Flight Simulator Software - Any Help or Just a Game?

Corky Scott wrote
Perhaps. On the other hand, during the war years it was routine to
solo students in as few as 8 to 12 hours of stick time. This is with
no previous experience and in some cases no previous experience even
driving a car. In addition, the trainer was inevitably a taildragger.

True. The standard military trainer of the time was a Stearman.
These days, it's considered a tricky, high performance (sic!) biplane.
There were some important things you're leaving out, though.

Training to solo took place on open grass fields. Cross wind landing
were not taught - or done. The students were all young and eager.
There was no radio work and no instrument work - just airwork and
landings.

Every field had a truck standing by. Each truck had a repair crew -
and a bed full of ailerons. The crews could replace an aileron on a
groundlooped airplane and have it ready for service in SEVEN MINUTES.
Imagine how much practice they got. A groundloop was no big deal.

Most older taildraggers are pussycats on wide open grass fields
landing into the wind - it's landing on paved narrow crosswind runways
with obstructions that makes them exciting. If all I had to do was
teach the average teenager to land, only on grass and into the wind,
and only well enough that I could be certain he would not hurt himself
- the occasional groundloop not being a big deal - I could solo them
in 6 hours all day long and twice on Sunday.

Realistically, I can't solo a brand new student in 6 hours these days.
My home field only has one narrow paved runway, aligned cross to the
prevailing winds and with structures and trees that make any crosswind
gusty. The pattern is busy, and radio use is expected. The FAA gives
me a laundry list of things I have to do with them before I solo them.
These days, if someone soloes in under 10 hours, that's pretty good,
and generally indicates better than average preparation.

Michael

I have the full yoke/rudder setup and found the simulator to be of
minimal use for initial training. Where it came in useful was in
habitualizing the procedures. (e.g. carb heat at midfield, RPM to 1500
at landing line, etc.). I am also finding it very useful for learning
IFR approaches and improving my instrument scan. I notice that the CH
Yoke sticks very slightly in the pitch access which makes it difficult
for precise glide slopes. Overall, I find the real airplane much easier
to handle.

Eric

Jay Honeck wrote:
So damaging can the use of the simulator be during this stage, that it's
use can actually retard the progress of a new student.


Another point of view:

I learned to fly ten years ago in 1994. I started "flying" sims in the
mid-80s, when they were little more than wire-frame depictions of flight.
(Anyone remember Atari STs?) By the time I could afford real flight lessons,
I had a zillion hours of sim time.

At least partially as a result, I took to flying immediately, and soloed
with just 6.4 hours in my logbook.

Quite frankly, I'd be willing to bet that my time riding motorcycles was
just as helpful in learning to fly (the physics of riding and flying are
nearly identical) -- but my instructor (who, by the way, was an older
gentleman and quite the technophobe. He believed that computers were evil
devices from Day One.) figured that all my sim time really helped --
especially in the early stages of flight instruction.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

In article . net,
Dudley Henriques wrote:
So damaging can the use of the simulator be during this stage, that it's
use can actually retard the progress of a new student.

My experience is completely the opposite. I was having trouble with
crosswind landings (I had to think about what I had to do to stop the
drift, and it was of course too late by the time I'd come up with the
answer - this is something you have to do automatically). With a flight
sim with a yoke and pedals, I could practise doing crosswind landings
with extreme crosswinds over and over and over again until I'd
automatically put the control inputs in the correct way. This was with
FS95.

The next crosswind landing lesson may not have resulted in perfect
landings, but they resulted in no overshooting of the centreline when
turning base to final, and automatically using the correct inputs to
stop the drift, and no sideways movement on touchdown. Worked great for
me.

Of course, for instrument training there is no question it's valuable
(the best ones are the 'PCATDs' with the right physical controls
including knobs you can twist on the radios, but a normal FS 'game' will
do the trick - and of course you can simulate conditions you'd never do
in real life training because they are too dangerous, such as engine
failure on takeoff in a light twin in low IFR, gyro failures - with the
slow failure of the gyro that might go un-noticed. We had great fun with
the PCATD with the separate instructor console as the poor pleb who we
are torturing has no idea what will happen next.)

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"