Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

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Not at all stupid! Very real question that's been asked by aviation safety agencies around the world for decades!

Sometimes there are genuine issues with instruments. As well, note that most GA airplanes operate their crucial instruments and gyros via vacuum pump and they need to be re-calibrated after a while even in regular flight.

But I believe much more frequently, inexperienced humans distrust their instruments and trust their instincts/guts/feelings/body more. It's very very unnerving for inexperienced pilot to lost their sense of sight, ALL of their body is telling them they're turning and need to correct it, and some 1972 vacuum gyro is telling them they're going straight and don't touch anything.

Other times, things just accumulate, little drifts and changes and influences. Let's say that you're in cloud and trust your instruments, but after a while for whatever reason your VSI (Vertical Speed Indicator) is showing that you're descending 500ft/minute. What control inputs do you provide to correct that, without any visual references? There are right and wrong answers and integrating the basic six instruments, building correct mental picture of your position and angle and direction from these very limited and separate instruments, without visual reference, for long periods of time, is more tricky for untrained personnel than may be immediately obvious :-/

Not a real pilot, have never piloted a real plane, but I love my sims and have put considerable resources into building my aluminium profile simrig.

I was practicing increasingly denser fog/low visibility ILS landings of the F-16 in DCS, on my TrackIR'd 32"x3 triple screen sim rig (with transducers for buffeting sensations etc).

With triples (and much more so with VR, I'll transition to a Crystal "soon") you do develop a semi/meta(?)-"physical" connection with the sim after a while.

At a point visibility got so reduced I would completely experience vertigo. Even though I told myself it's only a sim, just look at the instruments (and the F-16 has so many, including HUD with the ILS glidescope), my head would spin out and I'd completely bork the landing.

Only after several more hours was I able to do it (with visibility so bad that the runway would only pop out when right on top of it metres from the ground). It would take a lot more to get comfortable with it, but by that point I had enough and - I still have nightmares about it. :)

Can completely understand how cloud based vertigo in a real plane with your life on the line has killed and will continue to kill so many. Mad respect to the real pilots here who have mastered this.

The thing that a sim never can simulate (not even a full-motion sim) are the various ways the vestibular system can get confused by e.g. the coriolis force when you move your head while in a turn that makes your feel like you're turning around another axis.

Most sim pilots can fly on instruments without a problem, because it's precisely the conflicting information between the instruments and your vestibular system that makes it easy to get disoriented. Flying a sim, you'll never have your ear telling you that you're leaning on your side even though you're flying straight and level, or vice versa, so you'll never be tempted to side with your vestibular system.

In a real plane, just turning a tight turn and suddenly looking down on the floor because you dropped something can induce conflicting vestibular information that's quite disconcerting even in day VFR.

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