X-Plane 11 Coming This Holiday Season
x-plane.com
x-plane.com
I know Austin flies, so the following is more aimed at him if he's reading.
With moderate care you can totally fly a Cessna 172, 152 etc. controlling the pitch just through the trim. Change the pitch wheel, and it affects the elevator, which affects the wing. The whole aircraft then settles down to the desired AoA which given a power input will cause the aircraft to climb or descend.
The specific short-coming of most sims is that trim input should settle the aircraft to a desired AoA reasonably quickly (subject to mild phugoid oscillations - mild pitch cycling) but it just never really does.
Typically, any decent pilot can trim the aircraft to the desired speed at some rpm, then just fly using light pressure on the controls adding or reducing power in small increments as needed.
Under say IFR, the workload can be quite high, and anything you can do to reduce the attention needed to maintain chosen course is critical.
I had fun with this in a flight test in a twin once, landing on one engine, with the other feathered and not causing drag, the plane did not want to land. All you can do is wait in this situation. More fun with conventional gear where you can force it onto the ground and hold it there ;-)
Other areas, my recall is a bit hazy, but the corners of the flight envelope, stalls, spins etc., are better in X-Plane.
When I do flight sims, I rely on the pitch trim wheel a lot but I've had very little time at the controls of real aircraft so I don't know how should it feel.
This applies even with various FF sticks that I have tried and discarded over the years.
By the way, I've yet to find a vive game where I can simply fly around some world. It's the first thing I've wanted to do since I heard about virtual reality and yet no one has made it.
Saitek/MadCatz had some financial problems (made some wrong bets on farm simulators or something) and some of their equipment is currently hard to get ahold of. The good (?) news is logitech recently bought them up so perhaps they'll turn on the manufacturing line again.