How a Flight Simulator Can Be More Than a Game

It costs a lot of time and money to add an instrument rating to your Private or Commercial Pilot’s license. Once you have earned it, you don’t want to let it lapse and go to waste. Living, as I do, in Hawaii, I find that I don’t need to fly on instruments very often. However, island weather can change quickly and I need to remain practiced for those times when I am required to file and fly an IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) flight plan.



Instrument flying is not exactly like "never forgetting how to ride a bicycle." If you don’t fly IFR on a fairly customary basis, it is easy to become "out of form" and you don't want to risk your life and those of your passengers just because you failed to practice often enough to stay current. Recurrent training can be expensive, especially if your IFR flying skills are a bit "out of practice." Periodic IFR competency reviews with an instrument instructor are required by the FAA and, certainly, every instrument pilot wants those to go rapidly and smoothly. Much more essential than passing a flight check is the fact that you are required to maintain your IFR competency for the sake of yourself and those individuals who entrust you with their lives.



Although I can’t log the instrument flight time legally, as I could in an FAA-approved flight simulator, I have noticed that utilizing an excellent flight simulator on my home computer is an excellent way to prevent myself from getting rusty. I can practice all the instrument approaches I want, as often as I care to, at no real out-of-pocket cost. For years, I have employed various incarnations of Microsoft Flight Simulator for this purpose but recently I have become interested in the potential of a program referred to as Pro Flight Simulator. There’s a lot to admire about this simulator and there are very few bad points.



Many persons who employ this program have never (and probably never will) fly a real airplane in their lives. This type of user usually thinks of Pro Flight Simulator as a game, which, technically, it is. The other type of user is a licensed pilot, like me, who is more concerned with the idea that practice makes perfect.



Over the years, the obstacle with home computer-based flight simulators is that they were not very realistic in terms of lag as it pertains to instrument and control response. Personally, I have found the airplanes modeled by these flight simulators to be actually much harder to land smoothly than their real-life counterparts. When flying a real plane on instruments, there is a lag between the time when a correction is input to the controls and when the result that input will show up on the instrument panel as the aircraft responds. Pilots get used to this, so the more realistic a flight simulator is in this regard, the more worthwhile the software is to the practicing pilot. There is also lag in certain instruments themselves. For example, it takes a magnetic compass a few seconds to read correctly after the completion of a turn. You need it to perform this way in your flight simulator, as well.



While there are numerous nifty parts of Pro Flight Simulator that I could talk about, I will limit myself to those of most significance to pilots using this flight simulator to maintain their IFR skills. In short, the instruments and controls are not only true-to-life; they act very much like the real thing. In addition, the over 200 airplanes integrated with Pro Flight Simulator act much like their real-world counterparts do when flying through real air. You can control the weather conditions to simulate the IFR weather you are going to run into in real life and you can flight plan routes all over the world to and from twenty thousand different airports. For VFR (Visual Flight Rules) flying, Pro Flight Simulator’s photo-realistic scenery and landscapes seem very much like the real thing.



There’s much more to this terrific flight simulator. You can learn more by examining the advertising materials online. You can buy it and download it on the Internet but since it is such a huge download, I strongly suggest you order a DVD from the member’s area.



About the4 Author:



Bob Gillespie writes on many subjects including flight simulators. He is a full-time Internet marketer and author who lives on the island of Maui in Hawaii. Learn more about home flight simulators at Bob's blog:



http://flight-simulator.inetwyoming.com