I have been looking on the web for add-ons that are like PMDG but a lot of them are very expensive.

What are the cheapest study-level aircraft that have all he systems the real version has?

Zaakit.

I haven't yet tried it, but I believe this might be classed as a study level 152 - https://www.simshack.net/products/free-cessna-152-fsx-707

Yes, it's FREE.

Hi Folks,

If money is tight - wait for a sale - Majestic Dash 8 Pro for less than $50.00 during an Xmas Sale.

Regards,
Scott

As far as jetliners go......a long ways😄  Try this freebie: https://www.justflight.com/product/757-jetliner-freemium

Also available is the Flight1 C-162 Skycatcher with an electronic panel.  http://www.flight1.com/products.asp?product=flt1c162

A good 737 from Ifly on sale now.  http://www.flight1.com/products.asp?product=iflyp3d

Just now, diajohn said:

A good 737 from Ifly on sale now.  http://www.flight1.com/products.asp?product=iflyp3d

sale expired yesterday 😞

Shame but still a good price.

Have a look at the Manfred Jan C47 at Sim Outhouse. It's free but very detailed with plenty of documentation and a lot of fun.

Are you up for any type of plane or only airliners?

 

The cheapest "study-level" (whatever that Marketing gobbledy gook actually means) comes for free with your sim - The Cessna 172. Have you completed and passed all the free flying lessons?

The cheapest and hardcore airline add on is: Proyect Tupolev TU-154B2 😎

Depends very much on a few criteria. First up, we need to define what one means by the term 'study level'. I'll elaborate on this a little bit just so we are aware that 'study level' as a term, is meaningless without quantifying what it is one wants to study. Literally any flight sim add-on, including the very cheapest of ones with very little functionality, can claim to be 'study level' if one does not quantify what one intends to, or wishes to study, i.e. I can study where the throttle is located on a 15 quid Virtualcol airliner just as easily as I can study where it is on a 120 quid one from FSL. This is not a joke...

If I only wanted to study where everything was located on the main panel of an airliner, then literally a paper poster with a photograph of that airliner's panel would be sufficient to do that, it would effectively be a very basic 'procedure training simulator'. I'm absolutely serious when I say this, in the world of real aviation, despite the fact that you hear terms such as 'full motion simulator' 'procedures trainer' 'Level C simulator' 'Type 7 simulator' and so on, this leads to the mistaken belief sometimes, that every simulator aid a pilot ever uses is one of those 20 million dollar full-motion affairs; this really isn't the case, some of these things really are as basic as a poster with a picture of the panel, if that is all one needs to study.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have 'Level D/Type 7' simulators (i.e. the ones you would see at pilot training centres which are mounted on a bunch of hydraulic rams). To qualify as being simulators of that level, these have to have 6 degrees of mounting platform freedom of movement, a collimated visual representation of the view out of the cockpit windows which is at least 150 degrees wide, realistic sounds in the cockpit, the cockpit itself has to be a functional replica of the real aeroplane's cockpit, the controls have to replicate the feel and function of the real aeroplane's controls, the movement simulation has to be within a very close margin of accuracy in replicating how the real aeroplane responds, it has to do this within just a few microseconds of when the real aeroplane would respond in that way and so on. This is why those things cost millions of dollars, but it's also why these things are completely unnecessary if all you wanted to 'study' was how to adjust the seat straps; you could literally do that with just a seat, and airlines do indeed have cabin simulators for their crews which are little more than this.

So, what is it that pilots study? Well, they study how to operate the aeroplane of course, but, do they study literally everything on their aeroplane? Nope, they do not. Ask an SAS 737 pilot how the forward airstairs on a 737-700 work and he won't be able to tell you because SAS 737-700s don't have the optional airstairs fitted. I can give you an example of what this can mean in terms of real-world operation, with something which happened last week on a Scandanavian Airlines Bombardier CRJ 900 which I was working on...

This particular Bombardier CRJ 900 came in to Manchester airport, where it was supposed to be offloaded, refueled, then loaded up again and it would then depart about one hour after it had arrived. Now, when it came to a halt on the stand (Stand 6 if you're curious). When it came to a halt, I opened the panel on its nose and connected the Fixed Electrical Power plug to it so that the APU could be shut down, but, the light in the cockpit did not illuminate to indicate that ground power was available. Now, the crew unwisely assumed that we would get this working momentarily, and we did (briefly), so they shut down the APU, but the ground power connection refused to deliver consistent power to the aircraft and eventually it stopped doing so altogether. This left the aircraft without power and worse, now unable to start its APU.

We tried a few things, including the good old 'take out the plug and blow in its connector holes then plug it back in trick' (this often works), but still no joy, so we fetched a mobile Ground Power Unit and tried that, still without any luck but it at least confirmed that the issue was with the aircraft and not the ground power delivery from the Fixed Electrical Power plug. So, we also tried wiggling the plug about in the connector socket on the off-chance that there was a bit of a dodgy connection socket (not unknown), whilst the crew looked at the overhead to see if the 'ground power available' light came on. It didn't. So we ended up offloading the passengers and their bags and the aircraft's flight was cancelled, but this was not the end of the story for the crew on the flight deck. Without the ability to have a ground power source, the APU would not be able to start and so the engines could not be started either, and this is of course a problem as the aeroplane was not going anywhere until that could be fixed.

So, the crew then proceeded to get out the big ring binder manuals out; these are kept on a shelf in the cockpit. They began studying those to see if they could determine the problem; specifically, they were looking to see if any of the circuit breaker buttons on the rear bulkhead in the cockpit could be messed about with to alleviate the problem.

Now, the reason I mention this is because, contrary to what some people might think, most flight crews  rarely mess with that stuff and usually don't know much about it other than to try and press one back in if it pops out, it is normally the ground engineers who mess with those things, but being that the aeroplane was not at an SAS base of operations, there were no engineers to help with this, so it fell to the crew to try and figure it out, hence their need to get the books out. Now you might suppose that a pilot or co-pilot knows literally every switch knob dial and circuit breaker on their aeroplane, but that simply is not the case, as this example demonstrates, so when people say they 'want a study sim with every button working as per the real thing' they are perhaps unaware that many pilots on board the real things don't ever mess with all that stuff themselves because most of the time they would never need to. Thus the Aerosoft simulator version of a CRJ would probably be good enough to simulate their day to day stuff, even though it doesn't have working circuit breaker switches, unless you want to simulate situations which are in reality, just a pain in the @rse for the crew.

Why does this matter? Well, one of the most comprehensive 'study sim' aeroplanes you can get for FSX and P3D, is the Majestic Bombardier Dash 8 Q400, and that is because it not only simulates the things the pilots mess with, but also the things the engineers mess with, including all those circuit breakers and some of the maintenance modes which the real aeroplane's avionics have. So if you were for example a real flight engineer who worked on Bombardier Dash 8 Q400s, this would indeed be a real 'study sim' of considerable use to you, but if you were a pilot on that Dash 8 for real, the chances are this would be a feature which you might find interesting, but would probably have no real reason to study unless you were curious (pilots have enough to do without making more work for themselves). Now personally, if I were a Dash 8 pilot, I would go out of my way to learn that stuff on that Majestic simulator version of the Dash 8, but that's just me. This incidentally is one of the reasons why I bought the Flight Sim Labs Airbus A320 sim, because it simulates a lot of systems very realistically, and I work on A320s for real, so it's of interest to me, but that hasn't stopped me from also having bought the Black Box Simulations A320 and the Aerosoft A320 too, because both of those have some merit too, i.e. they simulate most of the 'day to day' pilot stuff you'd do with an A320, and the fact that they don't simulate everything else in quite as much depth as the FSL one doesn't matter in that circumstance, so I can live without it and have my flight sim run a bit quicker with those thing because they aren't wasting computer resources loading in all that additional (admittedly cool to have, but mostly unnecessary for normal flight sim use) stuff. So that's a bit like that example of a paper poster suiting the requirements for what you might want to do at the time.

So, don't get too caught up in the 'I've got a study sim' aeroplane bragging rights stuff which many flight simmers seem to want to indulge in, because it's far more important and more enjoyable to have a sim which lets you concentrate on studying what you want to study. You hear that a lot from people when they say stuff like 'can you do a cold and dark start up with it?' as though not being able to do that makes it not realistic at all. Cold and dark start ups are really pretty rare these days, most of the time the thing is pretty much good to go when airline crews get on board these days.

With that in mind, be aware that many flight simulator add-ons which some people would not call 'study sims' are in fact more than enough of a study to allow you to use them to simulate everything a pilot would do on a typical day. I mean things such as Quality Wings, Aerosoft, Captain Sim, Just Flight and so on. When people say these are not in any sense study sims, half the time they've got no idea what they're talking about.

Now having said that, granted if you want a really hardcore super-duper realistic flight simulator which does as much as it can and more but which doesn't break the bank, then the answer is the Majestic Dash 8 Q400 (note there are three versions of it which you can buy, with differing levels of complexity and realism, but all of them are fairly inexpensive for what you get and certainly less than anything FSL or PMDG have ever brought out). because it literally features more actual operational working switches than pretty much any other flight sim add-on there is.

Alan,

That is a very well written,comprehensive article.

 

Tom

Yep! Allan's the go to man for real world technical and historical info and always ready to share his intellectual wealth. Good man!

Edited June 17, 20196 yr by PATCO LCH

 

4 hours ago, Chock said:

....some of these things really are as basic as a poster with a picture of the panel,

 Yet more justification for my need of an MD-11 panel poster on my living room wall although my wife may disagree 

Thanks for your insight once again Chock.