I’m contemplating getting a PPL, but I’m very prone to motion sickness trying to read while flying. If I’m not resting, turbulence is just fine. First-person-shooters make make me sick, but third-person do not.
> I get violently seasick in any normal ocean swell but have never thrown up on a commercial airline flight. Personally I find light planes in good weather to be somewhat more nauseating than commercial airliners, but nowhere near as bad as a boat. That said, I felt really sick during my first lesson and continued to get queasy whenever my instructor touched the controls. If you tend toward motion sickness, try to find an instructor whose style is to talk you through everything rather than demonstrate and correct with his or her hands and feet. A $100 electronic ReliefBand[1] for your wrist will probably help but the keys to avoiding motion sickness while training are the following:
> - Eyes out of the cockpit; fly by watching the nose’s position relative to the horizon and periodically check the instruments to see if the visually established attitude is getting you what you want in terms of airspeed and climb rate
> - Instructor talking to you instead of working the stick him or herself
> - Fly on non-turbulent days
> Maybe it will take you a few extra hours to get your certificate but you’ll have more fun.
> Oh yes, be sure to carry a barf bag for any passengers. In the immortal words of Charles Wright, instructor at East Coast Aero Club, “Having a passenger throwing up violently a few inches from you can be very distracting.” […]
> Personally I found that motion sickness was less of an issue at 50 hours than 5, less at 100 than 50, and barely a memory at 200 hours. The only way that I can bring on any symptoms is to let a friend fly through bumpy skies while I dig through luggage in the back of the airplane. The foregoing notwithstanding, I still try to avoid turbulence because I find it wearing and uncomfortable.
As a pilot I can shoot approaches with the hood on in turbulence for 2-3 hours a day and it doesn't bother me much. 4-5 hours in a single day when I was doing my instrument training was pushing it, but a lot of that was probably related to heat, dehydration, etc as well I think.
As a kid I was also prone to seasickness which subsided as I grew older, but since moving away from New Orleans into the center of the US I have completely lost any tolerance for boat-related motion sickness, I've found.
I think it's like so many other things: high tolerance comes from regular use.