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Congratulations Alec :Applause: . You will never forget that first solo flight... just you and plane on your own.

Private airstrip that hosts annual fly in. This year 88 aircraft and 1,000 people attended at the beautifully manicured grass strip.

This is pretty cool, bet he's already in the mile high club though!

https://www.facebook...94430507&type=1

Relative to other aircraft in the air it's all equal. The pilot has to be aware of airspace though which could have lower speed limits and which crosswind component could put him into and/or tailwinds would make him enter faster. ATC's concern is seperation in the air and closing speeds between aircraft. Pilot's responsibility is knowledge of which airspace they are in.

I messed with this enough in v9 to just give up. If you can find the coordinates ( a witching wand is handy!) the resultant display is so poor quality (nothing even close to FS4) that it ######es you off for the time you just wasted trying to figure out how to do it. If someone has a magic pill that will make this worthwhile please spill the beans for our benefit.

PS. Had I known about the language filter being set to such an innocuous word I would have used much worse language!

Alec, If I ever make it to Brazil or you make it up here to the Pacific NorthWest we are going to go flying for real :yahoo:

...and Larry, get up here so we can go visit the Vans factory at Aurora, I'm right next to it every Thursday for my club meetings (www.caapilots.com)

Larry, you're cracking me up and getting too hung up on this. For most simming all this is just fine... I use it ALL THE TIME for that! The OP was asking for input regarding practice during the learning phase of landing in real life and I just couldn't let him think using the sim would be a great idea for that purpose and then gave the reasons. In the plane he will learn the proper responses and burn in that motor memory and be able to come back to the sim and have a great time re-living those real life experiences. Some of the aircraft are less evident of the trim problem than others so I imagine you haven't run into this with the simming you have been doing, this is all for fun anyway. I just want to make sure he (the OP) gets in the aircraft and learns those skills properly. I'm sitting here thinking you might not want to sit in the back seat with someone at the controls that has done the majority of their flare training in the sim and have just few real world landings under their belt. Safe skies to all of you. The computer sim remains the best all around value for training so many other skill sets.

Thanks all :dance:

Tonight's PilotEdge pairing of Santa Rosa and Chico made for a nice and not too long flight. Capped off my day or real flying with some fun simming.

PilotEdge log

Guys... Larry and Rob specifically. We are pilots and have experience so we have the motor training to call on when using the simulation so we can "fill in the gaps" so to speak. For a noobie this is not the case and when I make comments regarding this it comes from my work experience with Applied Kinesiology retraining motor patterns after injury. If you've ever had the opportunity to work with a shuttle balance in physical therapy (look it up if you don't know what I'm talking about) most people will have difficulty balancing with both feet the first time they step onto one but you can actually time how long the brain will take to train a motor pathway and start to dampen out the movement and then control it... it's around 45 seconds regardless of sex and to a certain extent age. Now take someone that has done training on one of these and they can armchair rehearse it (this technique was used with the Apollo astronauts for motor training and later with Olympic athletes) or even better yet use computer simulations to augment that motor memory, BUT the person doing that work has the original physical experience and learned motor behaviour to call on and use. You (Larry and Rob and other pilots) have that motor memory to call on with the sim so we, whether we know it or not, "fill in those gaps" and the experience becomes much more real for us. IMO (and I won't be humble here) someone that doesn't have that experience to call on can learn behaviours that would not fare well in a real aircraft cause the sim wasn't programmed to respond correctly to that kind of input.

Regarding the trim issue you need to understand the SDK and how Microsoft has been doing this from day one well enough to understand that they are doing the best they can given what they are working with. The control inputs in MSFS have a set range of operation that unlike a real aircraft's moving surface will change with trim position so full deflection with full up trim vs full deflection with full down trim cover a completely different range of motion. This causes the sim to respond in an unrealistic fashion when we approach that end range of travel. There was some work work done towards this during the era when force feedback joysticks were in their hayday and an add on program would attempt to intercept those control inputs and trim data to come up with a solution that gave full travel authority and would balance input force to simulate the way a real trim gets used. Yes, the sim "feels" (?) about right near center and the trim can be used to set a given speed for a given power setting and rate of descent or climb even if it's zero but at end range it nowhere near duplicates the force the actual empannage would exert.

I took spin training during my private certification in the mid 80's and I've discussed spins with Clay Lacey who lost it in the Piper Arapahoe during testing in the early 70's... I'd imagine I've got a pretty clear picture in my head on what constitutes a spin legal/capable aircraft and what doesn't.

We're actually probably closer to agreeing on what each of us is saying than disagreeing, it's just the degree and angle we are viewing it that exposes our differences.

For Great Ozzie:

I already pointed out flying at the edge of the flight envelope in my original answer. First off the way the sim handles trim is not realistic at all but a compromise based on the controller generally being used by most simmers. Trim in the real aircraft is to relieve stick forces so you can fly hands off and does not have any effect on the overall travel of the control surface, in the sim the trim will ultimately modify how much force can be applied at both extremes of movement so you can end up with an aircraft that is "glued" to the runway and won't lift off even with full up elevator or won't allow a full flare (completely unrealistic). The amount of movement required to change attitude for most real aircraft is much much less than the movement required in the sim with most joysticks or yokes and the feel... well there is NO feel in a joystick, just springs. A real aircraft when flown at low airspeeds, high angles of attack and cross control can enter an uncontrollable situation that takes losing a few thousand feet of altitude to regain control if regaining control is at all possible (why spins are not allowed in many aircraft). In the sim you can quickly go to full deflection on the controls and do all kinds of crazy cross control stuff that would probably seperate a wing or the empannage from a real aircraft. A simmer that doesn't know or understand this that gets into a real aircraft and then attempts something they've done thousands of times in the sim is gonna bend the plane at minimum if they get out of the situation they got themselves into alive at all. When it comes to landing you 've got to take those eye/hand coordination skills learned in low speed/high angle of attack flight and couple them with learning the site picture (out front but also peripheral vision to the sides) for that individual aircraft and its individual flight characteristics and putting them all together into a smoothly executed exercise that ends in you smoothly arriving with the ground headed in the correct direction down the runway and with enough runway left to safely come to a stop or pull off. Your first time in real life jumping from a Cessna 172 with very very docile characteristics and flying a Piper Arrow you will be surprised at just how much faster things happen when you're not traveling that much faster and also when you get that wing on the Arrow down below 80 knots it gets really sluggish and will mush before doing what you want it to. The landing position puts you closer to the runway and the low wing responds differently to ground effect so you'll find yourself becoming much more skilled at speed control in the pattern and flaring technique. Jump into a Mooney and you're sitting even lower and have a wing that will really pick speed up quickly, most pilots will flare what feels like 3 feet too high and then literally drop the plane onto the runway when the wing stops flying and make a very rough arrival. The sim does very little to prepare you for this and while some good developers have worked to make some of these aspects more realistic they work much better to fill the gaps for someone experienced with the real thing than to teach a skill to someone that has never experienced it. I really like the bicycle analogy I came up with earlier in the post as that should provide a clue as to how the sim can provide the visual experience but has absolutely no ability to teach anyone the balance required to ride a bicycle.

Do you have an instructor come out to your house to log the instrument time with you?

Yes :Nerd:

Even factoring in the cost of the PFC hardware, FAA approved version of xPlane v9 (and v8), and numerous add ons this is one of the least expensive hobbies over the long haul. I can't name another hobby in which I have enjoyed so many years and over 6,000 hours logged (after MSFS started logging). The cost per hour is a fraction of what I pay when I play golf, when I autocross or race, boating, sand buggies, motorcycles, skiing. Once purchased for the sim you basically have no limits on how many times or how long you use them so if you enjoy them and use them a lot their cost is pennies or less for the enjoyment received. Cost is relative for everyone but this is the cheapest hobby I'm involved in.

This is NOT an expensive hobby!

I'll actually caution you on using the simulator for practicing techniques involved with landing. In 26 years of simming I have yet to find a sim that replicates the visuals and "feel" of landing. It just takes practice in the real thing and with that repitition will come a comfort level that allows you to add learned skills on top of one another till you "get it". The sim does work very well for other areas of flight but really slow flight, stall behaviour and the eye/hand fine touch coordination skills necessary to stay alive are best taught through frequent repitition in the real aircraft. They will burn into your neurons quite well and remain just like riding a bike (that's a good analogy, there probably are some good bicycle sims somewhere out there but none of them will teach you the balance required!). My caution is from some of the really bad habits you can get when taking the sim and doing things at the edges of the envelope, slow flight and landing technique being two of them. The computer will allow you to do things that can kill you quick and on the computer you will think you have learned something that can be translated into real life. Please don't think you can use the sim to aquire a skill set that requires feeling the real aircraft in that situation to burn in a survivable trait.

PS. I own a BATD which if FAA legal and I log approaches on it all the time. I also completed 15 hours of my instrument training on a Redbird motion sim (3.5 hours were on my home sim). There are things the sim does well, landing is NOT one of them.

Thanks for the tips. Beautiful shots too. What airplane?

RealAir Turbine Duke with dual RXP Garmin 530 panel.

Thanks all. Setting the UTX night lighting to 50% made a big difference in the realism on my system.

I toggle off the Orbx PNW+ and revert to UTX, GEX and FEX when flying PilotEdge SoCal and NorCal on the weekends. My preference is NorCal which operates Friday noon to Sunday close.

Orbx product will have a toggle program to turn it off or revert back to the installation without Orbx activated. I do this all the time using PNW for flying in the NW and then toggle it off so UTX is priority when flying SoCal or NorCal with PilotEdge. I have found that leaving the Orbx activated will have some affect on airports in the NorCal/SoCal areas. Kudos to Orbx for delivering the product with the toggle so you can easily turn it on or off. This is also helpful when adding additional sceneries somewhere else, leave Orbx on when installing into the Orbx areas you have and toggle it off when installing additional areas outside areas ie FlyTampa Kai Tak.

While there are products that will easily transfer from FSX to Prepar3d the SDK (software developer kit) for Prepar3d is not identical. Some aftermarket products will make the transition without difficulty but it is not the responsibility of the developer to modify their product for another product that the original was not designed or marketed for.

Just loved the lighting and looking out the window tonight landing the Royal Turbine at John Wayne on PilotEdge tonight.

Increase the null zone and see if that helps. Sometimes as the controller gets old they will spike a bit and after calibrating still send a signal that causes them to actuate.

You can also try depressing them just a bit when you calibrate the off portion so that there is a larger area to ensure them not depressing when you don't want them to.

Have you checked the calibration recently? You might try turning the sensitivity up a bit