FSLabs review by "Into de Blue..."

[bennyboy75]

Most pilots I’ve spoken to tell me that it’s usually easier to fly the real aircraft than the sim, especially the transition from air/ground which as we’ve seen from MSFS is clearly not an easy thing to get right. 

[Aglos77]

1 hour ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Are you a real pilot who has experienced both and can verify that? They must be extremely close in order to replicate situations such as the loss of both engines in the incident shown in the film “Sully”.

I have friends who are fortunate enough to be able to fly professionally, unfortunately I was left by the wayside due to health problems and like many of us here I have to settle for living my dream virtually.

Back to your question, when I talk about simulation with my friends they always tell me the same thing, no simulator is able to capture the sensations of flying a real airplane. Professional simulators are not free from this problem either.

They always make the same comparison with car driving simulators (this is something most of us do in real life) and that's when you really understand what they mean.

 

(Sorry for mi bad english)

[Ray Proudfoot]

12 minutes ago, Aglos77 said:

Back to your question, when I talk about simulation with my friends they always tell me the same thing, no simulator is able to capture the sensations of flying a real airplane. Professional simulators are not free from this problem either.

That will be down to zero forward motion with no airflow over the wings. But a full-motion simulator is as close as you’re going to get.

[cyyzrwy24]

On 12/18/2024 at 9:14 PM, Bigt said:

matter of time until they moved their aircraft into MSFS

Okay....the Time is long gone...and they are late...Nothing against their product, definitely one the best on the market, but coming to the Msfs at this "hour" with same product, and with this price I call that audacity ...product that is not "superior" to Fenix...anyway. Until they produce NEO and /or 330 they wont see much ravenue...my guess. And let's not mention attitude. 

[omarsmak30]

This YouTuber had produced couple of videos comparing Fenix to FSLabs in terms of 3D model, textures and sounds. After watching all those videos, I am very grateful for Fenix team with the amount of details they opted for and how they made the bar so high.

https://youtu.be/tksGuSgg268?si=-eXW3xZGGl36uDuk

[Bobsk8]

On 12/29/2024 at 8:02 AM, Ray Proudfoot said:

That will be down to zero forward motion with no airflow over the wings. But a full-motion simulator is as close as you’re going to get.

I remember spending 5 hours in a 767-400 ER sim with an instructor pilot at an airline training site years ago. The first thing he said was to make sure I had the seat belt and shoulder harness properly set, because in case of a rejected takeoff,  then I wouldn't get slammed against the cockpit panel. 

[Ray Proudfoot]

47 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

I remember spending 5 hours in a 767-400 ER sim with an instructor pilot at an airline training site years ago. The first thing he said was to make sure I had the seat belt and shoulder harness properly set, because in case of a rejected takeoff,  then I wouldn't get slammed against the cockpit panel. 

Even if it was a full motion sim you wouldn’t have a problem. Did he realise what he’d said? Probably just going through the same steps as in a real aircraft.

[prolixindec]

Where the big sims achieve greatest fidelity is in the cockpit hardware. It's always the real equipment, taken from the aircraft manufacturer (or from a scrapped airplane) and rewired to attach to the sim platform. The buttons and switches are the same size, have the same resistance to your physical manipulations, the same "clicks" and other sounds, the same lights. The throttles have the same resistance. And of course the seatbelts, pen holders, placards, circuit breakers, logbooks, dimmer switches for the map lights, and emergency equipment--all of it is exactly as it is in the real aircraft. 

Next up in terms of fidelity is aircraft performance. The sims are pretty sophisticated in terms of showing you what performance you'll get for any given combination of thrust, weight, weather, malfunctions, and whatnot. It's not 100% accurate because the real world throws variables at you that the sim just can't factor in, such as uneven wear on the components, subtle differences in manufacturing, or having a gust of wind hit exactly here instead of there, but it's close enough for everything the big sims are used for.

Last up in terms of fidelity are visuals and the "feel", the kinesthetics. The visuals are enough to tell you where the runway is, and they can show you the difference between day, dusk, and night, and you can see buildings, mountains, clouds, and cars on the roads, but MSFS 2020 is much closer to photo-real than the big sims are. (No stutters in the big sims, though, and no "Checking for Updates"... When it comes to reliability and buttery smooth fluidity, the big sims win every time.)

Regarding the kinesthetics, the big sims tilt the box to simulate changes in g-force that you get from changing the aircraft vector in real life. Abort a takeoff, and the box will pitch forward something like 30 degrees, to simulate the aircraft aggressively slowing down. You won't "slam" into the cockpit panels, but your body will certainly pull against the seatbelts, and things that aren't secured will slide forward until they hit something. Sometimes this is convincing and feels quite real, such as when performing a side slip in a poorly coordinated turn. But the big sims can really only play with the direction of the gravity vector; they can't create anything other than 1 g, except for brief excursions of small magnitude. You will never feel sustained 1.4 g, as you would in a steep turn. Note that in a steep turn, in real life, your arm also weighs 1.4 times it's normal weight, so when you reach up to flip a switch, you need more muscle power to do it. The sim can never give you that experience. And you'll never feel low or negative g's, like you would in a pitch-over. So at the end of the day, the "feel" is sometimes very convincing, but mostly, it's there to give you a gist of what flight is like. In my opinion, the most useful feature of the motion is to give you some realistically increased workload, as the sensations are another element to factor into your situational awareness (as they are in the real plane). So it's not necessarily about how realistic the kinesthetics are; it's about how they are simply there in the first place.

Put this all together, and the big sims are really just big procedures trainers. You get the look, feel, tactile response, and ergonomics of the real cockpit, and the systems perform as on the real aircraft, and the flight dynamics approach real-world conditions. But the exterior visuals can be less than fully immersive, and the motion just suggests a real flight experience. For that reason, I used to teach that flying the sim is a separate skill than flying the aircraft. There's lots of overlap, of course, but the sim and the aircraft are two different machines, and they are best approached for what they are. Otherwise you can get good at flying the airplane and struggle with the sim; or you can be good in the sim and struggle in the airplane.

This is off topic, sorry about that.

 

Edited January 5 by prolixindec

[MDFlier]

I love how the Fenix puts a QR code to the POH on the panel so you can scan it and get the docs for that airframe. Pretty cool...

Almost makes me feel like dancing. 🤭

[Bam2000]

Hi, does anyone know if this aircraft is compatible with time acceleration ? Up to x4 would be fine for me 🙂

[flyingscampi]

2 hours ago, Bam2000 said:

Hi, does anyone know if this aircraft is compatible with time acceleration ? Up to x4 would be fine for me 🙂

I've never tried it, but the A321 has a 'Jump Ahead' function.

You select a waypoint from the flightplan and can choose to alter the current calculations for altitude, speed, fob, and time to reach that waypoint. Then you start the jump. All controlled throught the MCDU.

 

[Bam2000]

30 minutes ago, flyingscampi said:

I've never tried it, but the A321 has a 'Jump Ahead' function.

You select a waypoint from the flightplan and can choose to alter the current calculations for altitude, speed, fob, and time to reach that waypoint. Then you start the jump. All controlled throught the MCDU.

 

thanks, might be good to know if time acceleration  also works, because i think APL v2 would not like the Teleportation feature so much and i would have get a bad flight score. Very Special Usecase here, i know 😄

[flyingscampi]

57 minutes ago, Bam2000 said:

thanks, might be good to know if time acceleration  also works, because i think APL v2 would not like the Teleportation feature so much and i would have get a bad flight score. Very Special Usecase here, i know 😄

A poster on the last page of this thread said they used 4x without any issues.

If you want a quality Airbus and don't already have the Fenix, the A321 is a no-brainer. It was released with only a few minor bugs and there have been 2 or 3 updates to fix those.

[Bobsk8]

On 1/5/2025 at 11:23 AM, Ray Proudfoot said:

Even if it was a full motion sim you wouldn’t have a problem. Did he realise what he’d said? Probably just going through the same steps as in a real aircraft.

No he said that this happened in the CAE sim, the hydraulics in the platform were able to simulate this sudden stop, in fact one time the computer rack in the rear of the sim actually broke loose from it's mount. 

[Ray Proudfoot]

3 hours ago, Bobsk8 said:

No he said that this happened in the CAE sim, the hydraulics in the platform were able to simulate this sudden stop, in fact one time the computer rack in the rear of the sim actually broke loose from it's mount. 

I’m struggling to understand how this works when you’re not physically moving.