I’m working on my PPL right now, and in my aviation circle we can’t wait until Flight Sim 2020 is released.
Even at $60 + hardware controllers, it’s a steal compared to actually flying a small single-prop.
Even at $60 + hardware controllers, it’s a steal compared to actually flying a small single-prop.
Now I just wish I could fly the Cirrus Vision jet in real life, like some Youtubers do.
Haven't tried the new MS flightsim yet. I hope they've put as much effort into physics as they did in visuals. Can't wait to give it a try.
Motion sickness isn't something I experience a tonne of in VR unless it's falling from up high or those rollercoaster simulations.
There is a flying VR game I used to play for awhile. Controls were a little difficult but it was quite fun and motion sickness wasn't a problem (in my case at least).
I don't suffer from seasickness normally, but a few years back we had a knotted up anchor chain so I went in to service the winch and there was a bit of a swell outside. In about 30 minutes I was quite ill. Once I fixed the winch and went out it all dissipated quickly when I could see the sea & horizon moving again.
I can see it being comfortable once you're in the air, but takeoff and landing might feel very weird :P
Funnily enough I've been playing Satisfactory a lot lately and I keep losing my stomach whenever I jump off really high places. I guess even non-VR games can affect you too!
But still, until artificial gravity can be generated, this is the closest it will come for the vast majority of people.
But definitely, any pilot will tell you that feeling all the forces is actually big part of good piloting, as you can feel what the airplane is experiencing & act accordingly. I took a ride in some small planes (a 4 person two motor plane and a glider) as well as an advanced small plane simulator and really, the simulator was good but not really comparable.
Not to mention extreme cases like air racing or aerial acrobatics where the forces are so extreme that they might prevent the pilot from having enough strength to execute control input or possibly even make them black out.
Going to argue against that generally. Vestibular disorientation is a significant killer of pilots. In instrument flying, you specifically train to ignore those sensations. Fly the numbers, not the feelings.
I've ridden it several times, and while I intellectually understand how it must work, it's still super convincing.
The sim was built out of an actual fuselage (Sikorsky S-76) with full controls, visuals were 8x projectors on a curved wall in front of and around the cockpit. Everything was bolted to the floor, no movement anywhere.
After 10-15 minutes I did a hard bank and my gosh, the whole world moved, and I could have sworn I was about to slide out of my seat. I panicked that I didn't have a harness on.
The instructor laughed and said that was quite normal and that many people get very motion sick.
So yeah, I can see that motion sickness, with the "right" setup, could easily be a thing.
This is why most 3d movies have very little happen in the virtual space between you and the screen. Since more than about 7 meters away is basically all the same final distance, it's fine.
That being said, it's the stuff flying at you that makes 3d seem worth the extra money, so they try to balance it. Some people will still get very ill even with the small amount that movies do.
I also think discriminating between motion sickness, flight simulator sickness and virtual reality sickness is splitting hairs, or at least a gradual difference. One could claim motion sickness requires real motion, but you have that in a good flight simulator, too, and most VR setups allow one to, at the least, move one’s head freely.
At Oshkosh he jumped into a $250,000 Frasca simulator and did a complete flight with no assistance /and/ the sales guy turning off various parts of the avionics. He’s 15.
TLDR don’t wait around for Microsoft.
There are other feelings, such as buffeting before a stall, that you'll miss on a sim. But flight training is very explicit about those situations, so you'll learn them when transitioning to a real plane. Avoiding uncoordinated flight is something that pervades your whole flight experience; it might be hard to retrofit it onto a sim-trained student.
There are other habits, but that's the most notable one when I'm comparing the two environments.
https://www.faa.gov/pilots/safety/pilotsafetybrochures/media...
https://www.aviation-accidents.net/tag/spatial-disorientatio...
For example, I explicitly stopped using a supposedly more realistic yoke controller in favor of a HOTAS joystick because I repeatedly found that I just _can't_ translate the physical inputs to a real plane. Yoke controllers in particular seem hard to get right (or maybe mine is just bad), but more generally, PC controller axes have a surprisingly low resolution (just 256 steps on an axis) making them wildly less precise than real thing, plus there's no force feedback. Using a completely different (and more precise) type of controller seems to help keep my brain from drawing conclusions it shouldn't.
Simulators _do_ seem helpful for more abstract stuff, like going through checklists, practicing maneuvers, experimenting... so long as you're very intentional about what you're trying to learn. I think I benefited some from practicing ground reference maneuvers [0] in X-Plane with a VR headset, for example, since they're largely visual and aren't tightly tied to physical inputs. On the other hand, practicing stalls in the simulator has probably lost me a decent amount of time in the air with my CFI trying to un-learn the wrong ideas I picked up, due to both control differences and (I think) simulation differences.
[0] https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/a...
- learning flying yourself means you will probably learn the wrong procedures, that a CFI would correct. For example, if you're not flying a landing pattern, your landing procedure is wrong. So use a real 172 checklist, POH and flight maneuver procedures. Also how to handle ballooned landings.
Source: commercially-rated airplane pilot that used MSFS for 20 years.