Simviation Forums

I've been doing the missions and free flight in FSX fine. Even tried online till someone landed on top of me
However last night I decided to try the lessons, and selected the VOR flying lesson. The guy talking started going on about stuff at teh top left of the panel, whilst the vor stack was at the right. I tried another lesson, (taxiing) and no-one pointed out the route. Are the lessons all this poorly designed??

I have found the lessions in every FS have been very poorly made/don't work well. In fs2002 and fs2004 they were so bad if you made one mistake you failed. They were ultra unrealistic, the best way to learn is do a little reading up, get some charts, common sence, and go try and use some VORs to navigate.

I have not even looked at the lessons in FSX but the lessons in the earlier versions STUNK big time.In order to pas them you had to hold your head at just the right angle and be at the right place on the right day hour minute and second to get it right. And even then if it was not your lucky day you were S.O.L.

I've been doing the missions and free flight in FSX fine. Even tried online till someone landed on top of me
However last night I decided to try the lessons, and selected the VOR flying lesson. The guy talking started going on about stuff at teh top left of the panel, whilst the vor stack was at the right. I tried another lesson, (taxiing) and no-one pointed out the route. Are the lessons all this poorly designed??

The taxi one is a solo.  No instructor included.

I find the lessons to be hard and the checkrides nearly impossible.  ALthough ih ave imporved a lot since the last time I tried them

When I did the PPL, I filed like 20 times, and then I finally passed after weaving back and forth on final.  They are good for training, but take what they tell you in context.  The checkrides I wouldn't bother with.

and all this time I thought I was just a bad pilot. Thank you for clearing this up! The checkrides really are nearly impossible. But I do have to say that I knew absolutely nothing about flying when I first got FS9 in September last year, and I started taking the lessons and learned the basics. So in a way they are good, but the checkrides.. omg. Especially the commercial pilot checkride, I tried it and made like every single mistake, though it seemed to me like everything was going smoothly. Oh well. I have yet to try the jet lessons

The lessons provide good information, but don't beat your self up over them if they don't work oujt.  I may take the Jet lessons simply to learn how to fly them, and leave it at that.

I never was a big fan of the lessons, or the checkrides... They aren't very thorough and they're buggy..

BUT.. I'll tell you one thing about the PPL checkride... it IS realistic in some ways. You have to nail your altitudes, headings and airspeeds.. that's the key to passing. Flying a plane that precisely is pretty difficult without physical sensations and and periferal vision (and most simmers get frustrated and lose interest). Along those lines, simming kinda promotes sloppy flying, by not rewarding precise flying... An avid simmer who can fly the daylights out of the KingAir (so he thinks.. take a look at his flight analysis and I'll bet he did some things in that flight that would have paying businessmen passengers lobbying to have him grounded), will fail the 172 checkride miserably... unless (and here's the great analogy) he spends as much time learning and practicing for it, as he would a REAL checkride. If you can whiz through the checkride, perfectly, you've got a good handle on being a realistic simmer.

No matter what you think about them.. practicing until you can pass the PPL checkride WILL make you a better sim pilot.

I agree, the lessons do teach how to do things but for most people their aim is not to be a ultra realistic simmer. One reason is because with the equipment provided you just can't. If you have the money for multi monitor displays and yokes etc then I can see realisitc simming beeing great. Try navigation from start to finish without a GPS get some charts and slide your (IFR ready)2d panel up so you can not see the world at all, try and fly from one point and put it down on the runway without any visual sight aids. That is the best training I think this sim has to offer.

Oh gosh yes... The sim is so good for instrument practice, it will definately aid you when you're going after a real instrument rating. I've always been enthralled at how realistic the sim is, along those lines. It's superior to the OnTop software that the FAA approved for 10 hours of real instrument traing.. that's for sure.

My point about the checkrides is that it will definately hone your sim-piloting... Other than the discipline involved (that's where it is similar), the lessons and checkrides don't lend themself to real training and require more of a dedication to fundementals than most simmers practice.

Every instructor I've flown with has asked me or made some comment about how people who use flight simulator do much better in instrument flying than those who haven't.  But, on the same account, after approximately 15 hrs of instrument training so far, I decided to give the instrument checkride a go, just to see what it was like, and the first thing that you do is a VOR approach into Seattle with a missed approach, and after I went missed, the instructor informed me I had failed the instrument checkride because apparently I did everything horribly wrong. :-?  So that was the last time I tried that.