The Real World

By Karl Gjertsen

After all of the debate and comments on how 'Flight Simulator Flying' compares to 'Real World Flying', I would like to share with you one of my experiences.

I have been using Flight Simulator for several years now and I am also a private pilot. Whilst the weather may prevent me from flying for real, I can always sit at my PC, play God with the weather and try a new plane with Flight Simulator.

However, one major question is how realistic is Flight Simulator compared to real life. Whilst this has been the subject of many articles, all I can say is that as a procedural trainer, it helped me gain my Instrument Rating. The next question is how accurate is the scenery? This depends on if you are asking about the default scenery or add-on scenery, and can be further complicated as to just how accurate you want the scenery to be. 

I often use Flight Simulator to fly a route that I will be flying in the future, to get a feel for the flight, especially if it is to an airfield that I am unfamiliar with. This can include getting an idea of any visual features on the route to having an idea of what the airfield should look like when I approach it.

To show what I mean, I have put together this article showing pictures of an actual flight and the Flight Simulator screen shots for the same flight.

On August 17th, a friend and myself travelled from Teesside (EGNV) in the North East of England to Lelystad (EHLE), Holland, in a 1975 Cessna 177B. The aircraft is owned by a group of 10 people and both of us are part-owners. The flight would stop at Southend (EGMC) in the South East of England and then onwards to Lelystad. I faxed Lelystad the day before that we expected to arrive at 13:30 (local) and that we would only be staying for a few hours.

The real flight was in a Cessna Cardinal, but for the Flight Simulator flight, I used the default C182 flown at the same speed as the Cardinal.

The weather at Teesside was:
0820Z 190/08 8000 Sct035 12/10 1013

As some of  you may know, this translates as Wind 190° at 8 Knots, 8,000 Meters visibility (just under 5 miles), Scattered cloud at 3,500 feet, Temperature 12°, Dew-point 10°, pressure 1013 Milibars (standard pressure).

The routing of the first leg would be:
Teesside - GAM (VOR) - FNL (NDB) - MLD (TACAN) - Southend

Runway 23 - Teesside

Teesside's Tower

Teesside's Main Terminal

Gamston Airfield


The VOR can be seen to the left of the airfield

Fenland Airfield


(Look closely - It is there!)

Approaching Southend

Outside Southend's Terminal

After a quick turnaround at Southend, our route would be:
 

Southend - DVR (VOR) - KOK (VOR) - COA (VOR) - HSD (VOR) - VRP ROMEO (close to Rotterdam's airspace) - PAM (VOR) - Lelystad

Dover Ferry Terminal

Ostend Airfield

Approaching HSD VOR

Somewhere Over Holland!

Llanding At Lelystad

As we taxied from the runway in Lelystad I wrote down our landing time and asked to park outside the tower, where immigration was waiting to see us. As we completed the aircraft shutdown and logged the flight time, we noticed that we had arrived at 13:29 - We had flown over 420 miles, been delayed at Southend and had arrived 1 minute earlier than expected--not bad!

The return flight was done in one flight taking, following the same route but in reverse and took just under 4 hours.

If you want to fly IFR, then the scenery is not important and all you have to do is find good scenery for your departure and destination airfields. VFR flights also need all of the scenery along the route and this might take to find.

The scenery used was Don Alexander's Teesside Scenery (egnv21.zip) and NL2000's Netherlands scenery (nl2000*.zip).

So after the flight's have been completed, how realistic was the flight scenery? You decide...

Karl Gjertsen
karl.gjertsen@touchdown-software.com