On Tue, 22 Jul 2003 13:56:13 GMT, Sydney Hoeltzli
wrote:

OK, your patience please. I'm a very novice simmer.

I'm a pilot trying to clean more rust off her instrument
skills than I have flight time for, since the birth of my
daughter.

I'm trying to use MSFS '98 to fly instrument approaches.

My husband has it configured with CH products yoke and rudder
pedals.

I've been flying a Grumman Cheetah someone else modeled and
I found on the net, since IRL I fly a Grumman Tiger and it's
nice to have the power settings etc etc be fairly close to real
life.

snipped

Aircraft input realism can vary significantly from plane to plane, but
your observation regarding pitch control is a good one. That is the
single most difficult motion to get right. That being said, it is not
hopeless.

First, I would recommend upgrading if your machine is capable enough.
I don't recall how much of a resource hog '98 was. 2000 was bad and
2002 showed a big improvement. Microsoft is just about to release
2004 so you may want to wait. Upgrading will solve the airport issue.
I believe that the flight models are better also, although the
improvement is marginal. There are ways to edit the flight model
values but I've never done that so I'll leave that to others. But be
aware that the option is there to tweak the planes characteristics.

I control my fine pitch adjustments with trim. I have two of the
buttons on my yoke programmed for trim up and trim down. That way I
can tap the button once or twice to get a more realistic change in
pitch. This is counter to the mantra "don't fly the plane with the
trim wheel" but it works. We have to make compromises as there are
differences between flying a computer and flying a real plane. I have
been using Flight Simulator since it was first produced by SubLogic in
the early eighties but I only got my PP ticket earlier this month.
From that perspective, I can tell you that there are a number of
things that are easier in the real plane than they are on the sim.

Another suggestion that I have is to search for aftermarket planes for
the sim. I know that's a problem for the Grumman because I tried to
find one a while back to show my CFI (she has one). I also downloaded
many 152s to use while I was training. One of those, and only one,
provided me with a flight model that was acceptable. It is very
possible that you will find and aftermarket plane that performs more
realistically than any of the default planes. Good luck.

Rich Russell