Mike Isaksen writes:

This thread reminds me of a CFI friend who raved about his new student
following a first lesson. The student ace'd the written and his years of MS
sim flying made him really smooth. There was no doubt he'd solo fast. After
the second flight my friend complained that the student wasn't looking
outside enough and had no feel for the controls. Following the third flight,
during a portion of which he covered the panel with the sectional, my friend
came back wondering if the student would even make it to solo. In the end
the student did ok and made his PPL in about average time. The lesson I
walked away with is that books and simulation can make you Talk the Talk,
but seldom Walk the Walk.

It works both ways. You learn from what you have. If you have a sim
with reliable instruments, moderately good visuals, and no motion,
you'll learn to fly by instruments, with some help from looking out
the window, and with no attention paid at all to motion. If you want
to fly for real, you'll have to counteract that tendency.

But the opposite problem can also exist. If you learn to fly in a
real plane with minimal instruments, always in clear weather, you get
used to looking out the window or "feeling" the plane's movements, and
you are less likely to look at those pesky instruments. So then you
have to force yourself to look at them when it becomes necessary to
use them.

The interesting thing is that IFR is always possible in VMC, but VFR
is not possible in IMC. So if you know your instruments, you can
always fly, but if you don't, you're in trouble if VMC disappears one
day during a flight.

I still can't believe the recording I listened to a few days ago in
which some pilot was screaming that he was lost and clearly feared
that he was about to die. He had passed from VMC into a cloud or
something, and apparently he had never looked at his instruments
before in his life ... or at least that's the impression I got. Why
not just glance at the artificial horizon and see if you really are
sideways before the panic attack?

--
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