My MSFS days are long over (1996-2006), but still, when I see this, I get quite excited…
The only problem I see is that it keeps some people away from real flying, since the simulation is “almost as good” (obviously isn’t…)
My son used to be heavily into this – FS2004, FSX and a brief encounter with X-Plane. I still have the PC he used to run these on. It gets used for video rendering which sometimes might take 100 hours.
I had a quick look at that video. They seem to have put a huge amount of work into reality of cockpit and airframe visual and functional details, but I wonder if the response (especially in pitch – the usual weak point of flight sims including the expensive FNPT-approved ones) is much better. The general detail shown was achievable 5+ years ago if you threw maximum money at stuff like a 1000 quid video card.
From countless posts from PPL instructors around the place, I think the PPL training scene has significant issues with 500-hour sim pilots turning up to do a PPL 
I think one can argue it exactly both ways, and if anything it puts useful pressure on the training business to modernise a bit.
Impressive
The only downside is, it doesn’t get me anywhere. Flying is just another means of transportation.
It doesn’t look realistic to me. A Piper Cherokee where everything works??? Come on.
He does open the door right after touchdown. That tells me that he got some real PA28 experience.
Having worked in that field for almost 20 years, I am still surprised how MSFS and particularly the last generation of it are looked down at by many people. Actually, in the “other” forum you’d be almost banned for just mentioning it and to be called a “flightsimmer” was to be qualified as being below the lowest form of life for some extremists.
Personally, I believe flight simming is the single most successful source for new pilots there is. And schools and “real” pilots would be well advised to help those guys along rather than refusing them and belittling their efforts.
I started flight simulation in the 80ties with a C64 and eventually built the first scenery project for Switzerland for FS4. I saw FS 5 first flown at the hands of Bruce Artwick, it’s inventor, in his office in Champaign IL. 1999 a friend of mine founded a flight simulation magazine called FlightXpress, for which I worked for until 2013 when it got cancelled by the new owner. During this time, all simulators combined, I looged some 12000 hours, of which about half on GA planes and half on heavies.
When I came back to flying in 2009, MSFS in combination with the Switzerland Professional Scenery and Germany SE as well as Carenado’s Mooney 201 were a HUGE help getting back in the air after 9 years of hiatus. I found that flying each flight on the simulator before I actually did it live helped me to get a very good preparation for the real thing. I did the Bulgarian rotation repeatedly on the sim and it was very helpful for doing the real thing.
I would honestly have to say that if it had not been for the fact that I never really left flying even after not flying for 9 years for real, I would most probably not have come back at all.
MSFS is far from dead. It now is called Lockheed Martin Prepare 3D and has gone towards the more expert crowd, while FSX is still very much main stream for other people, now that the machines available actually manage to run it properly. Als there are lots of new products out which are very helpful, such as a new weather engine which takes weather simulation to an absolutely new standard. And there is a lot more.
Properly used, MSFS (as well as others) can help also people like us with keeping their currency in times you don’t get to fly too much (like in winter), it can help with introductions to places we have not been before. And it can be an excellent (and legal) tool to get youngsters interested and started in flying.
Like Windows itself, MSFS has been shunned by the “geeks” of the profession, yet no other sim has ever reached that many people and no other sim has produced more pro-aviation crowd that MSFS has with over 10 million sold copies over 20 years of use.
The 3 great mountains in Switzerland in Flylogic’s Switzerland Pro X
Approach to ZRH in January
Samedan
Here’s one of mine: Mooney M20J over “E” at ZRH
Approaching the lake of constance in FSX
And the real thing.
The citiy of Ulm in FSX
And in reality.
Companies like A2A are heaven sent for people like me who simply can’t afford to fly a real plane for more than a couple hours a month. With FSX and aiplane addons of that level of quality plus scenery that’s good enough for VFR use with an official map you can stay current in quite a lot of areas, add online ATC networks like VATSIM and a high-end weather engine to the mix and things can get amazingly realistic.
Plus it offers you a glimpse into flying aircraft that’d it would be a privilege to stand next to in real life, not even dreaming of flying one – also available to the level of quality as the Piper in above link. If you routinely land a Mustang* into a 2000ft strip with the speeds involved in that (even if it’s just a sim), landing a C172 feels even more relaxed also in real life…
The latest thing the sim helped me with is actually remembering my little final-check-mantra – never did think of it in time in the real plane, so a week ago I pinned a note to my monitor and always chanted ‘GUMPF’ when on final approach in FSX, and voila: the two times I went flying since I also did the checks in real life!
Of course I would prefer to do all that flying for real. If someone here feels he needs to get rid of excesses of money, please speak up!
I use the Dreamfleet Archer II, because it’s roughly the same layout as mine, and with the simulated GNS430 (which doesn’t seem to work on Windows 8, grrr), its as realistic as I need it to be in terms of performance, aero characteristics, and avionincs as mine. I don’t think the ADF simulates dip error or the other range of errors, but besides that, its pretty good for some IMC refresher exercises. The a2a one looks good, and I might see if there is a PA28-181 version.
It doesn’t look realistic to me. A Piper Cherokee where everything works??? Come on
Reminds me of a post I saw on PPrune once, where someone enquired as to where they might get a replacement analogue clock for their PA28 (the one on the top left of the panel), and someone said “why, to make it unique?”. That was the funniest thing I had seen that day. I have flown something like 20 different PA28’s over the years and don’t recall one with a working analogue clock.
I have had a small number of student pilots with sim experience before they had any real flying experience. In some cases it seemed the sim experience had given them a good understanding of the flying and navigation instruments. However, they generally had to work much harder to start looking outside and to feel the aeroplane. In some cases the biggest challenge was that they believed that they were aeroplane pilots because they could fly a sim. I found that when a student pilot introduces himself as something like “a sim pilot with 900 hours”, you really need to have a talk with him.
My MSFS stopped working a couple of PC’s ago, but during the first years I had an instrument rating I found it useful for preparing myself for specific trips, airports or approaches – or for the proficiency check.
The scenery and the airplane has indeed become impressively realistic. But from a training point of view, I think it was just as useful back when every mountain was a pyramid.
