I recently led a discussion at West Valley Flying Club on How to Save Money Using a Flight Sim in Private Pilot Training. The presentation video is attached below, along with some excellent flight sim tips for student pilots shared by attendees.
Presentation Video
Flight Sim Tips for Student Pilots
The room had pilots with experience ranging from not-yet-started to CFIs, and each brought interesting ideas. I’ve summarized four key takeaways below.
Stay Sharp Between Lessons
One attendee brought up the issue of skill decay between flight lessons.1 This individual had found using a flight sim valuable in helping keep the ideas fresh when there was a longer break between flights.
See Maneuvers From the Outside
Unless you have GoPros mounted all over the airplane (and even if you do!), it’s hard to see the outside view of your maneuvers. For instance, you could watch your forward slip from outside the airplane to see how it (hopefully) doesn’t drift left or right.
You could also record and replay something like a ground reference maneuver to see if you’re complying with the ACS in its execution.
Practice Sim Landings with Your CFI
CFIs in the room lamented how difficult it is to see a student stuck in “pattern hell,” trying to learn to land. What surprised everyone was how well landings transferred in an Embry-Riddle study,2 where each iteration in the simulator reduced the number of required iterations in the plane by about two.
However, the researchers believed the results partially came from using a flight training device (FTD) with detailed scenery of the training airport, so using a personal simulator isn’t quite apples-to-apples. That said, it seemed encouraging that there may be another tool for CFIs to try out.
Remember Your Opportunity Costs
One item that we did not discuss occurred to me after watching the presentation again. In particular, my previous financial analysis does not include opportunity costs.
Perhaps you’ve saved flight time, but each skill takes twice as long to learn in the simulator. Your time is valuable;3 make sure to account for it when deciding if using a flight simulator makes sense.
Thanks to everyone who contributed in person or messaged with their thoughts!
And if you try out any of these ideas, please feel free to reach out! I’d love to chat about how it went.
See you at the airport,
Jack
- Common advice for PPL training is 2 lessons per week, otherwise you risk the first part of each lesson being dedicated to relearning what was previously covered. ↩︎
- Macchiarella, N. D., Arban, P. K., & Doherty, S. M. (2006). Transfer of Training from Flight Training Devices to Flight for Ab-Initio Pilots. International Journal of Applied Aviation Studies, 6(2), 299–314. ↩︎
- As a Plausibly Useful Idea, I was once advised to value your own time at the salary you want to make in the future (not necessarily the salary you currently make). ↩︎
