On Mon, 06 Sep 2004 20:02:59 -0700, Jim Rosinski wrote:

For VFR flying Flight Sim 2004 is probably next to useless (or worse
than useless as some others have indicated) for helping with the real
thing. But for flying in the clouds it's nothing short of superb.

Nah, it can be useful for VFR too. FS2002 and 2004 actually started to
have reasonably good terrain in which you could recognize cities, roads,
powerlines and lakes. It was useful for me for my PPL.

I did not "just fool around" but I planned each flight, made the flight
plans, route planning, calculated wind correction, drew the route on the
map and so on. When I started the flight, I did it non-stop. If I forgot
the plotter to the kitchen table, or if the pencil broke but I had no
sharpener, I would not hit "pause" but just tried to deal with the
situation. Basically I tried to do "real flights" even though I was
sitting on the front of the computer. This, while it was just simulated
and might sound a bit silly, made me go through the routine of flying just
as much as if I was flying for real.

The "stick and rudder" stuff is just one part of flying,
and I agree a simulator can be a limited help in that area. It took me
about 60 landings to "get it" despite (or because of my sim
experience..

But there's a LOT more in aviation - situation awareness,
navigation, communicating with air traffic controllers, airspace, flight
planning etc. When all this could be practiced at home, it made me much
more relaxed on the real flight, since I had usually flown the same route
before on the simulator, I became familiar with the speed of the
aircraft and what it meant in terms of inches on the map, what altitudes
to use and what frequencies to use etc.. Also on the sim I had to rely on
the "big picture" of the landscape instead of individual local landmarks,
which I think is a good thing. So instead of recognizing a particular
church building I learned to look for things like "a lake with a town in
the west side" and "road crossing a river" etc.. Things you can find on a
map even though you dont know the area.

I also feel I am more confident with the use of VORs and such since the
simulator is a good practice device for those.

I encountered low ceiling (still VMC though) during my cross country solo
flight, and it surprised me since I was used to navigating on higher
altitude where visibility was excellent. The lower clouds restricted the
visibility to a much shorter distance in the horizon, and I got pushed
sideways by crosswind. I then missed a landmark and realized I was not
where I intended. In that situation I cross checked two VOR radials and
found myself on the map again. This was a routine thing I had
intentionally practiced on FS2002 several times before, and I am glad I
had. It helped to keep the workload lower on that situation and perhaps
even kept me calm instead of getting nervous in the cockpit.

So, yea, in my opinion it can be useful.

//Tuomas