It is much easier to fly the real thing than in the game.  One of the big things is that sitting at home you are deprived of feeling G-forces, peripheral vision, the "feel" of the machine in the atmosphere, the control forces etc. 

With time, effort (and a lot of expense) its possible to get a setup to get closer to the real thing (as you can see in the pic I saw above where you see a yoke, throttle quadrant, rudder pedals etc). Then a lot of time must be spent on the controller sensitivity curves to get the "feel" right. I still struggle with this (I have my real world single engine IFR license) and on short finals I find the GA planes very very twitchy. 

Things like an ultrawide display or Track IR or VR can all help with immersion. 

If it is possible for you to do I highly highly recommend you go to your local flying school and purchase an hours flight in a Cessna 150 or similar light GA plane. The instructor will let you handle the controls and you can do turns, steep turns, climbs, descents and finish with maybe 4 or 5 rounds in the pattern so you get a feel for landings and such. 

It will quite an eye opener for you and the learnt experience will help a little towards setting up that class of plane in the sim.

When it comes to airliners for most of us on here its all guesswork. Only a serving or retired A320 driver can tell us what the games AIrbus feels like to them. However on YouTube there is a channel run by a real world A320 pilot and he has posted many tutorials on the A320NX (the mod for the default A320) and he gives high marks to it. 

32 minutes ago, ThrottleUp said:

It is much easier to fly the real thing than in the game.  One of the big things is that sitting at home you are deprived of feeling G-forces, peripheral vision, the "feel" of the machine in the atmosphere, the control forces etc. 

With time, effort (and a lot of expense) its possible to get a setup to get closer to the real thing (as you can see in the pic I saw above where you see a yoke, throttle quadrant, rudder pedals etc). Then a lot of time must be spent on the controller sensitivity curves to get the "feel" right. I still struggle with this (I have my real world single engine IFR license) and on short finals I find the GA planes very very twitchy. 

Things like an ultrawide display or Track IR or VR can all help with immersion. 

If it is possible for you to do I highly highly recommend you go to your local flying school and purchase an hours flight in a Cessna 150 or similar light GA plane. The instructor will let you handle the controls and you can do turns, steep turns, climbs, descents and finish with maybe 4 or 5 rounds in the pattern so you get a feel for landings and such. 

It will quite an eye opener for you and the learnt experience will help a little towards setting up that class of plane in the sim.

When it comes to airliners for most of us on here its all guesswork. Only a serving or retired A320 driver can tell us what the games AIrbus feels like to them. However on YouTube there is a channel run by a real world A320 pilot and he has posted many tutorials on the A320NX (the mod for the default A320) and he gives high marks to it. 

I really hope to a flying school experiencing what you said one day.

Thanks

 

Good grief…9 pages of you guys bickering about scenery when the original question was if the flight model is better now compared to release.  
 

OP…yes, the flight model is better now than at release.

During alpha/beta phase of MSFS, myself and several other RW aviators voiced concern over the twitchy flight model. Not much was actually changed in RTM version if I recall correctly.

What we have today, almost one year later is an improvement for sure.

11 hours ago, snglecoil said:

Good grief…9 pages of you guys bickering about scenery when the original question was if the flight model is better now compared to release.  
 

OP…yes, the flight model is better now than at release.

Thank you

8 hours ago, SAS443 said:

During alpha/beta phase of MSFS, myself and several other RW aviators voiced concern over the twitchy flight model. Not much was actually changed in RTM version if I recall correctly.

What we have today, almost one year later is an improvement for sure.

Thanks

On 7/5/2021 at 12:15 PM, Bobsk8 said:

MSFS 2020  is the closest thing to flying in real life, that I have ever had on a PC and I have tried all the sims except DCS. I have about 600 hours in real life flying . 

Wow, now that is interesting Bob! Hey, while I have you here, and others can chime in also, is it me, or does the TBM930 have a real problem with it's flight dynamics? I find it a great plane, but I stopped flying it because of the awful floating/porpoising effect that is apparent in it's pitch axis. 

Just now, Rockliffe said:

Wow, now that is interesting Bob! Hey, while I have you here, and others can chime in also, is it me, or does the TBM930 have a real problem with it's flight dynamics? I find it a great plane, but I stopped flying it because of the awful floating/porpoising effect that is apparent in it's pitch axis. 

I don't fly any of the default aircraft in MSFS 2020 or any other sim ever. I have no idea how it flies. Maybe you should invest a few dollars and get some good aircraft to fly. 

4 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

I don't fly any of the default aircraft in MSFS 2020 or any other sim ever. I have no idea how it flies. Maybe you should invest a few dollars and get some good aircraft to fly. 

Oh, I am like you, I usually only fly third party planes too. But for whatever reason I ended up trying out the TBM930 and rather liked it, but as I say, the FDE leaves much to be desired.

29 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

I don't fly any of the default aircraft in MSFS 2020 or any other sim ever. I have no idea how it flies. Maybe you should invest a few dollars and get some good aircraft to fly. 

Supposedly default aircraft are meant to be more realistic then every other simulator since the simulator itself is supposed to have superior flight dynamics. In reality once it was released, that was proven incorrect. 
 

ASOBO spent all their time on visuals and forgot the other more important aspects of the simulator.  

I've removed the off-topic XPlane vs MSFS thread hijacking.  8 pages worth of off-topic bilge.  A couple people have earned themselves a vacation as a result.  And a few more of you are teetering on the brink of the same.

The OP's question has nothing to do with another sim, and in fairness to him and those who contributed to an otherwise reasonable discussion of his topic, I've opened it back up.

If anyone wants to try and regress into another "Tastes Great!  LESS FILLING!!", "my sim vs your sim" food fight, prepare yourself for a strike of the ban hammer without further warning.

'nuf said.

If you have VR, give it a shot. In MSFS you can gauge the direction of the wind by looking at the ground. It’s really scary how close to reality it is. Now all we need is some kind of reality XP type addon. 

7 hours ago, Doug47 said:

Supposedly default aircraft are meant to be more realistic then every other simulator since the simulator itself is supposed to have superior flight dynamics. In reality once it was released, that was proven incorrect. 
 

ASOBO spent all their time on visuals and forgot the other more important aspects of the simulator.  

I have never flown a default aircraft in any sim that I felt was realistic. I started simming in the late 80's, 10 years after I got my PPL. I would buy a payware aircraft after I got the sim, fly it, and if I felt it had an unrealistic flight model, I would leave it in the hangar, permanently. I think the first two aircraft that I really liked, were the PMDG and the Level D products.  Then I moved to Majestic, and A2A . Now with MSFS 2020 I own a couple of Carenado aircraft,  two  I like , the Mooney and the Seminole and one I hated, the C 182. I really like  the JF Arrow 3 and that became the one I flew all the time until I got  the DC6, which  is all I fly now, and probably will be for a very long time. I look at default aircraft as something they put in the sim, so people can fly something, and that's about it. I guess an exception to that is DCS world, but I am not into that kind of flying.  The only MSFS 2020 default I tried was the steam gauge 172 and I thought that was fairly good. Haven't tried any of the other defaults, and probably will never. 

I am quite happy with the handling of the C172 (default and all the excellent variants by Bagolu) since I have set the extremity deadzone for the elevator to 75 %. That way the C172 feels not very different from the brilliant JF Turbo Arrow (with extremity deadzone 0 %). I am using the Honeycomb Alpha.

 

Edited July 7, 20214 yr by RALF9636