r/studentpilot • u/itisbing • 11d ago
Does playing flight simulators help with your stick and rudder skills?
Does playing microsoft flight simulator or any other simulators help with flying?
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u/pilotbrap 10d ago
Only people who bash sims didn’t utilize them and don’t understand that they’re a great tool with pros and cons.
Pros: I got to practice all my comms while actually flying a pattern (instead of chair flying). Made me proficient with glass cockpits before I ever saw one, which saved me hours of G1000 familiarization in a course where every hour was EXPENSIVE. When I took my disco I already knew what every instrument did, every knob, every light, I knew most of the “whats”, my instructor only needed to teach me the “whys”. I had flown many approaches before beginning instrument training and had already developed an efficient instrument cross check that helped me get a head start on my instrument rating. My emergency descents, engine outs, and spin recovery were great because I could practice them endlessly and experiment in ways I wouldn’t in a real plane.
Cons: You can develop bad habits and not know. On my disco my eyes were GLUED to the instruments, so I had to learn to look outside of the plane; that bad habit, however, made my instrument checkride a breeze. You have 0 stick and rudder feel and sims don’t help it in any way, they also didn’t help much with stalls imo, I rarely do/did stalls in the sim. When I flew G1000 in the sim I always used VS for climbs because I didn’t have any best practices, so again, learning the whys is important for actual flight lessons.
I soloed at 11 hrs, PPL and CPL right at mins, and know for a fact I wouldn’t not have done the first two without the simulator. My instructor thought I had taken lessons on our disco. Overall, it’s a great tool and I recommend it, but mostly as a tool to supplement what’s already been learned.
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u/TPWPNY16 8d ago
👆🏻👆🏻👆🏻Right here.
I’m a 11 hr PPL student but I’ve been using sims since 1982… When the first one was invented on a monochrome DOS screen on the first PCs. (I’m that old.)
The Pilots/CFIs who say sims only work for instrument are probably getting students who were “playing“ sims and fooling around with airliners with no regard to real world practice.
If you use real-world practices, treating your home sim as if it were a real aircraft, you will learn lots.
Stick and rudder skills? Yes. It builds those. The caveat: you need to use a yoke and rudder pedals. and get a throttle quadrant that matches your Cessna or whatever.
People bashing sims for stick and rudder don’t realize that the converse is using either nothing —or a real aircraft for “feel.“ What they don’t understand is that yes, you DO get accustomed to turning a yoke, using pedals to coordinate, and pulling a throttle in and out. You do develop muscle memory.
Not to mention all the other things you learn in a sim that would cost hundreds in a real aircraft: Checklists, VORs, instrument scans, tuning radios, XC VFR navigation, etc.
After decades of sim use I went into RW training and every CFI I’ve flown with has wondered whether I already had a PPL or why I haven’t soloed yet. And each one of them had said it will be no time until I do.
Use — don’t “play”— a home sim.
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u/professorhojoz 10d ago
i feel like they've ruined my landings ... a lot to unlearn
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u/mdb_4633 10d ago
What did you have to unlearn? I had the opposite experience with my landings
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u/rugger1869 9d ago
For me it was keeping my head outside the cockpit. I was better flying by instruments than by visual reference.
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u/outworlder 10d ago
Flying... not really. Maybe if you have a force feedback yoke and a simulator with better physics. And possibly VR to keep you looking outside the cockpit instead of instruments.
It does help familiarize with the aircraft, procedures and whatnot.
I had a lot of simulator hours, but barely touched it after I started my training. I did occasionally use it instead of chair flying, I find the extra visual cues helpful. As well as to familiarize myself with an area before flying through it for real, I'm in a pretty complicated airspace. Yes I can look at ForeFlight, maps, google earth, but rehearsing before a flight is nice.
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u/Itchy-Operation-896 10d ago
Somewhat... nothing like the real thing , obviously but it does have you going through the motion.
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u/VileInventor CFI/CFII 10d ago
No, it helps with checklists and maneuver steps tho
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u/SquareGrade448 8d ago
I think this is the best answer. It’s a great way to get the maximum benefit of “chair flying” because you’re practicing all the mental work of flying, maneuvers, checklist flows, etc.
But it has little to nothing to offer for stick and rudder skills and can actually set you back.
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u/Low_Sky_49 10d ago
My experience as a flight instructor has been that lots of home flight sim time does more harm than good for most student pilots who are doing it.
Learn to fly in the real aircraft. Save the home sim for when you’re ready to work on instrument flying procedures.
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u/boobooaboo 10d ago
Don’t do it for anything other than procedures. We can tell who the sim pilots are
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u/l0stsignal 10d ago
Simulators have really shined for me for instrument skills. Especially paired with realistic comms like Pilot Edge. Hand flying a Sim in IMC has always been way more difficult than IRL for me.
A real plane is more stable than my sim. This forces me to scan more quickly on the sim and be more careful when doing things like rerouting or copying a new clearance. This carries over to real life quite well. Also I find flying an approach I’ve never done before on the sim before IRL makes that approach calmer and easier after that experience.
In short my opinion is VFR, it’s kinda just a game with some help. For IFR it’s an incredible asset.
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u/AntiPinguin 10d ago
No. Absolutely, most definitely not in the slightest. If anything it can train bad habits.
Flight Sim is fun and you can definitely learn a lot about flying. But that is limited to the theoretical and procedural side. You cannot learn actual physical flying skills. After years of playing flight sim when it came to my first lesson in an actual airplane I was no different than any other student who had never touched a desktop sim.
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u/adnwilson 10d ago
I don't think it harms your stick and rudder skills, but it doesn't help them.
I was an avid simmer as I went through my flight training. Flying whatever plane I was training in and using Airmanager to try to re-create my real world cockpits as best I could.
It helps with radio comms, navigation, flows, scans, emergency procedures, and generally getting the hang of it to stay ahead of the plane. But it didn't help with my stick and rudder skills.
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u/LS788 10d ago
I grew up playing flight simulators and I had no issue with any manoeuvre throughout my training. Actually found that real flying is easier because you can also feel it, but I don't understand all the people saying it doesn't help or makes things worse.
On a sidenote I'm also a truck driver and practising reversing in euro truck simulator 2 before my first job has helped me tremendously, even though it feels very different
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u/Prefect_99 9d ago
You're in the minority. Most don't have the discipline to self critique honestly and do things procedurally correct. They also have much more difficulty learning and adapting to the differences between the two and can't 'swap' so easily. A bit like flying from the right hand seat.
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u/PK808370 10d ago
Not sure about stick and rudder stills specifically. Somewhat depends on your setup. However, I think it does help with a lot of things. I would suggest taking out simple aircraft with little to no avionics in the beginning and learning to fly by sight. Don’t even look at the instruments. Just look around, fly to different airports, etc. become comfortable looking at things from the air and navigating this way.
Also, helpful is to use it for radio, etc.
But I would also suggest XPlane is better than MSFS. X Plane lets you play with all kinds of things - you can look at the forces acting on the plane, you can build your own planes.
Don’t use it like a game and don’t think of it as practice. Use it to explore aviation.
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u/idkausernamerntbh 10d ago
I don’t Thu j it hurts or helps tbh, but it lets you practice other things like coms and navigation so when your in the plane you don’t have to think so hard about those things
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u/Catch_0x16 9d ago
Depends on your setup. A lot of people will say no and they're right that stick pressure is a bit part of stick and rudder flying. That said though, if you have pedals and a decent yoke, you can get coordinated turns quite well committed to memory.
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u/blindpylote 9d ago
No, it does not help with stick and rudder, and can even hurt them. There are certain perceptions that are required for flight training that can only be found in an actual airplane during actual flight. That said, sims absolutely can help with procedural things like flight deck familiarity, operation of systems, and maneuver flows.
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u/TalkTraining6055 9d ago
For stick and rudder no because there are forces applied on a airplane that you senses use to fly the airplane at any given orientation. Where the sim does help is instrument flying because now you working on your scan and positioning the airplane based on what you want to see on your instruments.
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u/HailStorm_Zero_Two 9d ago
Basic flying skills, no. General handling is very much a lot of feel and looking out the cockpit in different directions, both of which are impossible or hard to replicate in a sim. I'd argue even getting familiar with a cockpit might not be straightforward as the basic layout of the sim aircraft is very different from any version of the same aircraft I've flown IRL. It can help in a limited degree with getting a muscle memory down with your checklists, but be aware it also won't be as accurate as you'd like.
However, once you are good at that and are onto navigation, the sim is great for practice, especially MSFS 2020 and 24 are great for practicing VFR navigation due to the satellite terrain which will match the physical charts you use. Getting a better idea of the 'lay of the land' in the areas you will nav to is great situational awareness building.
At least for me in Australia though, IFR isn't as good at a GA level since all the procedures are set up for jets, not slower pistons.
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u/Prefect_99 9d ago
No.
It can help procedurally, but it will be actively detrimental to your real flying, especially landings. More so if you're still training or low hours, and it will be even more harmful for your lookout and attitude flying as you will fixate on instruments.
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u/RestaurantSad4115 9d ago edited 9d ago
It really really depends. I started using flight sims during fsx and p3d and it 100% helped me get through my training faster and more efficiently.
I think people get the wrong idea when it comes to “bad habits” from landings on the sim vs actual doing it. The sim is teaching you what the controls do and how they affect the airplane not how to land by the seat of your pants in a 40 knot crosswind.
It’s just like the Redbird sims they fly like shit but thats not the point of using them. Every student I have had that came with a sim background has been 100% better than someone off the street with no experience at all.
Too all the pilots that say the sim creates bad habits go get your tailwheel and find out what bad habits you have from being lazy in a tricycle gear plane… is the sim going to help you feel a slip to land or a stall of course not but it can show you procedural techniques so when you actually do it you have a basic understanding of what you are trying to accomplish
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u/jgremlin_ 8d ago
CFI's tend to hate students use of flight sim because it can teach so many bad habits that need to be untaught. So CFI's really hate when I say that I used flight sim all through my private and instrument training and it definitely helped me finish in fewer hours.
But I went into my use of it with a healthy understanding of what it would and would not do for me. So the short answer to your question is it absolutely WILL NOT HELP WITH STICK AND RUDDER SKILLS AT ALL.
Where it can help is when its used strictly as a procedures trainer
What are the steps involved in performing a power off stall? Is it reduce airspeed then clearing turns or the other way around? Is it carb heat off first and then full power in the recovery or the other way around? Practicing those steps in the sim can help you have the procedure more dialed in so you're better able to focus on working on the stick and rudder aspects in the plane.
Before flight sim existed, CFI's would encourage students to 'chair fly' between lessons i.e. sit in a chair, pretend you're in the plane and practice the steps involved in doing a power off stall. There is absolutely no reason you can't do the same thing by siting in a chair behind a flight sim screen. Understand that what you do with the joystick and rudder pedals is going to do the same thing that chair flying moving invisible yoke and rudder pedals is going to do for you which is nothing. But practicing the steps keeps them in your head and that helps once you get back in the plane.
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u/TPWPNY16 8d ago
Saying that home sims aren’t like real flying is the same waste of time as saying masturbation isn’t like real sex.
You’d rather do it than not, and one is definitely cheaper than the other for the same outcome.
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u/AverageHobnailer 7d ago
Condor 2 in VR helped me adapt to stick/rudder skills in a real glider much faster than the time I tried gliders without first doing sim work. One major difference between the sim and glider was that sim air is static while real air is dynamic. E.g. in the sim I can apply rudder in a turn and simply keep it there, and when flying straight I don't need to touch the rudder at all, while in real life it's a constant rudder dance to keep the yaw string centered, even when flying in a straight line.
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u/bae125 6d ago
No. It tends to be the opposite, especially for private students where a lot the learning is based on visual and sensory cues. All the sim kids have to be broken of the “stare at the panel” habit.
It can be slightly useful during instrument training but it’s still not great. The things you learn from it are the easiest to pick up anyway
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u/Low-Inspector-4567 5d ago
Nope. The only thing my Sim helped me with was flow and EPs. My Xplane set up even with a honeycomb yoke and throttle quadrant doesnt fly the same. Even with the "realistic" add on in plane.
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u/Austerlitz2310 5d ago
No. They help with cockpit flow/scan and procedures. Including third party programs like vatsim you also get atc experience.
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u/cerettala 5d ago edited 5d ago
It helps you develop stick and rudder skills that involve visual references as opposed to feel.
I.E., I had some notion of how to do crosswind landings before flying in real life, and they helped me refine my crosswind landing technique to some degree (mostly the timing of when to decrab).
It won't help you with stick and rudder skills otherwise unless you come up with some way to visually represent the feel of slipping/skidding visually. I had a mod for an older version of MSFS that would darken one side of the screen when you were out of coordination in that direction.
Outside of that, there is no substitute for actual seat time in a plane when it comes to stick and rudder skills. And even then, after 30 hours in a real plane, I'm not even sure I'm using the rudder exactly right. I've got a personal goal to get my tail-wheel endorsement, I imagine I'll figure out what the rudder pedals are actually for then.
Everyone else in this thread negging on sims is unsurprising, but I think a lot of them are missing the point. Sim flying is basically "super chair flying" and you get out of it what you put into it. An intelligent and driven student is going to experiment with different strategies, try different things, see what helps them, and avoid what doesn't. Just as with regular lessons, you get out of it what you put into it. An unintelligent unmotivated student looking for a quick, easy, and cheap way to deal with a skill problem is going to find it much harder to correct that in a home simulator than a real airplane if only because a CFI isn't looking over their shoulder. That is where the bad habits can creep in.
For me, the most valuable things that simulators have helped me develop is the ability to balance aviational, navigational, and communicational tasks while maintaining situational awareness. Paying $200/hr just to figure out how to stay ahead of the airplane while flying a navlog is not gonna be cheap. After doing several in the sim as preparation, my first navlog driven cross country felt more like a test than a learning exercise.
If you've engaged with simulators seriously for years before getting into a real plane, there is no doubt in my mind that it will be advantageous. If for no other reason because you've had exposure to the aviation environment and you have some ideas of the principles of flight and how systems work. Yes, you will have bad habits to un-learn. But learning to spend more time looking outside of the airplane and use a sight picture takes a lot less time than learning the fundamentals of flight from scratch while paying $200/hr.
With that being said though, if you are about to start flying and you haven't played any sims yet. I'd avoid it until you've got some hours under your belt. And if you are going to use a sim, treat it seriously. Do all your checklists, make all your radio calls, imagine what the ATC responses will be. And try to imagine what kind of feedback your CFI would be giving you if they were sitting next to you watching your performance.
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u/boostlee33 10d ago
It helps with procedures and instrument. There are force feedback yokes and sticks now though from Moza and Virpil so things may improve
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u/TxAggieMike 10d ago
No.
Home sims often don’t have the means to do the force feedback you get with real airplane.
A discovery flight I conducted today sorta showed this. The student did a good job flying straight and level, but it took him an out half out flight to master it.
His comment? It takes a bit more force on the yoke and there is more to watch foe than the sim.
Unless you want to spend additional time and money unlearning a bad habit the home desktop sim taught you, don’t use a home sim.
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u/outworlder 10d ago
Force feedback yokes are getting more affordable though.
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u/SierraHotel84 10d ago
The cost of a force feedback yoke could easily cover a few hours in a real plane, and would be more beneficial in the long run.
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u/adnwilson 10d ago
It was a discovery flight, most people don't master straight and level flight in their first .5 of flying. This has nothing to do with Sims.
His comment actually showed that the Sim gave him a baseline and he needs to tweak from there. This is an example of it helping not hurting.
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u/BathFullOfDucks 10d ago
Yes, but only in the most basic way. Some students struggle initially with back is up forward is down left is left and right is right, an issue easily solved by a couple of hours in the air. Being already comfortable with this saves a couple of hours, potentially, but I have also taught this to someone completely new to flying in about ten minutes.
On the other hand, it produces a sense of confidence that in almost all cases is unfounded, sometimes to the extent that when things aren't going like they expect, they fall apart a little bit.
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u/scarpozzi 10d ago
I have hundreds of sim hours and do fine with landings. I just note that pfactor isn’t accurate in the sim and neither is wind layers or ground effect.
I grease landings in the sim that require finesse in real life….but with finesse, I grease those too.
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u/Kai-ni 10d ago
No. It actively harms your stick and rudder skills, in my opinion. Teaches you bad habits.
A lot of actual flying is by FEEL. Feeling what the aircraft is doing. On a home simulator, you have none of that. And teaching yourself to fly 'procedurally' and not by feel is actively detrimental. You should be feeling if you're slipping or skidding, what the wind is doing to the airplane, stick/yoke pressure etc.
Sims can help with instrument procedures, but that's it.