[Quanta Mechanic]

If I were to start my PPL, How effective would using MS Flight Simulator be along side my real training?

[johnm]

Almost completely useless, it can be useful for IFR procedure practice but for initial VFR training no good at all.

[Charles Hunt]

To expand, the visuals and physical sensations are nothing like the real thing. The only way to check whether you are turning climbing falling etc is that you have to look at the instruments. When flying visually you must look out as much as possible with only an occasional glance at the instruments.

[Genghis the Engineer]

Almost certainly it'll have a negative effect.

The person who tries to teach themselves to fly has a fool for a student - you'll learn bad habits, and you'll slow your learning progress.

It's harder work, but quality time with the relevant textbooks, reviewing lessons, making notes after each lesson and looking up anything you didn't fully understand, carefully preparing for each lesson in terms of your understanding of what will be covered - all of that will aid the learning, in a way that playing on a flight simulator that from most perspectives is basically just a game, won't do.

G

[chipmeisterc]

Along side your training, I'd be inclined to agree that they are somewhat useless/detrimental..

Prior to your training, I would say it could give you a good head start with muscle memory for effects of controls as well as building a general awareness of the cockpit / flying environment.

It certainly gave me a good head start when I started my training and, having recently taken an avid flight simmer up in the back of the RV8 I was amazed at his standard of flying - I got to be a passenger up front for most of the flight!

I'm a fixed wing pilot, however a few years ago I was given a trial flight in an R22 as a Birthday present. I spent many hours prior in FSX trying to hover, knowing full well that it would likely feel nothing like the real thing. I was hoping that at the very least it would allow me to get to the stage where I knew which input was the correct response to what I saw out of the window without having to 'think' about it. To my, and my instructors surprise as a result I was just able to hover - it wasn't the prettiest, but equally the instructor wasn't having to take control. Not bad for a first lesson!

In that sense I'm somewhat of an advocate for flight sims (it's also the day job!), however I'd also agree that they have their time and place and are far from a perfect instructional aid when playing on a traditional PC configuration - Charles is absolutely right in that it will teach you bad habits - overly relying on instruments instead of looking out of the window is a big issue. They will also do nothing to help you develop the skills of actually landing an aircraft. This isn't the end of the world prior to training but as Genghis says could start to have an adverse effect if you start trying to learn on both the sim and in real life in parallel.

VR does change this some what however - it still won't feel perfect, but the cues are much more convincing - plus the resolution is so bad you can't read the instruments even if you wanted to

[FlightDek]

I think it can help in some limited ways

1 Instrument flying. Physical sensations are not so important and so you can practice keeping your scan going while doing other stuff

2 Navigation. Get a decent scenery add on and you can see how good your nav is. Can also help practicing for upcoming flights

3 Motor skills. I'm very right-handed. When I started flying I struggled with controlling the yoke with the left hand. I bought a yoke and throttle and set them up to fly left-handed. I think this really helped me to develop the required motor skills

What it won't help with is the overall flying of an aircraft. VFR flying is all about what you see outside and what your body feels. Neither of which are easily dealt with in a similar

FYI I have FSX with Saitek yoke, pedals and throttles

[Cessna57]

About half way through my training my nephew invited me to have a go on his flight sim, with pedals, a yoke and throttle quadrant.

I tried to fly a circuit (which I could do in real life), it just goes to show the difference, I couldn’t fly a circuit on his sim. He could though. (He most enjoyed doing it in a Ford Trimotor for some reason).

I think it’s more than “bad habits”, you can learn to fly a sim and you can learn to fly a real aircraft, but it’s foolish to pretend the two have more than a vague connection or are in any way the same thing.

[GAFlyer4Fun]

Courses are likely structured around having no pilot experience. If a student has inadvertently learned bad habits from a pc/laptop flight sim, they will waste some flying hours unlearning the bad habits where this becomes apparent to the instructor. If the instructor misses it, it reinforces the student response to that scenario.

That is the easy bit. The real problems are when something goes wrong, which it will one day, hence all the ongoing refresher and currency training in aviation.

When something goes wrong you will without thinking revert to ingrained basic training. However, if that was bad habits on a flight sim, it will be bad habits in a real emergency with associated risk to life of pilot, passengers and innocent bystanders on the ground that happen to be in the flight path.

The PC based flight sims are better for practicing instrument flying procedures for specific airports than effects of controls for general handling and landing.

[Paul_Sengupta]

To my, and my instructors surprise as a result I was just able to hover - it wasn't the prettiest, but equally the instructor wasn't having to take control. Not bad for a first lesson!

I did it in a Gazelle without the sim time.

They will also do nothing to help you develop the skills of actually landing an aircraft.

It did for me. I went out to Florida to learnt to fly but my grandfather died. I'd done something like 8 hours at this point and couldn't land for toffee. I came back to the UK and booked to go out again in a couple of months. In that time, I went through in my head what I was supposed to do on landing without the instructor rabbiting on, and I practised it on Microsoft Flight Sim. Hey presto, when I went back out, I could land.

[chipmeisterc]

Courses are likely structured around having no pilot experience. If a student has inadvertently learned bad habits from a pc/laptop flight sim, they will waste some flying hours unlearning the bad habits where this becomes apparent to the instructor. If the instructor misses it, it reinforces the student response to that scenario.

I really don't buy that - waste some flying minutes maybe, but staring at an instrument panel is quickly solved by covering it up with a piece of paper.

[rikur_]

I didn't use X-plane until I'd got my PPL, as I got it to help get my IMCR .... however, I have found a few other scenarios where it has been some help (e.g. crosswind landing practice) - but this in the context of having been trained, just not well practised.

Prior to getting my PPL, I used to fly the Boeing simulators at Cranebank - I didn't really find that much use for picking up GA, and took a long time to shake off the 3 degree approach angle.

[Spooky]

I found FSX with OrbX scenery handy for cross country practice. I could also go through PFL, circuit procedures etc

[NewFlyer78]

I used x-plane routinely through my PPL training recently. I have a multi monitor setup with full ortho scenery which is great for visual landmarks. Also got the Cessna yoke, rudder pedals and throttle quadrants - cheap from eBay.

Rather than teaching myself to fly, I used it to reaffirm lessons. For example, circuit procedures, forced landings, Nav etc. While I agree it’s not great for the feel and physical sensations, I found it a massive help to get procedures, checks, routines, techniques ingrained into muscle memory. When I got in the real aircraft, these were all second nature and I could concentrate on flying.

For Nav training, I often planned the route and flew it on the sim exactly as per the real flight. Plog on my knee pad, map at my side and the exact wind set on x plane. This is great for practicing Nav flights using visual ref points for track error correction.

Finally, I also use Vatsim to brush up on radio coms which is a big confidence booster.

So in summary, I see the use of a Sim as a learning aid, especially as technology has come so far recently. As others have said above, do not attempt to teach yourself to fly without taking lessons first as you will get into bad habits and its not worth the risk.

[AlexJR]

Certainly from a Nav perspective there is merit in knowing what you are looking for - e.g. playing with the flying settings on google earth - this is cool. Great so when you are doing your exam you know what to look out for on the way and what your target looks like.

I can imagine it helps with procedures etc also - just not the control inputs other than the very basics, which is surely no bad thing for someone who has never been in a plane? Just don't adopt the view "this is how I did it on flightsim" - more, pulling back = up...=stall

[defcribed]

I believe it can be useful as long as you realise the major limitation, which is that it will do nothing to help your 'seat of the pants' flying skills.

For me it certainly helped speed up some aspects of my PPL:

Startup and power check routines were not a new concept to me
I understood what the trim did (it sets the speed) and didn't need to figure it out
The instruments were all familiar and I understood how they worked
Radio nav took no time at all because I knew exactly how VOR/OBS and NDB/ADF worked

When it came to instrument flying and the IMC rating, it meant that most aspects of instrument approaches were already familiar to me.

You can learn all this from a book/classroom, but for me there's nothing like looking at something and playing with it to understand how it works and what it does.