Some thoughts about Yokes. I own the older CH yoke and the Cessna Yoke from Saitek. But as I go to FS Conventions nearly every year (Aerosoft FS Konferenz, FS Weekend in Lelystad and ILM near Luzern) I had the oportunity to try the Elite Yoke, the PFC Beach Yoke, several full size colonn replicas of Boeing 737 yokes as well as the traditional Saitek Yoke.
I also want to mention that I'm a real world private pilote flying several Cessna and Piper GA aircraft. I mention all this not to make myself feel important, but just to give you my perspective over the topic. The first difference I noticed when I had my first lesson in a real aircraft was the much much wider travel a real aircraft yoke has over our flight sim yokes. This is true for elevator travel but also for ruder travel. This is why I feel that I can pilot real world airplanes much more precisely than thos in the sim.
The standard Saitek has very short travel ways but Saitek has made a big improvement with their Cessna yoke which has a aileron travel which comes close to that from the real airplane. But I was most disapointed by the high end yokes from PFC, Elite as from the new GoFlight yoke. All those feel very study and smooth on the movement, but travel ways from the yoke in each direction are so awfull short that they all are no go for me. I'm especially disapointed by the GoFlight as it was on my wish list before I tried it, but the aileron travel is extremely short (the Saitek Cessna yoke is way better)! Here it is now where I want to come back to the VR yoke, not only it felt realistic in smoothness but the travel in each direction is far better than all the premium guys (PFC, Elite, GoFlight). Steve, own of the three owner from VR comes nearly each year to the convention in Lelystad (the largest in the world by far with thousands of visitors coming from all continents) as the one from Aerosoft and he told me that they are thinking about releasing an updated verion of their yoke with a few integrated buttons.
As I'm always trying to enhance my flightsim experience, I just ordered the new Iris force feedback yoke which will be delivered from may on (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/irisdynamics/affordable-force-feedback-flight-sim-control-yoke). I will report back on it as soon as I will get it.
If you are very tight on budget then I would recommend the CH Elite (not to be confounded with the yoke from the manufacterer Elite!). The CH Elite feels better than the original CH yoke I own, I guess they used a stronger plastic shaft and it's loaded with buttons and wheels. When you learn to fly real GA airplanes, you will soon learn how important it is to correctly trim an airplane and the CH yoke delivers all this from the start. It just looks more than a toy compared to others, but if you don't bother about that, it's unbeatable value when you consider that even kind of pedals are included. The Cessna Yoke from Saitek is also a good piece of equipment, the Saitek throttles are very nice with a wide travel enabling you to precisely command engine power, but you need to invest more money in pedals, trim wheel and so on. The VR yoke is the next best thing if money has less relevance for you because it's the most realistic yoke for general aviation I did try. As for it's price, I can barely fly 2 hours with a real Cessna 172 for the price it does cost. In fact it's a real bargain when you look at it's build quality. But I agree that 379 € plus shipping cost will represent a lot of money for a lot of people, but worth every cent in my opinion.
