite reading was always "I learned about flying from that"....

https://books.google.com/books?id=SOUUuRXEFmoC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

John

Thank you for the link...enjoyed among other things a short article by Isaac Asimov from which I read many of his books.