Re: Light-Sport Aircraft Yahoo group flight sim bad habits

I've flown ultralights, light sports, certified planes, and a lot of flight simulators (X-Plane, primarily, as I like to play with alternate layouts).

What I've found is that a flight simulator can teach you a lot about proper air-speeds, coordinated flight, and other instrument based techniques. What it doesn't do is teach you how to feel, and more importantly to IGNORE, your body's balance and motion cues. The _feeling_ of cross-controlling, of turbulence, of 'squishy' controls near stall speed - those don't come through the simulator. Neither does _ignoring_ your feeling of roll, of yaw, and other disorienting inputs shaped by your body's reaction to motions based on your experience of walking/running, rather than flying - those can really throw you off with how overwhelming the sensation of rolling too far, when what you need to focus upon is your sight picture, and after that the instruments (VFR sport flying, mind you - IFR is another story).

I took a lesson in disorientation training (3-axis flight simulator moving at cross-directions to your visual input); very instructive. I was horrible at it, and had vertigo for several days afterwards. Inner ear inputs can be overwhelming.

You can indeed learn a lot from a flight simulator; I think I got a lot from doing that. It _didn't_ teach me the proper viewpoint for a landing (cycling between side views of the runway and looking directly at the far end for consistency - too slow in the simulator), or how to handle the sometimes cross-purposes inputs of my inner ear.

If you mix it up with real flight training, simulators can be helpful as added work. If you try to focus on simulators without real life training, you WILL learn bad habits, and be unable to synthesize what you're doing with other non-simulator sensory inputs.

Just my opinion...

Kevin

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