Wow 15 pages for an X-Plane vs MSFS post and still not locked. That may be a record. 

29 minutes ago, Franz007 said:

I didn’t asked you to ask me other questions but to explan why you implied that training failures would not be needed and only matter of luck or skills if doing the right thing during an emergency? Why do you think pilots train failures if that wasn’t needed? It’s not about logging on or whatever but why you think training failures in a sim are not necessary? That’s at least what you implied above.

First of all, let’s clearly define that MSFS and XP are games. Terms like as “study level” or “failures” are for entertaining purposes only. If you noticed some developers even using disclaimer “not to use for real navigation or training”. So in order for me to answer your question I want you to tell me what sims you use for your PPL and how. This is really important! 

Secondly, I never wrote “training failures would not be needed and only matter of luck” I wrote that some high profiles aviation accidents are mixture of luck and professionalism. You do understand that Sally would never ditch airbus in the river if landscape would not gave this opportunity? Moreover, to my knowledge dual engine failure and landing  on airbus was not on airbus training manual for level D sim.

On 10/2/2025 at 2:57 PM, flying_carpet said:

It's not about crash detection. It's about failures. 

Oh ... and real simulators are usually used for exactly that: train beaviour in case of failures, not simply flying from A to B - that's the (relatively) boring part.

I thought we were talking about a damage model resulting from pilot actions.  That's what I mean by gamey, as this will never be simulated realistically and it's pointless - you know if you did something that resulted in damage.  Failures, on the other hand, have been part of good quality sim aircraft for... What, 15 years?  20?  We've had failures forever. 

Real simulators are used to train, drill, and evaluate crew performance during abnormals, but I wouldn't necessarily say that's how they're "usually" used, it's just one use case.  An equal amount of time is spent training and evaluating normal procedures during qual and CQ cycles, and then what I would consider the most important use is training, practicing and evaluating the "non-technical" skills.  

The reality is that almost any word not allowed can learn to drive a Boeing or Airbus, even during scripted non-normals like a V1 cut.  Modern airliners are literally the easiest aircraft to "fly", from a stick and rudder standpoint, that have ever been built.  Being able to put hands and feet on the controls and make the airplane go where you intend it to, that's not the desired endpoint of an airline training cycle.  That's the STARTING point, a baseline requirement for beginning to learn how to truly operate the aircraft safely. 

To this end, multiple entire disciplines are studied and practiced and debriefed: threat and error management, cockpit resource management, event management, task prioritization and division, active monitoring, automation management, mitigated vs unmitigated communication, and more.  This is where we really earn our pay and where we really train pilots to become professional aviators.  And MUCH of this type of training is indeed conducted on flights from A to B, with common distractions that occur everyday on the line.  The days of never flying in the sim with both engines operating and everything working normally, those ended about 30 years ago.  😉. For whatever that's worth.

1 hour ago, Stearmandriver said:

I thought we were talking about a damage model resulting from pilot actions.  That's what I mean by gamey, as this will never be simulated realistically and it's pointless.

There's a lot of positive training in simulating down the line damage.

The pilot raises the gear, counter to hot brake actions, and now you get to practice wheel well fire actions. 

Pilot mishandles a manual pressurization action and now the crew gets to simulate an emergency descent and high cabin altitude actions.

Pilot is oversaturated after a V1 cut and leaves the engine at TOGA for 20 minutes and...

You get where I'm going. Additionally, this being a game, there's a certain quality lost if there are no consequences for failure. Flying through squall lines should be game-ified. Theres less entertainment value if the game doesnt respond to player actions.

Or aircraft door blows out because boeing forget to use bolts 🙂 Alaska Air Portland.  Or one engine eats itself and spreads shrapnel thru the fuselage … South West … 

 

 

 

The is so much to learn (the point) with simulated damage … how the aircraft will respond when you don’t have one, which way it’s going to pull when it hits, etc. etc.  

Not all damage = death

The list of incidents is endless, would add a new level of excitement well beyond crop dusting or search and rescue or delivering supplies mission to XYZ … damage and failures test’s your skill and knowledge … what’s not to like?

7 hours ago, sd_flyer said:

First of all, let’s clearly define that MSFS and XP are games. Terms like as “study level” or “failures” are for entertaining purposes only. If you noticed some developers even using disclaimer “not to use for real navigation or training”. So in order for me to answer your question I want you to tell me what sims you use for your PPL and how. This is really important! 

Secondly, I never wrote “training failures would not be needed and only matter of luck” I wrote that some high profiles aviation accidents are mixture of luck and professionalism. You do understand that Sally would never ditch airbus in the river if landscape would not gave this opportunity? Moreover, to my knowledge dual engine failure and landing  on airbus was not on airbus training manual for level D sim.

They are technical games but have the purpose of simulating. There are all kind of level of simulators and the fact that you cannot log your hours, doesn’t mean they are not simulators. I’s even in their names. Yes it’s true that they can only be used for « entertaining purposes » from a legal point of view. But some still use them for procedural training that helps them in their real flights. I used all kind of desktop-sims to train before doing my flights. And there are professional Airbus pilots who stated using such desktop-sims to train before their checkrides. So they are both and it depends how you want to use them. Again, doesn’t mean they have to be recognized by any authority, just that they are also being used as a personal training-tool. But since for me flying irl was a hobby and also for entertainment, there isn’t really a difference at the end 😀

Regarding the failures, I agree that some cannot or aren’t being simulated and may only have a positive outcome because of some lucky circumstances. Absolutely. Perhaps I missunderstood you because I interpreted your statement like as level D sims being useless since it was all luck at the end. I think many situations and failures can be trained pretty well in such a sim.

Edited October 4, 2025Oct 4 by Franz007

8 hours ago, WestAir said:

There's a lot of positive training in simulating down the line damage.

The pilot raises the gear, counter to hot brake actions, and now you get to practice wheel well fire actions. 

Pilot mishandles a manual pressurization action and now the crew gets to simulate an emergency descent and high cabin altitude actions.

Pilot is oversaturated after a V1 cut and leaves the engine at TOGA for 20 minutes and...

You get where I'm going. Additionally, this being a game, there's a certain quality lost if there are no consequences for failure. Flying through squall lines should be game-ified. Theres less entertainment value if the game doesnt respond to player actions.

I feel like the line is getting blurred from what was talked about earlier... Less of a failures model and more of a damage model.  It seems like most of those examples already exist in good add-ons. 

But I see your general point and don't disagree that it would be fun - sometimes.  It would need to be optional though; a simulator is first and foremost a consequenceless sandbox.  While these programs aren't really simulators, they are at least branding themselves that way, so you'd hope they'd be trying to stick to the general concept.  That means that if I'm trying to test out one thing and I don't care about the consequences of over boosting an engine, dealing with pressurization etc... I should have the option to ignore it all.  Just like we do in level D simulators.  There are no damaging consequences to any action unless an instructor triggers it or it's pre-built into a canned scenario.  The base condition of the sim is you do what you want and no damage is going to occur (certainly systems reactions will occur, like for instance the cabin alt warning and light indicating the masks dropped in a pressurization example... But depending on what you're doing you may not care.  But no matter what you do, the engines will keep running and the plane will keep flying fine until the instructor tells it to do otherwise.)

The other consideration though is resource allocation.  This program is fun, but it is pretty unpolished as a sim.  Basic things are missing.  I used the dirt simple example of setting visibility earlier, but there's a ton of other things that should probably be prioritized before the game of managing the consequences.  Runways shouldn't be blurry at night.  (Maybe that's been fixed in SU4?). A tool like FSI panel, as great as it is, shouldn't need to exist because everything it does - from repositions, to configurations, to triggering failures, to loading a pre-built scenario doing all of the above... Those are BASIC functions of a simulator.  Not extra credit, but the basic building blocks.  Along with surface friction on contaminated surfaces, tiltable weather radar (to stay on topic 😉), etc.  So you'd sure hope to see all that first.  An enhanced "the pilot broke it" damage model would seem to be down the list a ways, that's all.

5 hours ago, Franz007 said:

They are technical games but have the purpose of simulating. There are all kind of level of simulators and the fact that you cannot log your hours, doesn’t mean they are not simulators. I’s even in their names. Yes it’s true that they can only be used for « entertaining purposes » from a legal point of view. But some still use them for procedural training that helps them in their real flights. I used all kind of desktop-sims to train before doing my flights. And there are professional Airbus pilots who stated using such desktop-sims to train before their checkrides. So they are both and it depends how you want to use them. Again, doesn’t mean they have to be recognized by any authority, just that they are also being used as a personal training-tool. But since for me flying irl was a hobby and also for entertainment, there isn’t really a difference at the end 😀

Regarding the failures, I agree that some cannot or aren’t being simulated and may only have a positive outcome because of some lucky circumstances. Absolutely. Perhaps I missunderstood you because I interpreted your statement like as level D sims being useless since it was all luck at the end. I think many situations and failures can be trained pretty well in such a sim.

What you are  referring is what we call a training aid. Training aid can be literally everything  that helps you to practice difference aspects of training or proficiency. Training aid could be a simple chair where you can sit pretending that you in airplane and run check lists. Training aid could be a Garmin App on iPad where you can practice difference functionality like setting up approaches. A toy airplane could be a training air where you can pretend flying and talk through  maneuvers moving toy airplane like it would do it real life. So you can use whatever you want if you think it would help.

Here in US FAA clearly define what sims are, like ATD, BATD, AATD and etc. Look at the price tag and hours you can log:

https://realsimgear.com/pages/atd-faa-page?srsltid=AfmBOopkV3dShvHjQJOBmQlSJ_48k3zvwV9nbVlMRN-8sEj1Z76c5S57

These are procedural sims!  By the way don't expect A2A like flight dynamics in those procedural sim with hefty price tag LOL  Unfortunately you won't  develop stick and rudder skills in those! You may as well rent a parked 172, hook up  external power and learn all procedures. I bet it will be cheaper than buying real gear sim. But for a flight school perhaps one of certified sim like real gear would be cheaper to operate that actual airframe. Win for students and win for owners.

I had numerous students who used desktop sims on their own. It never gave them significant advantage over students who never used sims at all. Other than familiarity with cockpit layout or knowing each instrument function which definitely helped but not significantly shorten or accelerated their training time. Both students who used desktop sim and not soloed after about same amount of hours!

In some cases usage of desktop sims "on their own" actually cause some harm as student picked up bad habits of having wrong side picture and making horrible "flat" approaches. So it actually delay their real life training. Guess what I'm not only experience them as instructor but also was one of them before I started my initial training.

So the bottom like - you can use whatever you want if you think it will help you for training or proficiency a chair, a game, or a paper airplane. But don't expect you handle real life emergencies just because you "trained" them in desktop sim on your own. It's like in a boxing ! You can punch a bag on your own all you want but still get knocked out in the first round of actual fight.  I'd say more, I can see more successful  utilization of desktop sim by already certified pilots because they know "what's up" then by simmer on their own. I still can't stop laughing  recalling how one of my primary student on his second flight tried to impress me with setting up flight plan in GNS530 he learnt in XP (in midflight), before we found ourself almost inverted thanks for his fixation  and elbow which accidentally  pressed on the yoke ! LOL 

@sd_flyer for me the use of desktop-sims gave me a lot of advantage when starting my flying lessons. The only thing where I had a bad habit was during the flare: I was not pulling back the yoke enough lol. Apart from that my instructor was impressed. The only real difference was the flying feeling and being exposed to the true forces. People tend to overexagerate how difficult real flying is. It is not. It's even a bit easier to land from my point of view. And training the procedures have been a great help for many of us. Nowadays desktop sims are very advanced and even if they are not certified they can be quite close to what professional certified sims offer in my opinion (depth, failures, procedures being almost 1:1 identical). Even level D sims are not exactly the same as real flying. A simulation will always be exactly that: simulating reality and not being exactly identical, regardless of a sim being certified or not. But of course nothing can replace real flying, that is absolutely mandatory, no discussion about that 🙂

1 hour ago, Franz007 said:

A simulation will always be exactly that: simulating reality and not being exactly identical, regardless of a sim being certified or not.

This has always been obvious to me, and becomes the rationale for why one sim having better 'flight dynamics' is not nearly as valuable to a new wannabe as is all the rest:  avionics layout and function, basic flight handling using the controls available and so forth.  I've said a few minutes behind the yoke of a RW aircraft gives one the true sense of feel and behavior with rudder/yoke/flap inputs very quickly that you will never get in a desktop sim of any flavor because not only have you miniaturized the whole affair but you're missing so pretty much all of RW forces.  That is, there is no actual 'feel' happening in a desktop sim.   I also surmised actually landing a RW aircraft would ultimately be easier than a desktop sim again because of feel and scale/size, even though consequences exist in the RW making the action ultimately far more meaningful/demanding.

13 hours ago, sd_flyer said:

First of all, let’s clearly define that MSFS and XP are games.

You keep hammering on this, so yes, let's be clear.  The difference between these "games" and a certified training device that you can log training time in is, for the most part, a regulatory one.  I have no doubt in my mind that MSFS could be used as the base software for an approved sim when paired with the right hardware, if MS/Asobo or a third party wanted to jump through the regulatory hoops.  No doubt whatsoever. 

I have logged instrument instruction time back in the day in an approved training device that was an absolute joke compared to today's sim "games".  It was entirely analog, with flight paths sent to a plotter for later review and was a horror to "fly", but it was FAA approved at the time and the sessions were run by a CFII.  So yeah...  (Google ATC-510 if interested.)

I also have no doubt whatsoever that both XP and MSFS can be valuable training tools, just as they are when used appropriately - particularly when coupled with appropriate hardware.  Far more valuable, in fact, than the ATC-510 was to my training back then.  No, not loggable and certainly not a substitute for approved training methods, but as an adjunct.  Or they can be just games, toys, amusements...  But then, so can a fully certified training device used improperly.

Labeling these things ("it's a game!") does not speak to the quality/value (or lack thereof) of the sim as, well... a simulation and potential training aid.

 

Scott

1 hour ago, sd_flyer said:

But don't expect you handle real life emergencies just because you "trained" them in desktop sim on your own. It's like in a boxing !

You are clearly not of the same opinion of other instructors I’ve hired when starting my PPL process.  Which unfortunately I failed the ME due to my hearing issues.

Obviously instructors are going to push for seat time because $$$ … but the ones I hired never discouraged using any flight simulator for training be it officially certified to substitute hours (upto a limit) or just for personal training.

I’ve also done coding work for CAE (Canada) dev team putting together a training sim using P3D as a base and MJC 400 modified by source dev for fire fighting training.  

6 minutes ago, tttocs said:

 

Labeling these things ("it's a game!") does not speak to the quality/value (or lack thereof) of the sim as, well... a simulation and potential training aid.

 

Scott

Like I said a "lazy boy recliner" in a living room could be great device for "arm chair flying" still it's "lazy boy" LOL

4 minutes ago, SayAgain said:

You are clearly not of the same opinion of other instructors I’ve hired when starting my PPL process.  Which unfortunately I failed the ME due to my hearing issues.

Tell you a secret! While all instructors use same industry standard to pass exam or renew, we are not made on the same "puppy mill factory". So out opinions are varies!

I was a long time simmer before I became certified pilot, flight instructor and airplane owner. So I'm aware of the desktop sims their value, benefits, and harm. I have a plenty of actual hands on experience with students of different walks of live. We can all share our opinions here all we want. However, what really matter is how it playout IRL. 

When folks make a fuss about "my sim more realistic then your", I aways remind them those are just games. Enjoy using them as you wish but don't pretend that you are better prepared to face challenges of real life flying. Also be we must be honest to ourselves. We never cancel our sim flight because of adverse weather. Deviate because we smell funny scent in the cockpit! Or return back to the airport because second cylinder head temperature a bit higher.

Matter of fact is that trained professional pilot do make mistakes. The whole point aviation industry to minimize fatality of those mistakes.

Finally, I did have in flight fire. We were lucky it happens near airport not in the middle of nowhere and not at higher altitude. We landed with smoke fill the cockpit coughing and choking from fumes. Fortunately, we were proficient enough to quickly land under pressure . I'd say luck was on our side this day, otherwise, I wont be writing it now. 20+ years of desktop sim didn't help that day. Quick thinking and practicing power off 180 IRL did! LOL

Also I wan to post vids here.

Those are professionally trained pilots pulled working engine instead of  dead one. Unfortunately those things happened IRL more than miracle viral saves. You can never be ready enough.

 

This is famous Top Gun instructor Dale "Snort"

 

This is how he died - control lock partially removed

 

You are playing games. Me too! We should be happy about it! We still alive!