Hi its my first post on this forum after some research online - I thought it would probably be best to ask the enthusiasts.

My girlfriend has just completed her 8th hour in a Cessna 152. I want to surprise her for her birthday (September) by purchasing a setup for her. I need the entire lot from PC to simulator package and controls. I literally know nothing but gather starting packages are around £2,000. She can set this up at hers or in my 2nd bedroom - I dont know if I need to upgrade to a high speed broadband as I have regular fibre optic from BT.

Literally any advice you can give me would be incredibly helpful

I will be looking through this forum a lot

Thanks

 

LD

That is a very nice idea for a birthday gift. I don't know about prices/availability in the UK, but you will need the following.

- A gaming PC, preferably with a GTX 30xx graphics card. https://www.cyberpowerpc.com/ prices are pretty typical for North America. I would say you start around $1700.

- A simulator. Prices are in the $50-$150 range. The current contenders are

  + Microsoft Flight Simulator (MSFS). First developed in 2020, visually stunning, has some really good payware airplanes and a very good flight model (i.e., the airplanes behave realistically if the developer put some work into it), and it includes a pretty descent Cessna 152. MSFS is in part still in development. There are still some woes regarding weather, air traffic control and air traffic. MSFS is my recommendation because it very immersive for smaller airplanes (General Aviation, GA), has the greatest market share, and there is a large number of free addons available ay flightsim.to

   + X-Plane 11 (XP11, soon to be replaced by XP12). Very good flight model for small airplanes, some excellent payware airplanes, and probably the most mature simulator by now. However, it is visually on a much lower level than MSFS and its market share is smaller, which means that fewer third-party developers develop airplanes and scenery for it. If you don't want to use Windows as operating system for the PC, this would be my recommendation. I use it on a MacBook (also runs on Linux) when I am travelling.

   + Prepar3D (P3D, by Lockheed-Martin). Technically, P3D is a training tool, not a consumer product. LM bought the source code of the old FSX (a previous version of MSFS that was developed in 2006 and has nothing in common with the new MSFS) and gradually improved it. The flight model is reasonably good for larger airplanes, but not on par with MSFS and XP11 when it comes to GA. Graphically, P3D is outdated by now. It used to have the largest market share until 2020, but since then most users (including me) have switched to MSFS and to a lesser degree to XP11.

   + Aerofly FS4. This is a new (1 month old?) version of a simulator that has been around for about 10 years. It always had excellent graphics, but it used to be geographically confined. I think it isn't anymore, but I never tried the simulator. Market share is much smaller than for the big three above.

   + Dove Tail Combat Simulator. As the name says, this concentrates on aerial war. I never tried it.

- Yoke, rudder pedals, and throttle quadrant. You can start the hobby without that and just use a joystick, but proper controls really make a big difference. Affordable choices are offered by

https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/products/flight/flight-simulator-yoke-system.945-000023.html

https://www.chproducts.com/Flight-Sim-Yoke-v13-d-705.html

https://flyhoneycomb.com/products/alpha-flight-controls

There is also a UK company offering yokes (https://fulcrumsim.com/shop/) but I am not sure if they already sell their stuff. The shop says they are out of stock, and they are a fairly recent kickstarter project, if I recall correctly. You can also invest (much) more into a yoke with force feedback and Hall effect sensors, but to start flight simming, any of the cheaper ones will give you a good experience already.

Good Luck,

Peter

3 hours ago, secretsquirrel83 said:

My girlfriend has just completed her 8th hour in a Cessna 152.

you are in for a "huge" letdown buying "simulation gear" for a pilot ....... buy her many hours in the real & you may get a "ride",

 

5 hours ago, secretsquirrel83 said:

Hi its my first post on this forum after some research online - I thought it would probably be best to ask the enthusiasts.

My girlfriend has just completed her 8th hour in a Cessna 152. I want to surprise her for her birthday (September) by purchasing a setup for her. I need the entire lot from PC to simulator package and controls. I literally know nothing but gather starting packages are around £2,000. She can set this up at hers or in my 2nd bedroom - I dont know if I need to upgrade to a high speed broadband as I have regular fibre optic from BT.

Literally any advice you can give me would be incredibly helpful

I will be looking through this forum a lot

Thanks

 

LD

Sporty's pilot shop is always a good place to start for neat stuff for a beginner pilot, and they also sell flight simulator software & hardware:

Sporty's Pilot Shop Home Page (sportys.com)

My Pilot Store is another place: 

Pilot Supplies - Shop at MyPilotStore

Today, I believe that real flying and flight simulation goes hand in hand.  I have a pilots certificate since 1981, hold an ATP, and flown everything from C152 to Challenger 350s.  I have found flight simulators a very useful tool, and darn right enjoyable.  As I look at the close of my professional flying career in the coming months, I am looking forward to flight simulators keeping me engaged and entertained. 

Rich Boll

 

Guys thanks you so much for your replies - very kind of you to take the time to help. I did wonder about whether it is best to just buy her 10 flying lessons instead but she is taking her lessons regardless and this gives her 24/7 practicing. Plus she can try other planes presumably whenever she feels that she wants to move on in the real world.

 

I am going to take a proper look at these links

 

Also just to ask - do you think a VR headset is worthwhile?

5 minutes ago, secretsquirrel83 said:

Also just to ask - do you think a VR headset is worthwhile?

Maybe something else to look at!

https://www.trackir.com/

Gents, secretsquirell is based in the UK as he mentioned BT, the phone and internet service provider many of us use.

 

29 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Gents, secretsquirell is based in the UK as he mentioned BT, the phone and internet service provider many of us use.

 

Just curious, Ray.....is anything that was suggested not available across the pond?

3 hours ago, charliearon said:

Just curious, Ray.....is anything that was suggested not available across the pond?

Sporty’s Pilot Shop and MyPilotStore are US based so may be more expensive given the exchange rate.

7 hours ago, secretsquirrel83 said:

Also just to ask - do you think a VR headset is worthwhile?

Not day one... start small and add on later if desired.  🙂

Thanks very much for all of your input

Just make sure you save enough for “the ring” ……😋

HAHAH - I actually phoned the flying school where she is taking lessons and was expecting the guy to just tell me to book her a load of lessons but he was very helpful and also gave some good info. 

In the UK it's probably worth having a nosey at Currys PC World's website for gaming desktop computers, where something for about 800 quid or so would do the job. You don't have to buy from there of course, but it's a quick and easy way to suss out what is generally available for a reasonable price and you can then shop around for something similar if you don't want to buy from there, but you could do worse than to get something from them. You could pay more of course, that's up to you, but figure on spending at least that amount to get something capable of doing the sim justice in terms of graphics and performance.

Things to watch out for in a suitable PC are the processor (an Intel Core i5 would be a good choice), the amount of RAM (go for 16Gb minimum, more if you can manage it), the amount of memory the graphics card has (I would aim for at least 8Gb on the graphics card, again more is better though), and the amount of storage the drive has (aka the SSD), where I would not recommend going for anything less than 1TB of storage space because modern flight sims use up a lot of storage. These are the things which will matter in terms of perfomance. If you tick all of the aforementioned boxes, it will do the job fine.

I would recommend getting hold of the latest version of Microsoft Flight Simulator (can be bought online at the MS website), as it is optimised to run very well on even fairly modest computers, so a new gaming-oriented PC would run it very well indeed, and it is currently the best all-round flight simulator available for a PC (note there is also a console XBox version of it too, which might be an option, however, if she's into flying for real, a PC version of it will probably suit better since there are far more peripheral devices suited to flight simming available for PCs). Since it is visually impressive, with streaming scenery based on real-world data, it would actually be useful for practicing what she is doing for real, such as visual navigation around her home airfield. It comes with a number of aeroplanes built in, including several which are similar to the kind of thing she will be learning to fly in, and it's easy and fairly inexpensive to expand upon these via a built-in marketplace. Bear in mind that if you want to surprise her with something all set up and ready to go, MS Flight Simulator is a big digital download which might take several hours to install because of that, depending on your internet connection.

If you don't want to break the bank but would like to add some realistic controls which will be similar to those in her training aeroplane, you could consider one of these. There are better an more expensive controls out there, but generally speaking that thing does an okay job without needing anything much more than to simply plug it in. If you really want to go for it, you could also add some of these too, which would then mean the sim would completely replicate the controls in her real aeroplane. With this in mind, since these things plug in via USB sockets, make sure the PC you get has enough of these available, if not, you can buy expansions which add more sockets, so don't worry about that too much.

If you total all that lot up, you're probably looking at somewhere around £1,300 all-in, which is a fair chunk of change of course, but whereas you can put a price on flight simming, you can't put a price on love. 🙂

Flight sims are useful enhancement to real flight lessons, particularly for flying circuits accurately in terms of learning visual landmark references and getting used to reading the instruments. Hope you find something suitable, and welcome to Avsim. 

 

 

 

Edited July 28, 20223 yr by Chock

OK thanks very much for that Chock, very kind of you. £800 is obviously more preferable than the £2,000 i was thinking about. Googling a gaming PC brings up some pretty expensive results.

 

Those controls look great and aren't too expensive. I wonder if they do an official Cessna 152 replication?