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!
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.
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.