6 hours ago, tonywob said:

Whilst I knew exactly what all the dials were telling me, I had 0 sense of what it actually felt like to fly an aircraft (and it's totally different), e.g. You can feel the need to use the rudder or if you're climbing/descending too fast, which you can't in a sim.

Despite our sims looking way more realistic these days, it hasn't changed at all in this sense. It's good for getting familiar and learning some theory, but that's about it. It's probably also super useful for learning the complex cockpits and procedures for airliners as well

Well said and this is why making any kind of an issue out of subtle differences in 'flight dynamics' between desktop sims is largely a crock of sheet.  Immediately in the real plane you feel what's happening and certainly instrument-focus is a very good thing once you have real world basic flight down.  XP, MSFS, P3D all are essentially equally effective in helping one learn cockpit and avionics layouts and interacting with them.  

This was an interesting discussion. When I got my PPL A 25 years ago, I used my flightsim to practice the lessons before doing it in real life. I t was not like the real thing, but it gave me some understanding. My flight instructor also used my sim to practise IFR flying procedures.Today I was talking to a friend of mine, who is an Airbus captain, and he told me that he is still using his flightsim for training. When he is flying to a new airport, he is flying the procedures  with FS2024 and the Navigraph charts to learn to know the new airport. He said that the scenery is so good today, that it gives him a good picture of what he will see in real life. That is different from what it was 25 years ago.

Tor Arild Danielsen 

I think the most successful people who can utilize sim on their own are certified pilots! Rest of the folks who desire using desktop flight sim towards flight training, are better off under guidance or supervision  by aviation professionals.  While some teaching method vary from CFI to CFI or flight school to flight school, you probably should listen to a person who sign off your logbook for solo and practical exam, not to internet expert who is real blah blah blah pilot. LOL

Long time ago one  veteran FAA examiner once told me: "There are very good professional pilots, but they are absolutely terrible teachers. There is license to fly and there is license to teach. Those two are not always the same" 🙂

21 hours ago, LRBS said:

Regardless of what people advocate for and wish to see, several issues prevent MSFS2020/2024 from being approved. Now, while people may do or claim this as a tool for teaching private pilots or students, we can arrive at a different conclusion based on the requirements. 

This was all started by someone seeing a comment on Reddit.

This is how rumors and false information is disseminated on the world wide web!

Someone takes it verbatim and runs with it.

 

56 minutes ago, sd_flyer said:

I think the most successful people who can utilize sim on their own are certified pilots! Rest of the folks who desire using desktop flight sim towards flight training, are better off under guidance or supervision  by aviation professionals.  While some teaching method vary from CFI to CFI or flight school to flight school, you probably should listen to a person who sign off your logbook for solo and practical exam, not to internet expert who is real blah blah blah pilot. LOL

Long time ago one  veteran FAA examiner once told me: "There are very good professional pilots, but they are absolutely terrible teachers. There is license to fly and there is license to teach. Those two are not always the same" 🙂

Ironically I am very good friends with a number of pro race drivers, some of them are also instructors and I asked one of them to help me out and his response was exactly what the examiner said.  He said "I can't really teach you to go fast, I can go fast but I can't put into words how to teach someone else to go fast..."

He could do with the best of them but he couldn't teach with the worst of them... 

2 hours ago, adaniel said:

Today I was talking to a friend of mine, who is an Airbus captain, and he told me that he is still using his flightsim for training. When he is flying to a new airport, he is flying the procedures  with FS2024 and the Navigraph charts to learn to know the new airport. He said that the scenery is so good today, that it gives him a good picture of what he will see in real life. That is different from what it was 25 years ago.

Tor Arild Danielsen 

This is very interesting. It's consistent with the person who claimed his seaplane airline was using MSFS 2020 because the "visuals" was helping them train (I assume by "visuals," the person was referring to the geographical islands created by MSFS satellite and photogrammetry data).  The quote was exactly this:

Quote

My last airline before where I am now used MSFS as an in-house sim because we needed the visuals for seaplane flying, so that’s what we used. The visuals in the ATR sim that I got my type rating in were terrible in comparison.

 

15 hours ago, GoranM said:

Let me enlighten you on what CFI's and flying instructors have to say about flight simulators in general.  I used to hold a PPL, and I had 3 flight instructors in my road to a PPL.  My first meeting with a CFI, when I took my first introductory flight, during the briefing, the CFI asked me what do I know about aircraft in general.  I told him I was very familiar with aircraft through the Microsoft Flight Simulator platform.  This was in 1997, after using FS5 and FS98.  

He gave me a polite chuckle, insinuating that flight simulators can never replace actual flight.  

During the briefing, he told me, word for word, "Forget what you know about that flight sim."

Every instructor I had, basically repeated the CFI's words.  

The primary reasons CFI's would use any flight sim, at most, is teaching people about circuits, VOR's and NDB's, and how to read instruments.  Even Flight Gear can be used to teach student pilots about these things.

FAA certification is another level, and only one flight sim, with the correct hardware, is qualified for that.  

Flight sims are an entertainment platform used for a hobby.  There are some cases where an add on can be used for flight training to help a pilot stay fresh, but if I, or any person with common sense, came across a pilot on a commercial aircraft, who said he got his training from MSFS, I'd be looking for another airline or another pilot.

"It's not the Arrow, it's the Indian."

And I'll add a corollary: It's not the Indian, it's the Tribe.

The USAF/USN are using HUNDREDS of COTS desktop simulator setups to train pilots.

And as an especially delicious tidbit in debates like this, they're using Prepar3D!

Time for the Old Dog CFI's to learn new tricks.

IOW, it's not the sim that matters, it's the Training Program:

 

15 hours ago, Funky D said:

I had the opposite experience when getting my PPL... my instructor routinely said I was more prepared than most of his students and I hit milestones like my solo and XC's faster as a result. I attribute much of that to all I learned in MSFS before my training along with using MSFS as a supplement during my training. Heck, I thank MSFS (this was 2004) for helping me easily spot one of the airports of my solo cross country, even with those outdated graphics! I regularly brought up my at-home "training" during debriefs and my instructor was all for it. I did Part 61 and finished in just above the minimum of 40 hours. I have no doubt that MSFS saved me thousands in training costs.

Any consumer flight sim is what you make of it. It can be a game or a powerful training tool (or both)!

Im so old that flight sims weren't really a thing when I got trained.

I agree with you entirely: I would've become a much better pilot much faster/sooner/cheaper if I had been able to complement my IRL training with sim time.

6 minutes ago, UrgentSiesta said:

they're using Prepar3D!

I mentioned this very point earlier.  Many of these MOD/DOD/EC site guidelines require these locations to be air gapped so MSFS would be a non starter... 

MSFS also lacks the instructor panel required for proper training unless I missed it in the sim which is highly possible.  

5 minutes ago, psolk said:

I mentioned this very point earlier.  Many of these MOD/DOD/EC site guidelines require these locations to be air gapped so MSFS would be a non starter... 

MSFS also lacks the instructor panel required for proper training unless I missed it in the sim which is highly possible.  

Exactly right.

An easy thing to miss, as well, is the .Mil's focus on multiplayer, multi DOMAIN training. E.g, as in the video, it's possible to train ATC operators in the same session as the pilot trainees, etc.

In terms of MSFS itself, the missing pieces would be relatively trivial to enable.

The .mil already has their own private Microsoft 365 instance. It wouldn't even be a stretch to do same for MSFS. Same for Instructor Station.

To be clear, I'm not advocating for one sim or another, just for the validity of flight sim in general, as long as it's paired with a valid training program.

1 hour ago, psolk said:

MSFS also lacks the instructor panel required for proper training 

Another one of the many missing requirements.

As @tpete61 mentioned, one person makes a ridiculous statement, and many take it for granted. Then, all of a sudden, many will start to argue even though they don't know. Overall, this MSFS is nice, but there are still items missing, and many improvements are needed.

1 hour ago, UrgentSiesta said:

Exactly right.

An easy thing to miss, as well, is the .Mil's focus on multiplayer, multi DOMAIN training. E.g, as in the video, it's possible to train ATC operators in the same session as the pilot trainees, etc.

In terms of MSFS itself, the missing pieces would be relatively trivial to enable.

The .mil already has their own private Microsoft 365 instance. It wouldn't even be a stretch to do same for MSFS. Same for Instructor Station.

To be clear, I'm not advocating for one sim or another, just for the validity of flight sim in general, as long as it's paired with a valid training program.

Exactly.. and re: FAA certification, flight sim platforms like P3D and XP and others are certified, and they are very different when it comes to their core default sim capabilities (P3D has FSX in its core after all). And what it takes to get certified is not some magical special features, and like you say MSFS could also get that status if they choose to pursue that route (though the cloud-services aspect could be a deal-breaker).

If one is going to dismiss sims helping to train IRL pilots that's fair, but then that dismisses all current general purpose flight sims and not just MSFS 🤷‍♂️. It would seem that general purpose flights sims could only help rather than hurt, as long as they are coupled with proper training.

On a related note, this reminded me of an article a few years back (late 2023, using the default C172 + G1000) on FSNews from someone who used MSFS 2020 to help with their PPL certification: https://fsnews.eu/using-msfs-for-flight-training-helped-pass-private-pilot/ ... was a good and insightful read.
 

Edited June 11, 2025Jun 11 by lwt1971

Maybe someone like @jon b can comment but I was under the impression that a lot of times a new commercial pilot will do all of their type training in the sim and then do check out flight or OE flight which will also be a revenue flight as their first flight outside the sim.

So as others have said, when used under the right supervision it's as easy to master good habits in the sim as it is to learn bad ones. 

But that pilot up front on your next flight may have done all of their training in the sim and be on their first real world flight so you better hope that sims can be effective training tools LOL.  

There's a few areas where simulators can really help supplement real flight time and/or training. IFR procedures, and associated buttonology (when accurate) for example. I've used a certified SR22 FlyThisSim setup (on X-Plane) on many occasions to maintain proficiency and even currency (with and without an instructor present, since the rule change). During IFR training, it was also a big help that definitely accelerated things for me. Practicing hold entries, complicated procedures and the like were very helpful and much more affordable on the sim to work on. Of course, real time is important and can't replace sim time, but the sim time helps strengthen confidence, knowledge and technique. You can also practice things in the sim you can't (or shouldn't) in real life. You can do all this in FS2020/FS2024 too (uncertified of course).

For VFR/PPL, there are also some supplemental benefits, but as many instructors agree, it can be a negative.

1 hour ago, lwt1971 said:

(though the cloud-services aspect could be a deal-breaker).

This would be a straightforward, though not necessarily easy/cheap, challenge to overcome.

But measured against the cost of IRL flight operations, hey, pennies on the dollar 😁

The main consideration would be isolation/security, so as with Microsoft 365, the .mil would likely need their own private instance of MSFS.

And given the pending re-ability to locally cache content (in SU3, right...?), even live bandwidth would be less of an issue.

The big question is whether MS are pursuing this angle at all (and i bet its at least being explored - on both sides of the table).

I do know that visually realistic flight training is a consideration for .mil programs. There are other sim platforms presently competing with Prepar3D (e.g., NOR, and LM's rumored Next Gen flight sim) that offer far and away better graphics than P3D.

One of the other considerations would be combat training, as MSFS doesn't support that (at least as far as we know). OTOH, someone did note that "bomb release" was somewhere in the MSFS v2020 code...

And while there is some air combat training being done in UPT, there's a lot of training that doesn't need it.

Anyhow, if Prepar3D and all the others can do it, it's obviously just "some" additional coding to make it happen in MSFS/et al. 🤙