Comment by inoffensivename | Hacker News Reader

Comment by inoffensivename | Hacker News Reader

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inoffensivename

Airline training takes place in a multi-million dollar simulator, which is a 1:1 replica of the flight deck in a room on hydraulic struts. The struts provide feedback and the sensation of acceleration... to a certain extent. They are the state of the art for training, you can get your whole type rating for the airliner in a simulator without ever having touched the real jet.

Even in this case, I would say the simulator has specific strengths, and that is to teach instrument flying procedures. Landing the simulator is pretty different than landing the real thing, there is some negative transfer (the bad habits I was referring to).

Retail flight simulator flight models are just toys. They don't do a good job of simulating the behavior of the airplane close to the ground (e.g. during landing), nor are even the expensive ones necessarily accurate at the edge of the flight envelope (near/at stall).

I don't think haptic seat and VR change much, you are still better off getting into a real plane and just flying. You can probably do quite a bit of flying for the cost of all this gear.

How much flying are you going to get for the cost of a $300 Quest 2, a $200 chair, a $400 joystick, and $40 for Microsoft flight simulator? Throw in a gaming PC for $4,000 and round to $5,000. How many hours, and where, can I get flight time for that price, and will I have a PC to continue using after those hours are over?

You'll get about half way to a third of the way through a PPL, depending on the kind of plane you rent and where you live.

Note that struts do not provide acceleration directly, but by rotating you in relation to the existing gravity. This means they can generally only simulate 1 g situations, unless I'm misinformed.

You’re not misinformed, but perhaps underinformed.

The hexapod both provides acceleration and rotates to use gravity to simulate continuous acceleration.

The brilliant part is that it trade between these two modes below human vestibular thresholds. So you can’t tell whether your sense of acceleration is coming from movement or orientation.

I took a flight physiology course with Larry Young who modeled the human vestibular system as a set of feedback loops with known gains. And an awesome graduate course entirely on flight simulation.

Exactly, for example accelerating down the runway on takeoff is simulated by tilting the whole room so you're actually reclining slightly.

> I don't think haptic seat and VR change much, you are still better off getting into a real plane and just flying.

Indeed.

And unlike your haptic seat and VR, you can't hit pause on a real plane whilst you go have a shit, eat dinner or answer a phone call. :)

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