Hands up who uses Flight Sim to help their training? *puts both hands up*
I found/find it to be quite helpful when it comes to a night rating, NDB/VOR tracking and intercepts. It's a controlled environment where you can plug in cloud, winds, temperature, pressure and everything associated. Not so great for full on visual navigation but there seem to be golf courses where some small towns are. Major roads and railways are where they should be as are decent sized hills.
Here are photos that took me a but by surprise when I studied it carefully enough, you can see how the roads bend the right way and it's a bit harder to see, but the little rivers are where they are on the map:
Check out how close the panel is too, of course each aircraft to their own, but I reckon they did a pretty good job..
I do my training in the Mooney M20J. Fortunately for me,
Carenado
have made an exact model of this plane for Flight Sim X. Even more fortunately for me someone has done a few repaints of that model, for the exact aircraft I fly. So what I find FSX useful for stretches to operating procedures, systems, checklists, power settings, emergency procedures etc.. Say I wanted to set up a quick, semi realistic nav out of Jandakot to Northam and back. I'd write up a flight plan on paper, measure tracks, distances, work out times and everything else you normally do. Taxi out of the parking bay with my nav board on my knee or desk and away I go, as I would in real life.
All at a fraction of the cost!! Say the 'game' itself was $60.. Fly for as many hours as you like. The Mooney costs around $220/hr. Sells itself really.. You can also have a bit of unrealistic fun flying a 747 or an Extra 300
![:laugh: :laugh:](/media/kunena/emoticons/laughing.png)
plus the countless other planes you can download.