I've been a flight instructor in my twenties but then got out of flying due to monetary and health reasons. I've just bought a honeycomb yoke together with X-Plane 11. It is close to perfect, when it comes to simulation. Back when I flew, we didn't have the sophisticated avionics, so it's been quite a challenge to adjust to the modern glass cockpit, especially in an IFR environment.

Now I just wish I could fly the Cirrus Vision jet in real life, like some Youtubers do.

Haven't tried the new MS flightsim yet. I hope they've put as much effort into physics as they did in visuals. Can't wait to give it a try.

Adding VR to the mix should be even more valuable to you. They said they intend to support VR eventually in FS2020.

VR will be fun for some players but I expect many will struggle with motion sickness.

Probably not in a cockpit. At least in my experience having that cockpit as a static frame of reference really makes it quite a smooth experience.

Motion sickness isn't something I experience a tonne of in VR unless it's falling from up high or those rollercoaster simulations.

There is a flying VR game I used to play for awhile. Controls were a little difficult but it was quite fun and motion sickness wasn't a problem (in my case at least).

I'm not an expert but I thought a large part of motion sickness comes from the fact that you perceive motion visually but there is no confirmation from the inner ear (as in real life these two sensory inputs work together to maintain your balance). The other way it's also true (sea sickness), where the inner ear registers motion (the ship bobbing due to waves), but you don't see that you are moving (doubly so if you are inside) so again there's conflicting sensory input.

I don't suffer from seasickness normally, but a few years back we had a knotted up anchor chain so I went in to service the winch and there was a bit of a swell outside. In about 30 minutes I was quite ill. Once I fixed the winch and went out it all dissipated quickly when I could see the sea & horizon moving again.

I have a steering wheel and pedal setup that I use in VR, and it's the lack of correct G-forces that really get to you. I'm pretty good with motion sickness in VR, but Asseto Corsa took me about 3 hours of 10 minute intervals before I could take a corner at high speed, or slam the brakes without getting very very nauseous.

I can see it being comfortable once you're in the air, but takeoff and landing might feel very weird :P

You just reminded me I used to play Dirt Rally VR quite a bit. That's amazing in VR. The sense of presence is incredible. Maybe I just don't suffer motion sickness as much?

Funnily enough I've been playing Satisfactory a lot lately and I keep losing my stomach whenever I jump off really high places. I guess even non-VR games can affect you too!

This is a best-case for VR -- sitting still in a cockpit. The sensory input should be almost identical to real life, so I wouldn't think nausea will be a big issue.

I think the lack of forces, especially in smaller, more agile plains, can introduce some motion sickness in experienced pilots who are familiar with, and their body expects, the forces they ought to be feeling when taking off, doing a roll, etc.

But still, until artificial gravity can be generated, this is the closest it will come for the vast majority of people.

There are some small/ultra light aircraft simulators that get pretty close, being able to rotate the cockpit left right up and down. Still, can't really simulate directional acceleration/deceleration with possibly short bumps like landing gear contacting the ground and similar.

But definitely, any pilot will tell you that feeling all the forces is actually big part of good piloting, as you can feel what the airplane is experiencing & act accordingly. I took a ride in some small planes (a 4 person two motor plane and a glider) as well as an advanced small plane simulator and really, the simulator was good but not really comparable.

Not to mention extreme cases like air racing or aerial acrobatics where the forces are so extreme that they might prevent the pilot from having enough strength to execute control input or possibly even make them black out.

> any pilot will tell you that feeling all the forces is actually big part of good piloting, as you can feel what the airplane is experiencing & act accordingly.

Going to argue against that generally. Vestibular disorientation is a significant killer of pilots. In instrument flying, you specifically train to ignore those sensations. Fly the numbers, not the feelings.

Yep, that's a good point - it can certainly also be a big problem in poor visibility or other cases where you get disoriented.

At Kennedy Space Center, the Space Shuttle simulation was pretty amazing. I believe the trick was to make us think we were sitting at rest at a 90 degree angle, when in fact it must have been less, such that when the shuttle did take off in the simulation the seat made an even higher angle (+ shaking). And the sudden lowering of the angle (when engine cuts off and we're supposed to float) was a pretty damn amazing illusion too. I definitely recommend it.

Yeah, I'd love to see a "behind the scenes" of that ride (it's entirely possible one exists, I haven't actually looked...)

I've ridden it several times, and while I intellectually understand how it must work, it's still super convincing.

For simracing and VR, a 6dof motion rig decreases motion sickness.

Why would a game like this have any motion sickness?

I had 30 min in a certified helicopter simulator earlier this year.

The sim was built out of an actual fuselage (Sikorsky S-76) with full controls, visuals were 8x projectors on a curved wall in front of and around the cockpit. Everything was bolted to the floor, no movement anywhere.

After 10-15 minutes I did a hard bank and my gosh, the whole world moved, and I could have sworn I was about to slide out of my seat. I panicked that I didn't have a harness on.

The instructor laughed and said that was quite normal and that many people get very motion sick.

So yeah, I can see that motion sickness, with the "right" setup, could easily be a thing.

Maybe not motion sickness, but I’ve yet to wear a VR set I can enjoy for more than 10-15 minutes at a time. I think some people just adapt to stereoscopic illusion better than others- I struggle during 3D movies too.

There is a small fraction (iirc 10-20%) of the population for whom a disparity between accommodation (focus) and binocular vision (what 3d movies do) causes headaches and nausea.

This is why most 3d movies have very little happen in the virtual space between you and the screen. Since more than about 7 meters away is basically all the same final distance, it's fine.

That being said, it's the stuff flying at you that makes 3d seem worth the extra money, so they try to balance it. Some people will still get very ill even with the small amount that movies do.

Technically, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality_sickness, but I think motion sickness suffices as a generic term.

I also think discriminating between motion sickness, flight simulator sickness and virtual reality sickness is splitting hairs, or at least a gradual difference. One could claim motion sickness requires real motion, but you have that in a good flight simulator, too, and most VR setups allow one to, at the least, move one’s head freely.

The term “motion sickness” describes the disparity between sensations that the mind expects to accompany what the eyes are seeing, but those sensations are not there. In a flight simulation, things like gravity, acceleration, etc. are not really possible to simulate.

The physiological basis is that a disagreement between the inner ear's sense of balance and the eye's perception of orientation is an early signal of having ingested a neurotoxin. Thus vomiting to expel whatever you just ate is a good first response.

My son is also working on his PPL and has been flying 172s in XPlane 11 for the last year or so.

At Oshkosh he jumped into a $250,000 Frasca simulator and did a complete flight with no assistance /and/ the sales guy turning off various parts of the avionics. He’s 15.

TLDR don’t wait around for Microsoft.

Be careful, too much time in a simulator and not enough time in an airplane can teach bad habits.

I'm curious, what kinds of pitfalls can occur?

Uncoordinated flight (roughly, not being turned in the direction you're flying) feels very weird when you're experiencing it for real. It's also an ingredient of a deadly spin if you let other things also get out of control. On a sim, you won't experience much more than a certain dial reading a certain reading, and the plane will more or less fly as expected. It's important to learn coordinated flight "by the seat of your pants" to have the habit of adjusting the rudder ingrained in your muscle memory.

There are other feelings, such as buffeting before a stall, that you'll miss on a sim. But flight training is very explicit about those situations, so you'll learn them when transitioning to a real plane. Avoiding uncoordinated flight is something that pervades your whole flight experience; it might be hard to retrofit it onto a sim-trained student.

There are other habits, but that's the most notable one when I'm comparing the two environments.

Why aren't those part of the sim?

While there is an instrument on panels that shows when turns are coordinated (a turn coordinator), fixating on it isn't really possible, and it's better to develop a feel for what coordinated flight is like, and be able to adjust automatically. Replicating this feeling in a sim is difficult because it's the interactions of motion and rotation that cause flight to be coordinated or not.

Vastly disagree. I am an instrument rated pilot about to take a commercial checkride and using the seat of the pants to determine coordination is a very bad idea. The turn coordinator is part of your instrument scan and “stepping on the ball” is a fundamental skill that you learn during primary training. In the clouds, you can be in an uncoordinated turn and not “feel” it because your inner ear is doing one thing, your eyes are doing another and using “feel” is a great way to crash. The FAA specifically advises to not fly by the seat of your pants due to the dangers of spacial disorientation. Teaching pilots to listen at all to physical sensations is teaching them how to die. Not hyperbole, but fact. VFR pilots can and should trust their eyes and look outside, but any CFI trying to train coordination through “feeling” is setting the student up for a very dangerous habit. Your inner ear lies to you. The majority of the airmanship training you get in the instrument rating is designed specifically to teach you how to ignore your body.

https://www.faa.gov/pilots/safety/pilotsafetybrochures/media...

https://www.aviation-accidents.net/tag/spatial-disorientatio...

Thanks for the insightful reply, certainly not meaning to diminish the importance of trusting your instruments. For what it's worth, a turn coordinator isn't required equipment for VFR flying, and in either case (whether helpful or harmful), the inability of a simulator to faithfully reproduce turning forces seems like a weakness.

I'm about halfway toward a PPL myself and have been trying to practice with a simulator. My biggest complaint is that control inputs seem to be almost completely different from the real thing. Maybe it's the hardware I'm using, maybe it's my own lack of experience, probably some combination of the two... but it's been a mixed bag for me, largely due to the controller situation.

For example, I explicitly stopped using a supposedly more realistic yoke controller in favor of a HOTAS joystick because I repeatedly found that I just _can't_ translate the physical inputs to a real plane. Yoke controllers in particular seem hard to get right (or maybe mine is just bad), but more generally, PC controller axes have a surprisingly low resolution (just 256 steps on an axis) making them wildly less precise than real thing, plus there's no force feedback. Using a completely different (and more precise) type of controller seems to help keep my brain from drawing conclusions it shouldn't.

Simulators _do_ seem helpful for more abstract stuff, like going through checklists, practicing maneuvers, experimenting... so long as you're very intentional about what you're trying to learn. I think I benefited some from practicing ground reference maneuvers [0] in X-Plane with a VR headset, for example, since they're largely visual and aren't tightly tied to physical inputs. On the other hand, practicing stalls in the simulator has probably lost me a decent amount of time in the air with my CFI trying to un-learn the wrong ideas I picked up, due to both control differences and (I think) simulation differences.

[0] https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/a...

Looked at that in the past, for a more realistic experience you probably have to buy yokes like https://www.brunner-innovation.swiss/product/cls-e-ng-yoke/, which have more steps and do have force feedback. Unfortunately they are quite expensive ($1000 and up..)

- no PC simulator feels anything like a real small airplane, but that's not really the main issue, which is:

- learning flying yourself means you will probably learn the wrong procedures, that a CFI would correct. For example, if you're not flying a landing pattern, your landing procedure is wrong. So use a real 172 checklist, POH and flight maneuver procedures. Also how to handle ballooned landings.

Source: commercially-rated airplane pilot that used MSFS for 20 years.

This is legitimately the first thing my instructor told me when I told him I used MS Flight Simulator X back in 2009.

What sort of pedals etc does he have set up?

Logitech G yoke, switch panel, and rudder pedals. Nothing fancy, works just fine (by his standards)

Would you mind sharing what setup you have for the hardware controllers? I'm looking at getting this setup for a friend but I'm not sure where to go to get the peripherals.

I don’t have one yet, but one of the peer comments talked about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23137228

I think the real cost will be the broadband. The whole map is 2 petabytes large, so each area has to be loaded seperately which will take up a lot of space.

Its probably not too bad. You only see a tiny slice at a time. They must have pre-cached regions, as you specified ahead of time where you will fly.