avallillo

Yes, I've spent a bit of time in full motion simulators, hundreds of hours in fact, and they were all "fun" even though they were keeping score! But that is to be expected in a 38 year career as a professional pilot. As it happens, though, I actually had an hour in this simulator that I suspect you are going to - Dream Aero in Montgomery County Maryland. I wrote a piece about it here at Flightsim.com a few years ago. (https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/content.php?20343-Dream-Aero-USA) You will enjoy it, be certain of that. It looks exactly like a 737-800 on the inside, and the wrap around visual is outstanding. It runs on the commercial version of XPlane, at least when I was there, and with but a few exceptions flies very well. I never flew the 737 IRL. but I did spend 10 years on the 727, which flies pretty much the same, and on that basis it seems realistic except for the fact that when I flew it, it had a detent-like notch at the neutral point of the aileron travel of the yoke. Real airplanes do not have a detent at neutral, and it is bothersome in the sim. Particularly in roll, what is needed is smooth small control pressures, and the detent requires some effort to overcome, thus you may end up in a pilot-induced-oscillation in the roll axis, at least until you get used to it. The pitch trim is also a bit more sensitive and difficult to get exactly right than the 727 airplane was. And, I presume, the 737. But with a few minutes of "flying" you can get yourself used to these quirks. Actually, if you have never flown a real airliner, you may be better off than a real pilot, since you have no preconceived notions! Have a ball, and write about it for the rest of us! And if Lamyl is your instructor, please give him my regards. Tony Vallillo

Have you checked the unit out in the Windows calibration? I am on my third Bravo (the first two had issues, and Honeycomb was very supportive and replaced both promptly) and even this third one occasionally hiccups in a manner similar to what you are describing with the erratic behavior of the axes. Try to check, in the Windows joystick calibration app, how the unit is being recognized and if it is displaying any unusual behaviors in the axes.

I fly an nxi C172 for CAP, and "that" (rol and pit always active, even when the FD is off) is NOT how it works. One bit of full disclosure - fortunately, the nxi that I fly does not have the Cessna MCAS (!) in it; it is just the more advanced PFD and MFD, without the "Otto has the airplane" override (I forget what they actually call it - perhaps ESP). I have no idea what additional tendrils the automatics have on manual operations in an airplane with the ESP. In any G1000 plane (nxi or original) with the Garmin GFC700 autoflight, disengaging the autopilot will leave you in complete manual control, BUT with the Flight Director still engaged and displaying the command bars-either to the last settings you had the autopilot working under, or PIT/ROL if all else has dropped out. To get rid of the PIT/ROL, you must turn off the FD. THEN you end up with no annunciators showing on the PFD. You have been in full manual control since the AP was turned off, but it can sometimes be confusing since the FD command bars are still visible, commanding whatever they had been doing before Otto signed off. How well this is modeled in any given product is subject to review!

It is not entirely clear from your original post whether you want this to be a school for training (or, in the case of PC based flight simulation like this site supports, augmentation of training) for real world students, or a school to train people to use PC based flight simulation. If the latter, the sky is the limit, but in the case of the former goal you will run up against many regulatory hurdles, First of all, where do you live? In the USA this all comes under the authority (and some would say the thumb) of the FAA. Other countries have their own regulatory agencies, but it is safe to say that there has been very little movement, even recently, in the direction of large integration of PC based flight simulation into real world pilot training. In the USA, Redbird, the makers of a line of FAA certified training devices (which is what devices at this level are officially called) had done some work in that direction, on something of an experimental basis, using their own product line. Apparently without much success. Many flight schools now have Redbird trainers, but are quite limited in how they can use them, and for what (at least officially, in the sense that using them can satisfy one or another regulatory experience requirement). The purpose of all of this was to move toward an environment in which low cost (at least relatively speaking) trainers could be used for far more in a Private Pilot program than they are now allowed to be used. Nothing that you could do with a sim powered by XPlane (or P3D for that matter) can be much more than a small adjunct to an aviation training operation. Of course, you could do whatever you wanted in terms of setting up some sort of "flight experience" attraction (look up Dream Aero in the Washington DC area as an example, and a good one at that!). But none of it would be acceptable to the FAA as part of the required experience for any license or rating. For that you need certified hardware and software (Redbird, Frasca, etc) and licensed instructors (FAA CFI or FAA Ground Instructor). If you want to set up this "flight experience" operation, check out the flight training syllabus of any major training material supplier - Sporty's, Jeppesen, and the like. That will give you an idea of how the industry is structured in terms of what they teach. They all have to teach the test... By the way, if you are going to charge money for any of this, you will need the Pro version of XPlane, which is a hefty bit more than the entertainment version costs!

To gloat, of course!!

I remember the Captain Sim 707 - had it for FS9! It was very good for its time, although the cockpit had some flaws that would only be apparent to one like myself, who had actually flown them IRL. Having a passenger experience might possibly add to the enjoyment, at least for some. Joe Maldonado, down in Puerto Rico at his Project 727, has actually got at least three rows of cabin in his real 727 fuselage, which he has masterfully converted into a fantastic flight simulator from the cockpit to row 3! He also rigged a screen outside the pax windows on one side, to allow for a passenger view. This would be about as real as it gets, although he was only able to buy coach seats, not the leather covered first class variety. Simulating a passenger experience, however, has several more levels of realism than might be apparent at first glance. Number one- the comfort (or, in coach the discomfort) factor, and number two - the cost! Cost is easy to simulate - just hand over the actual cost of the appropriate air fare to either your spouse or your kids! Comfort, on the other hand, is relative. Coach today might compare favorably to "the hole" in a Gulag prison camp, but there is little else in the modern Western experience that really compares. Maybe sitting in the back seat of a compact 4 seat pickup truck for several hours? In any event, it is easy to calibrate comfort, since the price of a coach ticket, particularly on a fly-by-night low cost carrier can be less than any edition of FS2020!

Your English is far better than my Dutch!

As to how I "ran the numbers", I fly them for CAP in the real world, and I used my Garmin Pilot EFB program on my iPad, which has complete weight and balance calculators for all of the Cessnas I fly. As for a good 182 in MSFS - I have the Carenado Skylane in my FS2020 and it seems to be very good in terms of operation, and great on looks as well!

Welcome to the real world of light airplanes! The limitations you have tapped into are both real and frustrating. Many, if not most, GA pilots fly overweight at one time or another, the result of a combination of lack of knowledge of regulations and/or the POH limitations, and the automobile-induced line of thinking that posits that if a vehicle has so many seats and a fuel tank and a cargo area it must be OK to fill them all at the same time. By Gosh I paid for all of that so I should be able to use it! Actually, many autos are occasionally driven overweight too, but how many of us actually know the max weight for our car? As for your question about an airplane with the specs above, the answer is look for one that can handle roughly 1.5 times any of those limits and then go light! Example: the Cessna 182 can handle the range with its' reduced fuel load of 64 gallons (87 gallons is max in that airplane), and it can also handle the crew weight. It can also handle 200 lb of cargo, although some of that may have to go into the back seats instead of the cargo area due to weight and balance and/or structural limits. In any event, I just ran the numbers on a 182T with the G-1000 and with 400 lb in the front seats, 200 in the cargo area, and 72 gallons of fuel you are just within limits - 3093 weight and cg of 44.5 which, although somewhat aft loaded, is within the cg limits. With this setup you could go about 5 hours with an extra hour of fuel for reserve, and given a TAS of around 130 kts you would cover 650 miles no wind.

Very few Cessna 172's actually have rudder trim. It is apparently an extra cost add-on, and not really needed as much as it is on the 182.

Climbs in transport category jets are made according to a speed schedule that differs a bit from one type to another, but would approximate the following for all: Rotate slowly (around 1-2 degrees per second) to around 7 degrees nose up to become airborne after reaching VR, and then continue to pitch up to around 15 degrees nose up (or maybe a bit more if you are light) so as to maintain a speed of around V2 plus 10-15 knots, and climb at this speed to your clean-up altitude, which is part of the particular procedure for each type, and varies from 1000 AGL to 3000 AGL (also varies by country for noise abatement purposes). This portion of the climb is made using pitch attitude to control airspeed; ie, to reduce speed if you are too fast, raise the nose a bit, and do the opposite to increase speed. This is what is known as a constant airspeed climb, and is what the autoflight does when in FLC mode, and much of the time also in VNAV mode. At clean up altitude, lower the nose to between 5 and 10 degrees nose up to increase speed, and as you pass the speeds for retracting the flaps notch by notch, do so. After flaps up, let the speed build up to 250 knots and then raise the nose to resume a constant airspeed climb at 250 until passing 10,000 feet, at which point lower the nose to accelerate to enroute climb speed (in the 290-320 knot range depending upon what the performance manual and/or FMC tells you is best economy). At some point in the low to mid 20 thousands of feet, your Mach number will increase to the climb Mach number, which is typically between Mach .70 and Mach .78, and from then on until you reach cruise altitude you maintain the Mach number with pitch, not the indicated airspeed. A constant Mach climb will result in a slow reduction of IAS, but that is normal as altitude increases. In VNAV, the autoflight will do all of this for you, and it may be instructive to watch it perform, in order to get an idea of exactly what pitch attitudes are involved at each segment of the climb. But in any event, when flying manually, it is whatever pitch attitude it may take to achieve or maintain the desired IAS or Mach number, or to accelerate at the various change points. Although you did not ask about descent, it is the reverse of the above. Thrust levers to idle, and using pitch attitude (lower the nose) maintain the cruise Mach number until you reach the IAS called for in descent, typically between 280 and 350 knots depending upon airplane type and also wind (headwind or tailwind - the FMC will often calculate this best economy descent speed for you). Hold that speed with pitch attitude until you get to just above 10,000 feet, and then more or less level off (raise the nose to near level pitch) so that the airplane slows to 250 knots. Lower the nose again, and descent in a constant airspeed descent at 250 knots until ATC slows you down or you need to slow down to extend flaps and landing gear as you get close (within around 10 miles, maybe a bit more) to the airport.

Wouldn't we all! (chuckle!) Actually, that sort of shake-and-bake solution exists - they are called FAA certified training devices. Special pro version of FSX (P3D usually) or XP11; special panel and control hardware; completely dedicated, totally off-line computer; multi-screen visual. Nothing can be altered in any way without voiding the FAA certification, but as long as that cert is in force, you can log some or all of the events for various requirements. Just spent 2 weeks instructing on this sort of thing, and one of them broke! Happens to the best of them....

Is anyone else getting a strange process occurring when they try to open flightsim.com in Firefox? It looks like some kind of third party site, and it seems likely to be malware of some sort. For some unknown reason I also cannot add a screenshot, or any image to this message. So I cannot show you the screenshot I got of the splash screen that shows up before flightsim.com eventually gets through, somewhere around 10-15 seconds after it otherwise should. But the strange process appears to call itself DDos Protection by Cloudflare and it says that it is "checking your browser before accessing flightsim.com"

I would agree with you as far as FS2004 is concerned. That one is still a classic, perhaps the best of all time in its' day, and I still have the disks, albeit no longer installed on the new computer I got 6 months ago. But the add-ons were superb, particularly the Cal Classics and that other Golden Era site the name of which escapes me at the moment. We get spoiled by the realism, particularly the visual realism, of the new platforms, but those really were the "good old days"!

Not all of the airplanes, and certainly not the ones that come with the sim, are modeled accurately enough that you need to worry about the book settings. If you are interested in such things, a search of the internet for the POH for the make and model you are looking at will likely yield a pdf version of it, and Performance is section 5 in all modern manuals. Don't worry if you have a bit of trouble grasping it -- the advice you got here is excellent, and many pilots know little more about it than you do now!

Microsoft strikes again! That is so basic I'm amazed it was omitted. Fortunately, I don't fly the 2 airliners that came with my setup since I flew neither of them in real life (much easier to rely on stored memory and not have to "go to school" again on an airplane! As in real life these days, I'm having as much fun as I can stand with the little ones purely VFR, admiring the eye candy scenery.

Turns out that the steering on the aft bogies IS in fact correctly modeled in FS2020 (although not at all in XP11), at least visually. None of this really matters right now since there is apparently NO way to set up nose wheel steering other than with the rudder pedals; ie, no nose wheel tiller axis. This is a very serious omission on the part of whoever created this, and more or less makes the large jets unusable, at least in any realistic terms. Hopefully they will fix it, because the animation of the aft bogie steering is already there and very good.

I can find no nose wheel tiller (steering) selection among all of the various things in the controls section that you can assign buttons and axes to. Is there no way to steer the big ones on the ground in 2020????

Transport category jets actually have two steering inputs - the tiller, which has full authority up to around 60 degrees either side of center typically, and the rudder pedals, which have authority limited to typically 5 degrees either side of center. All taxiing is done with the tiller, except for long straight stretches like the journey to the reef runway at PHNL. The 747, specifically, has an additional feature to allow for tighter turns - the aft main gear bogies are also steered, by the tiller, and turn to allow sharper turns without scrubbing the aft tires. This all happens without any special pilot input other than the input on the tiller. The C-5 Galaxy had something like that too, except that the pilot had a switch on the center console that, when activated, allowed the aft bogies to free caster, which resulted in them turning in the opposite direction as the nose wheel all by themselves - exactly what happens on the 747, except that on the C-5 it is separately activated and not automatically invoked with the tiller. The C-5 can make a turn without the caster activated, but the radius will be larger and the tires on the aft bogies may scrub (be dragged sideways). The A-380 probably has a system like either of these as well, but I have not looked into it. The reason I know what I know is that I flew the C-5 for 9 years, and we had some 747 guys in our unit as well. All of this may or may not be modeled in a PC based flight simulation. I will have to take a look at it in 2020 and Xplane to see if the aft gear turns. Unless you are dealing with a C-5 simulation, it is all automatic and works with whatever you have set up to be the tiller. If you set nose wheel steering to your yaw axis, whatever that may be, it should all work when that control is moved.

Real pilots are trained on everything from Basic Aviation Training Devices (such as the Redbird TD desktop device) all the way up to FAA Level D flight simulators (what the airlines use and more or less what the military often uses as well). Fixed base trainers fall in the middle, with airlines, the military, and larger flight schools using them for portions of pilot training. A Level D flight simulator has a visual system plus motion; a fixed base trainer, by definition, has no motion but may actually have a visual system depending upon what it is designed to do. Back in the day, all simulators were fixed base - motion, in the sense we know it today, came about in the early 1960's when the jet simulators were developed. XPlane is another PC based flight simulation that is capable of generating weather, equipment failures and the like, depending upon just which airplane is being used (the add-ons vary in terms of how much they depict in the way of abnormal operations). If you are up for it, you can give yourself fits by programming failures and weather into your session. Then you too can proclaim - "I started the day out with brown hair and white shorts!"

I can add little to Herc79's excellent post, except to say that at this moment in time most of the kinds of airplanes that he mentions are apparently not yet available in FS2020 (since this thread is in the 2020 folder, I am assuming that you are indeed talking about Microsoft's newest). Actually, having recently gotten started in 2020 due to finally buying a computer that will run it well, I must say that the real strength of this platform, at this point, is indeed VFR flying. In fact, with the sole exception of Aerofly FS2, there is nothing out there that matches the scenery of 2020 (although XP11 with a ton of orthophoto scenery and something that will add some gamma and contrast to the picture will in fact come comfortably close). So what I am doing is going back to the past and recapturing some of my VFR flights in the new sim, which is so much like actually flying that it boggles the mind! My own 2 cents is that, except for simple IFR using VOR's and light planes, 2020 is not really ready for IFR flying at this point - the airplanes (in the case of airliners) and the GPS that are included are so stripped down that they are good for little other than going direct. XP11 (and I imagine Prepar3, although I do not have that one) are best for airliner type IFR for now. That will change some soon, but that is where I spend that kind of time now. But the VFR stuff in 2020 - amazing. Take full advantage of it!

I cannot cure the download problem, but I too had the no-real-weather, and the Marketplace not available, and some of the other woes you describe. Turned out it was all due to the fact that apparently the update shut off my online capability. This is a setting in the data section of options, and by enabling it all was made well again in Microsoftland. The idea to do this came from a YouTube video, and it is to MS's discredit that they apparently can't get out an update that would go smoothly without half of the world pulling out their hair (what little they have left after COVID!) and turning the air blue with invective! (like I was doing yesterday!)

What online status - how do you find that and change it??

First off, the system installed the "mandatory" update in the wrong order (at least according to a you tube video about it); ie, immediately demanded an update of something called the MS Store (I've been using XPlane for a while and this was new to me, what with the 202 having been installed by Jetline Systems on my new computer without my having to do anything). So, updated the "store". Then restarted 2020 and lo and behold, instead of installing the 1.4 (?) something update it went right ahead and installed a 1.5.7 (?) or something like that. Big update - around 22 GB, but on the new machine and with a very high data rate courtesy of XFinity and Comcast it only took around 15 minutes. Then I started it up again, and intended to update whatever it is in the marketplace that the video said needed updating - but the marketplace is now unavailable - grayed out entirely and non selectable! Went over to the other area to update some files that the video said needed updating and on every one of them it said that a newer version of the sim was required to update! So no updating there either! Live weather does not work either, but then again it never did, in my limited experience (It has taken so long, and so much cursing and swearing to get 2020 to the point where I can do anything with it that I almost trashed it. Worst sim experience in my long life in flight simulation!). I have yet to try flying in the new area to see if I can find all the landmarks that 10 years of layovers in Paris have put indelibly in memory, but if my luck holds out I will find what other posters have found - nothing at all! Does anyone know why little to none of this all is working correctly???

"So, how long will it be before aircraft manufacturers put a web browser under glass in the cockpit?" For some years now I have been of the opinion that the IFR panel of the future in a light airplane may well be a sheet of metal covered with velcro, to which would be fastened as many I-whatever devices as the pilot could afford! There are already modules that communicate with I-devices that function as AHRS and Air Data Computers, and these can drive a display on something like the Garmin Pilot app that approximates that which you saw on your G-1000 airplane! Realistically, of course, this is tongue-in-cheek, because anything that makes its way onto an airplane, including the toilet seat if you are lucky enough to have one, must be FAA approved and certificated. But with at least one iPad and a hockey puck like the Stratus or the Garmin GDL, you can have more in front of you than I had in the 767 12 years ago (and as much as they have in front of them in a 787 today). The fact that most of the current crop of PC based flight simulators can actually connect with Garmin Pilot, Foreflight or Wing X Pro makes such simulation a real benefit to real pilots looking to enhance their use of these EFB's in the real world. And since, even in a G-1000 airplane, we always use the iPad or iPhone along with it, to replace paper charts if for no other reason, a simmer using such auxiliary hardware is merely being realistic to how flight is conducted today. There is actually an app that is entirely free, which pretty much duplicates the capabilities of Wing X or Foreflight, and that app is Flight Plan GO, from the Flightplan.com website. With an iPad working the same network (typically WiFi) that your sim computer is on, you can get all the info you need to run the app in real time, as though your sim was the real airplane.