I’ve am going to flight school. At home I practice the same drills through the Sim. Will that help?
It can help somewhat. It can help you practice cockpit procedures. Flight instructors usually tell thier students to "fly thier desks" at home to ingrain procedures and responses to certain events. FS can simulate failures. But you don’t have an instructor there to tell you if yopu are doing something incorrectly, so you could develop bad habits if you’re not careful. You also won’t learn to fly the aircraft "outside the cockpit" very well, and this is a critical skill for a VFR pilot. When the time comes that you are pursuing the instrument rating, that is where simulators help out the best. FS is descent, but there are other simulators (like IFR On-Top) that are better. Simulators are excellent for practicing holds, instrument approaches, instrument takeoffs, departure procedures, and emergencies.
#1 by pbpullman on August 5th, 2009
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It can help somewhat. It can help you practice cockpit procedures. Flight instructors usually tell thier students to "fly thier desks" at home to ingrain procedures and responses to certain events. FS can simulate failures. But you don’t have an instructor there to tell you if yopu are doing something incorrectly, so you could develop bad habits if you’re not careful. You also won’t learn to fly the aircraft "outside the cockpit" very well, and this is a critical skill for a VFR pilot. When the time comes that you are pursuing the instrument rating, that is where simulators help out the best. FS is descent, but there are other simulators (like IFR On-Top) that are better. Simulators are excellent for practicing holds, instrument approaches, instrument takeoffs, departure procedures, and emergencies.
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commercial pilot, 14 years
#2 by Mxsmanic on August 5th, 2009
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It helps a lot more than it hurts, particularly if you are also flying real aircraft. A simulator alone might give you a few bad habits (although nothing you couldn’t easily correct), but if you fly for real at the same time, those bad habits should not develop.
The biggest complaint about desktop sims is that they encourage pilots to stare at their instruments, because the sim simulates instruments a lot more accurately than it simulates visual flight (and there is no motion). However, this is only a disadvantage for VFR; if you are flying IFR, then you obviously spend a great deal of time scanning your instruments. The sim is thus more useful for IFR than for VFR, although it’s better than nothing for both.
If you add complex, ultrarealistic add-on aircraft to the sim, and fly online with flight networks such as VATSIM or IVAO, you can greatly increase the value of simulation in your flight training. The former give you aircraft that are dramatically closer to their real-life counterparts, and the latter gives you practice in communicating with ATC and following procedures.
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