Sometimes it's the small details in the sim which impress me most.

Am currently doing my IR in the real world, and one of the things taught early on is flying on partial panel and in particular being able to fly turns using just the magnetic compass - imagining your HSI/DI has failed.

This is harder than it seems, because the magnetic compass is partial to error. Particularly when turning onto northerly or southerly headings. You're therefore taught the acronym 'UNOS' which stands for Undershoot North, Overshoot South. Essentially, if you're turning onto a heading of around North you should aim to roll out about 20deg earlier, as the compass will carry on turning towards north after you've rolled straight and level. Inversely, if you're turning South you should actually overshoot South on the compass and roll out level about 20deg late, as the compass will roll back the other way by a similar degree once you've levelled out.

I decided today to try this in FS2024. Surely they've not modelled it this accurately. Well I was wrong, they have! And the compass behaves just like in real life. Try it yourself!

That's very interesting. I'll try it out - thanks.

1 hour ago, Tom Wright said:

Sometimes it's the small details in the sim which impress me most.

Am currently doing my IR in the real world, and one of the things taught early on is flying on partial panel and in particular being able to fly turns using just the magnetic compass - imagining your HSI/DI has failed.

This is harder than it seems, because the magnetic compass is partial to error. Particularly when turning onto northerly or southerly headings. You're therefore taught the acronym 'UNOS' which stands for Undershoot North, Overshoot South. Essentially, if you're turning onto a heading of around North you should aim to roll out about 20deg earlier, as the compass will carry on turning towards north after you've rolled straight and level. Inversely, if you're turning South you should actually overshoot South on the compass and roll out level about 20deg late, as the compass will roll back the other way by a similar degree once you've levelled out.

I decided today to try this in FS2024. Surely they've not modelled it this accurately. Well I was wrong, they have! And the compass behaves just like in real life. Try it yourself!

MSFS 2024 has gotten a lot of flak from the flight sim community because of its UI and also because of Career Mode, with the detractors continually calling it a “game,” etc.

But if you look at MSFS 2024 from an objective viewpoint, with the improvement in flight dynamics, improvement in ground handling, improvement in water physics, improvement in clouds, improvement in terrain, new avionics by Working Title, etc, MSFS 2024 is technically a much superior flight simulator than its predecessor.

And we should keep pushing the MSFS team to make MSFS 2024 even better, and I’m sure they will.

Edited February 22, 20251 yr by abrams_tank

Awesome write-up. I'm in the same boat as you.

And there is a reason why I have no issues about using MSFS24 as procedural sim for my own IR (CB-IR, to be precise).

As a sidenote:  for CB-IR at least, all theoretical items regarding direct reading compass have been withdrawn from the Learning Objectives per EASA. 🤷‍♂️ But we still do the same maneuvers as @Tom Wright mentioned....

With the work that's been done by WT on the Garmin avionics, it's also an awesome platform for training on these. Our club fleet has a mixture of GNS430 and GNS530 units and their replication in flight simulator is so exact I can follow the same procedures as I do IRL.

43 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

But if you look at MSFS 2024 from an objective viewpoint, with the improvement in flight dynamics, improvement in ground handling, improvement in water physics, improvement in clouds, improvement in terrain, new avionics by Working Title, etc, MSFS 2024 is technically a much superior flight simulator than its predecessor.

Nice summary. 

Occasionally the standby compass will catch my eye in VR and I see it tilted over in a turn and displaying the errors mentioned and also its behaviour when accelerating or decelerating. I think to myself they’ve gone to the trouble to model all this accurately but I bet most people don’t even know it’s behaving that way or even look at it, I know I seldom do, so it’s nice to read Tom’s post.