Hey! I’m currently pursuing my Private Pilot License (PPL-A) and have been considering incorporating flight simulation into my study routine.
Has anyone found flight simulation to be a valuable part of their training, and if so, how specifically did you use it?
Thank you in advance for sharing your experiences and insights!
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it helped me for sure in knowledge of instrumentation, navigation, atc phraseology, aerodynamics, those kind of things. I started gliding recently, actual plane handling is a complete different ball game - I don’t touch the gliders in the sim because of learning the wrong things. But I think simulation really helps with getting more comfortable with all other aspects than actual flying.
Copied from a comment I made on Reddit a while back (first time opening Reddit in a month!)
I’ve been simming 15 years and got my PPL last year so have gone through this recently. Simming absolutely helped me in my PPL, I had a good understanding for how the aircraft handled and felt things came quickly in most regards. As far as stick and rudder skills, I obviously had to learn the muscle memory, which came fairly quickly but took practice. Sight picture was actually a bigger thing to learn, along with localized weather, things like thermals on a hot day or mini rotors when landing in a heavily wooded area, etc. Those are things which don’t exist in the sim so had to be learned from scratch. The actual aircraft handling made sense in my head so it just required the stick and rudder learning. Crosswind landings actually came really easily having already learned and practiced the coordination in sim for years.
A few things I noticed in my training
let your CFI teach you. Don’t assume you know anything, let them teach you everything as if it’s new. Some stuff you’ll say to yourself “yeah I already knew that”, but with a lot more stuff than I expected I actually learned I was doing it wrong or learned a better way to do it. I found this helped me overcome bad habits more easily because they were identified from the get go and then never practiced the bad habits in the real plane.
dont bother using the sim to practice any stick and rudder stuff, but do still use it. I found it helpful to practice my SRM skills, visual navigation, and just familiarizing myself with the area and landmarks. It can be helpful to do stuff in the sim to practice the things you learn for the written, like VOR stuff, magnetic compass turning/accel tendencies, etc.
look out the window! learn your sight picture and keep your head out of the cockpit
reset your bar. Don’t assume you can do anything irl that you do in the sim. You need to prove everything to yourself IRL before you can be confident doing it.
use VATSIM, even for VFR. Just having lots of voice comms and being comfortable talking and flying, and just with how radio comms flow is very useful and made learning the radios super easy. I learned to fly under the seattle bravo shelf and was always talking to someone and it was really not too bad given how much I’ve used VATSIM.
I agree with majorswitcher, it helped me with cockpit flow and procedures. Not with actual flying.
But I’m talking about IFR in study level aircrafts (Airbus is my jam). I don’t really know about smaller aircrafts for PPL, the paid PA-28 or C310 could probably help getting use to their cockpit but you might not find a quality addon for the type of aircraft you’re going to fly.
You can still work your navigation and approach procedures if you have good quality old instruments (you’ll probably won’t fly on a full garmin piston aircraft).
For voice phraseology I believe using IVAO/VATSIM is better for IFR. VFR phraseology license is easy to pass anyway.
It definitely did not help with getting to know how the aircraft handled - sims are just too… different from reality. Even my flight school’s dedicated whole-cockpit sim wasn’t great at emulating real flight physics. What it certainly did help with is cockpit flows and flight planning (within reason). The school wanted us students to learn certain procedures by heart (unsure how yours does things) and only verify their completion via checklist. Flying multiple traffic patterns and learning when to do what was certainly helpful. So, definitely useful, but not for everything. The only way to really learn to fly is… to fly :)
Contrary to what most people say, I found that having flown X-Plane for a year or so before flight training, always striving for reality, has given me a pretty good feel for how a real aircraft handles. This probably doesn’t translate for all planes and for everyone, but it sure helped me. With a good set of rudder pedals and even a mediocre stick, I can practice crosswind landings and sideslips and it helps me being more comfortable when doing it in real life. It needs to be a pretty accurate simulation for that, and judging that isn’t easy, and bad models can lead to bad habits, so I won’t recommend it in general.
The only way to really learn to fly is… to fly :)
That is mostly still true, although professional full-flight simulators used for airliner type-rating and recurrency training are probably good enough to teach you to fly without ever having been in a real aircraft. But those cost at least an order of magnitude more per hour than a light GA airplane, so it’s not cost-effective for ab-inito flight training.
Ive used it to get a rough idea of approach into new airports. It isnt perfect at all, but has helped ‘get a lay of the land’ so to speak.
Sims suck for feeling how something will fly. Maybe it is the lack of hardware that makes me feel like im forcing the experience.But msfs has been an asset for a wierd approach on occasion, just to get an idea of what to expect flying into addison or centinneal for example.
Personally i get bored flying for 2 hours and not going outside my house. But i can see the appeal so i wont judge it. It has its place and plenty of people love it. If you can find a good service, for radio work ive noticed some sims are more educational than actual atc tbh. And way safer when you mess up royaly. Speaking as someone who has fucked up his calls with vegas approach, radio work is pretty important.
Not at all. I am still being a sw engoneer
