Paul Folbrecht wrote:
But there's X-Plane. The flight sim junkies love it, but is it good
enough to use for IFR training? The feature set looks good. There is
even a free demo version but before I spend time with it I wanted to ask
if anybody here has experience with it. TIA.

I bought X-Plane a bunch of years ago when I was prepping for my CFI-I
ride. I hadn't flown any NDB approaches since I got my instrument
rating and was having a hard time getting them back up to snuff (read: I
was wasting a lot of money boring holes in the sky in the general
vicinity of airports with NDB approaches).

Yes, the control feel is terrible, but as a *procedures* trainer, it did
the trick for me. After a few sessions sitting at my desk at home, I
was nailing NDB approaches one after the other. Then I went back into
the plane and they were fine there too. I think I was running it on a
Mac 7100 or 7200 at the time.

These days, I havn't flown an NDB approach in years, as none of the
planes I fly have ADFs installed any more. Procedure training these
days is becoming much more of a GPS programming exercise than anything
else.