Although your motorcycle skills and experience would most certainly have
had a positive effect on accelerating the learning process in the
airplane, the actual effect of flying a desktop simulator would have
limited effect. It's true that the simulator would have taught you the
basic DIRECTION of movement for each control, and that would be a
positive, but for the actual purpose of flying an airplane, it's
PRESSURES and RATES that are the pertinent factors, NOT direction!



This has made me rethink a little. My time windsurfing surely helped in
this regard.

--
Dave A

"Dudley Henriques" wrote in message
ink.net...

"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
news:Z15%c.136659$Fg5.37892@attbi_s53...
So damaging can the use of the simulator be during this stage, that
it's use can actually retard the progress of a new student.

Another point of view:

I learned to fly ten years ago in 1994. I started "flying" sims in the
mid-80s, when they were little more than wire-frame depictions of
flight. (Anyone remember Atari STs?) By the time I could afford real
flight lessons, I had a zillion hours of sim time.

At least partially as a result, I took to flying immediately, and
soloed with just 6.4 hours in my logbook.

Quite frankly, I'd be willing to bet that my time riding motorcycles
was just as helpful in learning to fly (the physics of riding and
flying are nearly identical) -- but my instructor (who, by the way,
was an older gentleman and quite the technophobe. He believed that
computers were evil devices from Day One.) figured that all my sim
time really helped -- especially in the early stages of flight
instruction.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

Control direction is learned early on and the good instructor gets away
from direction quickly and begins working you with pressures
immediately. Over concentration on control direction is one of the big
negatives that has to be addressed by instructors with students coming
out of a heavy desktop sim environment into the real world of actual
flying.
From the instructor's viewpoint, the negatives involved in acclimating a
student to the control pressure environment after having been exposed to
a directional environment only as it exists in the sim; FAR exceeds any
positives gained through the knowledge and use of a joystick in a
simulator.
The motorcycle experience however would have been a huge plus, as is any
(hand eye vs pressure of application equals coordination )background.
In your case, I'm fairly certain that the reason for your accelerated
progress wasn't your sim experience, but rather the motorcycle skills
coupled with your extreme positive motivation and ability to learn and
absorb quickly.

I'm sure it helped however, that from the tons of hours you spent flying
the simulator, you already knew which direction to move the controls.
Why if you had been one of my students, this valuable information would
have saved you a HUGE amount of learning time.....say about the first
fifteen seconds of your first dual hour when I explained control
direction to you. Then of course, I could begin the process of weaning
you off the expected sim reaction and into the real world of getting to
know those pesky control pressures. Who knows...with all that motorcycle
training and hand eye stuff going for us, we might even get into those
pressures without wasting all that much time; but that would of course
depend on how good I was at getting you to let go of all that sim time,
and how receptive you were to actually letting it go!! :-)

Dudley Henriques
International Fighter Pilots Fellowship