If you just got your PPL, you might want to spend some time flying VFR
before jumping into the IFR training.

From my experience, Flight Simulator can definitely help you with your
navigation techniques, but it almost definitely will NOT significantly
help you learn to precisely control the plane, regardless of whether you
use a yoke or the keyboard. It's just not real enough. At least that's
how it's been for me.

Where it helped me most was with VOR tracking, holding patterns,and the
like. When you read the books and see videos and all that, it kinda makes
sense. But when you open up the Map view, and turn on the feature that
draws the red line over your track, it makes a WHOLE lot of sense very
quickly.

The key is (IMHO), you first need to be able to keep the plane on heading
and altitude without requiring too much attention before you can start
also thinking about hold entries or approaches and following bouncing
needles and reporting positions and such...


Beyond that, for what it's worth, I wouldn't even worry about using 2004.
I use 98 and it works great. But 2002 has some ATC communication built in
I think, so that might be worth something. I don't really know about
2004, but MS generally has a policy of intentionally building new
versions that are bigger and hungrier than previous versions just to
force you to upgrade the computer and OS. So if you're not sure you have
the minimum equipment, you might consider finding an older version on
EBay or something.

Just my 2 cents.


Gerald Sylvester wrote in
link.net:


I just got my PPL and heard from some ATP rated friends that using
MS FS 2004 could help a bit for getting down some of the navigation
techniques for IFR. I figure for $50 that is about 25 minutes in
a IFR GPS equipped plane.

What is the minimum equipment *really* required to use MS FS 2004?
Right now I have a new Dell Latitude laptop. I have a mouse
and that is about it. Joysticks? Foot pedals (cost?)? I don't want
it to replace flight since I can just get in a real plane but I have
heard from many people that it is quite good. I want
it more for the instrument training.

I have no idea about this since the last MS FS I had was back when I
had an IBM PC jr. (no joke).

replies will be directed to: rec.aviation.simulators.

Gerald Sylvester