Seeking advice from experienced FS users:

I want a portable system to practice IFR procedures only, fly in clouds to minimums and go missed approach.

I travel for work and need something that will fit into a checked luggage bag. I'm thinking a laptop with four USB ports (control stick or wheel, throttle, pedals and mouse) HDMI to a separate but small screen (23"?).

I don't think I need great graphics, I won't fly VFR for fun, just clouds and IFR procedures.

What would you recommend for flight controls, laptop, monitor, and other accessories?

Thanks for your help and advice

I was in the same boat when I used to travel around a lot teaching software courses, and I used a laptop for that, still do occasionally. So I have a cheap (ish) laptop for that purpose. It had to be able to run stuff such as Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere Pro etc for the training courses and had to have an HDMI output for hooking up to a projector. Beyond that, there was nothing fancy required. I surmised that any laptop capable of running After Effects sufficiently well, would probably run P3D pretty well too, and I was right, it does. As such I had to buy P3D twice (since you cannot have it on two PCs with one licence), but almost every add-on aeroplane or scenery can be installed to both my desktop and my laptop, and doing that does not break the EULA, since I'm effectively only ever either on the laptop or the desktop, never both at the same time, so only ever using one copy of the software at any one time. A notable add-on exception to that is Fiber Accelerator, which, like P3D, can only be run on one PC with one licence, so I bought that twice as well because it help the laptop manage big scenery loads. To be honest, I could have transferred the licence to the laptop and not bothered on my desktop, but since the program is only 20 quid, I did not begrudge buying it twice.

Since the use of the laptop for flight sims was only really to alleviate boredom in hotel rooms on occasion, I surmised that it would be a bit of a faff to take joysticks and such, so I content myself with using the mouse as a control method, which isn't fantastic, but it works and for things which use the autopilot a lot (i.e. airliners), it makes very little difference anyway, and I would assume you would find this a similar thing if you were practicing IFR stuff. One thing it is great for, is Air Hauler, since you can just run that on its own and play around with managing your virtual airline with no need to fire up a sim at all and in a hotel room with plenty of time on your hands, you can do all the things you perhaps would not do if on your desktop.

Thus, the laptop I use for that is an inexpensive Acer model with a pretty decent processor but only on board graphics, which cost me about 450 quid new, and it more than does the job. You'd be delighted to see how well something like that can run P3D, it's a lot better at it than I expected and I was pleasantly surprised by that because I thought I'd really have to bring those graphic option sliders down a lot. It is great for watching movies on as well, which is another lifesaver when you are bored and away from home, and of course if you get an hotel with wifi, you can always surf about and have fun on the Avsim forums to hit that flight sim fix.

One thing you might also consider, is to get hold of a procedure trainer application. Many of those run on phones and tablets as well as PCs, and they are great for practicing your teardrop entries into holds and all that kind of IFR stuff. Most of them will run on any old PC although keep in mind that some of them use Flash, so check the requirements. Here is one:

https://windowsden.uk/813825630/vor-tracker-ifr-trainer-pro

 

Edited March 8, 20206 yr by Chock