The Simulator

The weather did not want to cooperate today so we took a seat in the club's simulator. I need to log 5 hours worth of instrument time for my license.

I5 was telling me that you could log up to 3 of those 5 hours in the simulator and the other two were done under the hood in the air. Apparently most people do it this way to save money.

I'll make this short and sweet. The briefing about the instrument scan methods was great. I learned a lot from I5 that wasn't obvious from the FTM and FTGU. In the sim I essentially flew runway heading in a climb. Flew straight and level, did some turns, then combined climbs, descents, and turns.

Overall it was quite boring and somewhat useless for me. I've been flying in simulators since SubLogic's FS on my Apple ][+ (well actually it was an apple clone called Unitron, but man we had an 80 column card!). Not that it actually amounts to a hill of beans since 95% of those sim hours were spent doing things I will probably never do. However I just didn't feel that I got much out of the simulator. I even have a newer version of X-Plane (they use v8 and I have v9) and my home yoke and pedals work better than the one at the club.

If there was one good thing (aside from the brief) to come out of this - it was the structure of having a specific set of tasks and goals for an instrument flight.

In any event, my mind was made up by the time I left the club - I'd make sure the other 4.3 hours I spent on instruments happened in the real thing, regardless of the extra few hundred it would cost me. If I ever got caught in a bad scenario - the experience from the sitting in the cockpit under the hood would most likely be more valuable than sitting in the simulator.