Are PC-based flight simulations like Flight Simulator X, X-Plane 11 and Prepar3d actually realistic? It's a subject I've always wondered about, but never previously had the means to test. But I finally took a discovery flight last week in a Cessna 172S, which is coincidentally one of the default planes featured in FSX. That finally let me do a direct comparison using the same plane flying out of the same airport, on the same flight path and in the same weather conditions. How close can a current piece of consumer software come to reality?
4/1/2019 UPDATE: I'd love to do a full follow-up to this video but probably won't have time for a good long while. I'm currently in a training program to eventually get ATP certification; I'm in the private pilot stage right now, with about 30 hours of actual flight time (vs. 1 hour when I made this video).
You may wonder if any of my views have changed since making the video - and generally, I'd say no. I do use X-Plane more often than FSX at the moment, but I always think about switching back... X-Plane does have better graphics and maybe marginally better flight models, but it also has terrible ATC and really bad ground handling, both of which are also really important to creating a realistic flying environment. (One of the most difficult things for any pilot is taxiing... in fact, the airline I'll be flying for only allows captains to do it because it's so dangerous, especially in bad weather. There's no other facet of flight that first officers are just forbidden from doing. So ground dynamics and traffic are really important for a sim to get right.)
Sims also have a tendency to teach you really bad habits unless you get real-life training *first*. For example, it's easy to get used to the "death grip" on the yoke/stick, and as I'm finding out firsthand, it's hard to shake that habit when you've been doing it for 30 years. Ditto for staring at your instruments - you need to do that if you're IFR in IMC, but on a VFR flight it's very, very bad practice. Sims get you in that habit because unless you're in VR (which X-Plane does now support), you're looking at a static display and have no other real-life traffic to worry about, so there's no incentive to scan outside and it's even kind of a pain to do it. This is some really effective negative training.
I'm currently trying to set up my system so it's more effective for positive training. One thing sims can be good at is running through procedures and checklists - provided you're training on a plane that's well modeled in the sim (even the most realistic planes are often missing features that are on checklists, which again makes for some negative training since you will likely rush over or even ignore those items in real life). The plane I'm training on - the Diamond DA-40 - has a Garmin G1000 glass cockpit, and there's actually a sim of just that that can run on two iPads (one for PFD, one for MFD). The G1000 is such a complex system that just having that connected to X-Plane can be a big help, since otherwise it can take a really long time to learn it well if you try to do it while flying your regular lessons. The default X-Plane G1000 is, maybe not surprisingly, not very good. It's missing a ton of features of the real G1000 that we use every day, and are part of our setup and checklists.
Anyway, so that's the update. Hopefully I can eventually put all this new info in another video, but don't hold your breath because I'm flying too much to do it right now!
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