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 plus the countless other planes you can download.

Ah, Ellzy, you're a man after my own heart! A sim is a brilliant way to keep (especially IFR) skills sharp. When I was doing my UK CIR, I used to pre-fly the route for the next day. It was a HUGE help.

I'm an X-Plane junkie myself and in fact have a Cat III equivalent sim in the cellar

Have you tried combining your flight sim adventures with VatSim ? There's an Australian branch as well: VatPac . Now, that's a marriage made in heaven: ATC enthusiasts providing free air traffic control to flight sim enthusiasts.

Shooting approaches with the cellar-sim whilst getting ATC from a real controller on Vatsim is really as close as you can get to the real thing. And for the cost of electricity.

Another cool addition is FSEconomy . That allows you to take charter jobs from airfields near you and earn virtual dollars. That might sound really nerdy, but if you are looking for a new route for a flight, it acts as a great motivator.

That Carenado Mooney is a brilliant aircraft. I have it for X-plane as well. Very nice

Cheers,

Rich

Oh my god thats so cool!! Nothing to be embarrassed about! Yeah I was running round on vatsim not too long ago and even got myself a tower rating to control others however studies and 'more important things' got in the way as they do. I swear by vatsim I think it's a brilliant idea and encourage others to use it to sharpen radio procedures, phraseology, task sharing etc etc..

Oh and to those wondering whats going on with the AH, I failed it, just another brilliant feature of flight sims that you don't really get to practice in the real world other than your instructor sticking a post it note over it. You can program it to fail when you want, or randomly between x minutes and x minutes.. good stuff.

We won't get into the Xplane/MSFS argument that I know is out there alive and strong! I might check out FSEconomy actually, bit of extra motivation never hurts.

I dream of building a sim in my house one day

Studying up for BAK exam. Must keep away from flight sim. Waste too much time on it. Practicing bombing runs on Port Power headquarters won't help me.

Haha yeah tell me about it, I'm trying to get all my KDR revision done for this Thursday and it's hard to say no to.. If you need to ask any questions about BAK go for it

I just having trouble getting my brain working again. Never had trouble like this when I went to Uni studying computer science and mathematics. Maybe I over did it back then and now my brain has given up.

I am a Big X-Plane Junkie i have over 3,000 HRS on that Game plus i fly alot on VATSIM aswell and i also Use ESEconomy aswell bet thing & it is as close too the real thing as you get. but it seem's too help a hell of alot

I have a long history of using a flightsim in one form or another during my career.

The first was FS 5 with a Melbourne scenery patch during my PPL and NVFR training days to master the ADF/VOR.
Then it was FS '98 for my CIR. Taught myself how to fly a DME arc and ILS approach. Save me a lot of time and dollars.

During my instructing career I used a program called IT2000 (Intercept Trainer 2000). This was an extremely handling tool as part of pre flight briefing and familiarization for ADF?VOR training before we got in the sim or the aircraft. This way we could concentrate on understanding how it all works without having to manage the aircarft at the same time. Save my students heaps of time, dollars and frustration.

After I lost my medical, I was doing a bit of work for a simulator company. This time it was FSX with PMDG 737NGX.

Nowadays, its il2 (got to get Cliffs of Dover), Lock On and Strike Fighter.

Cheers,
Mister W.

Now I'm off to fly some combat!