Flight school with or without simulator

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Charles Kelly

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ckelly14
Considering a PPL in the Charleston, SC area, and there are least 2 Flight Schools that advertise a full motion simulator as a plus for their school. Price for an hour on the simulator runs $50-$70 per hour, compared to $140/hour on a number of 1970"s era 172's with GNS430 or similar GPS.

I understand there is no substitute for stick time, but I do appreciate the ability to practice what I learned in a safe, as-realistic-as-possible simulator.

Being completely new to this, what is everyone's thought? I fly X-plane on a regular basis, purchased a honeycomb yoke and other peripherals, but couldn't make it work in my office, and really would have to spend quite a bit to be even close to what they have.

Thanks
 
James331 said:
For a VFR PPL, sims are of little to no value.
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I concur. The real world experience covers more ground in a shorter time for the primary student than jerky boxes with video screens.

For IFR training, the various sims start demonstrating their utility.

@Charles Kelly .... I think I know where you're coming from and going... you're may be thinking that using the sims to replace the real aircraft and save some money on aircraft rental.

However, even if the sim was used to introduce or reinforce a particular learning block, you are likely to repeat the learning block in the airplane at a later time. So no money savings.

That those Charleston schools have those sims will become a good thing for you with you move up to training for your instrument rating.
 
Thanks guys. This is what I was thinking. I’m going to meet with both the companies and instructors and see what I think. If the sim is mandatory or if they have minimum requirements, I may look elsewhere. If they have it there just as a supplement, I don’t see it as a disadvantage.
 
Also, there are schools that fly out of CHS, a busy class C airport, and others that fly out of my local airport (untowered). Advantage/disadvantage?
 
You’ll probably wait more on the ground at CHS as opposed to the non towered field. I’d just go where the cheaper school is and where the instructor’s schedule matches yours. You’ll have to learn tower ops anyway so you’ll probably visit CHS at some point.
 
The only place in my life ever gotten motion sick was one of those Redbird motion simulators.. this includes extended ocean passages on a 36-foot sailboat, reading in cars, steep turns all day, etc

for private pilot, where most of what you're learning is how the plane handles and flies anyway, those simulators are just about worthless

Even IR.. it might help with some systems and things like that but ultimately nothing can replace the real thing
 
Your radio skills will be much better by training at a Class C. I did mine at KRNO, also a Class C.
 
jordane93 said:
You’ll probably wait more on the ground at CHS as opposed to the non towered field. I’d just go where the cheaper school is and where the instructor’s schedule matches yours. You’ll have to learn tower ops anyway so you’ll probably visit CHS at some point.
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All other things equal, I prefer a towered field.
 
I don't find sims of much value in primary training. For instruments, though, I wouldn't consider using any flight school who doesn't have at least a basic ATD. When I do instruments, we do one or two lessons on basic attitudes and aircraft configuration. Then it's back inside on the sim for the next 5+ hours.
 
PPL training is eyes outside flying except for the 3 hours under the foggles. A full motion simulator has no value for PPL. You need to learn by flying with your eyes 90% outside 10% inside.
 
Honestly can’t state the value of training out of a busy airport. I learned out of a super busy delta but right after I got my private felt comfortable going into a Bravo for a full stop solo, something I don’t think you would get if you training out of a private field. Yes, you will get the training, but getting the training of towered field operations is very different from doing it every single flight.

Obviously, don’t base you decision around that. If the other flight school is cheaper/ has better instructors then it very well might be worth it. Just thought I’d share the benefits of that.
FYI I agree with the sim being irrelevant for PPL training.
 
There are advantages and disadvantages to training from a busy towered airport. Some place like CHA will definitely encourage you to deal with any mic fright early on. That's a definite plus. Longer taxies and holding for traffic can eat into some valuable flight time (and money), though. The best choice wherever you find a really good instructor. While I agree that flight sims don't add much...really any...value to primary "stick and rudder" training, I can say that PilotEdge is a really great service for coms and general airport procedures training. Get that hooked up with your X-Plane and give it a shot. Just be aware that until you get some initial flight training under your belt, you have to understand that "flying" in the sim may be reinforcing some habits that may need to be undone.
 
Most will say use of a sim has no value to a private student. I think all training has value so I think its more accurate to say use a sim during primary training has limited value. Much more value when used during instrument training and when used to help maintain instrument currency. There are also lots of CFI's who say they absolutely hate it when their primary student practice at home on a computer sim. They say it takes those students longer because they have to unlearn what they learned incorrectly on the sim at home.

That may well be so but I used MS flight sim at home extensively during my private training as a sort of procedures trainer and I can confidently say my lessons in the plane went better because of it so I think its a your mileage may vary kind of thing.

As for where to do your training, I always recommend a towered airport over an uncontrolled airport if the choice is available. I've known more than one private pilot who would not fly into any kind of controlled airport ever because they did all their primary training flying out of uncontrolled airports and only flew into controlled airports a handful of time during their training. I've never met a private pilot who was afraid of going into uncontrolled airport after doing all their primary training from a controlled airport.
 
When ppl say that sims offer little to no value for a PPL, they tend to be thinking stick & rudder only. In reality, there are many more tasks that you need to master for a PPL beyond flight control manipluation. There's flight planning, understanding weather, understanding airspace, communications, towered vs non-towered operations, etc. MODERN sims let you practice those things and can reduce your time to train and/or, have you more prepared to fly in the real world once you have your PPL.

This is a frequently discussed topic. In my experience, many pilots on one side of the debate have not seen what modern day sims can do.

Now, you can debate whether solo practice at home ahead of the training is a good idea or not....but that's totally separate to how effective the device can be. A well-configured sim with appropriate addons for ForeFlight integration, decent scenery, decent ATC, real-time weather and a frame rate higher than someone finishing up a wall-size oil-painting completely changes what can be achieved (solo or dual) as compared to, say, a dusty old Elite 135 sitting in the corner from the early 90's.

Disclsoure: I have a vested interest in seeing more pilots make use of simulators during training, but even so, my convictions about this topic are genuine.
 
coma24 said:
WhenThere's flight planning, understanding weather, understanding airspace, communications, towered vs non-towered operations, etc.
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Describe exactly ...

... how a sim would be used by an instructor to teach flight planning that a whiteboard and a copy of any EFB software wouldn’t be better at.

... how a sim would be used by an instructor to teach weather that a whiteboard, a current weather observation and forecast, and a window to look outside wouldn’t be better at.

... how an instructor would use a sim to teach airspace that a diagram wouldn’t be better at.

... how an instructor would use a sim to teach communications in a way better than simply doing it across a table with role play and real world practice?

... and the favorite... how an instructor would use a sim to better teach towered vs non.

A sim isn’t needed for any of those. In fact, I bet any good instructor can not only teach all of those topics better without a sim but also in a way that will “stick” better without it.

The sim CAN be used to flow those together a bit before a real flight, but again, unnecessary with a good syllabus based upon building blocks. In fact the sim can be just as overloading to a new pilot as an airplane.

None of the items you mentioned gain much from being introduced in a sim. They all gain much from being introduced over a table and a whiteboard, however. From there, the sim doesn’t add much over just moving to the aircraft and the instructor handling parts while handing off briefed tasks to the student.
 
By the way @coma24, it’s a tad cocky to think a majority of instructors DON’T know or keep up on aviation tech.

You really think we don’t know the world has better sims than the Frasca we trained on thirty years ago?

LOL. Yeah. We just don’t know about those “new fangled” sims. We just ignored that they came about. Missed all the articles about RedBird. Etc.

:) :) :)

Which... is why I just called you out on instructional techniques. Sims are a tool.

They don’t usually provide anything needed to teach the material. The material hasn’t changed in decades and hundreds of thousands learned it all.

They’re great for drilling procedures and demonstrating complex avionics. They’re also good for doing things that are unsafe to demo in an aircraft.

Most instructors DO know what they’re good at. That list of yours, they’re just not anything great at. Not instructionally anyway.
 
I have a little time in one of those Redbird sims in Charleston. I thought it would be great to practice gusty cross wind landings and other difficult landing situations at no risk of beating up an airplane. The landing practice was of no value to me as the sim really didn't "simulate" actual landings to me. There was no flare but rather you just flew the plane on the runway. Not something that felt like an actual landing. It was of value in IFR conditions and dealing with adverse situations such as turbulence and weather minimums. As for your training, take a look at Mount Pleasant. Good folks there and pretty decent airplanes. You will spend enough time around KCHS to get the necessary radio work. The last time I flew into KCHS I spend a lot of time waiting for instructions. Between commercial, Boeing, Air force, and general aviation, it can get very busy. And finally, the sim gave me a bad headache, and I didn't enjoy it at all. I would much rather be in the air than in a sim.
 
@denverpilot, like you said, a sim is a tool. I can tell you from experience, though, that they do provide a huge opportunity to rehearse that theoretical white board knowledge. I stopped flying not long after I got my PPL when I got married and started a family. I actually got bitten by the flying bug again after getting back into home sims around 2014. A home sim with real-time weather, paper charts, a plotter, and an e6b and you can realistically practice old school dead reckoning and compare your calculations to performance in the sim to your heart's content...for a lot less than $180/hour. A sim doesn't replace a qualified instructor, but with the foundation of good instruction, the sim can be a very good tool. And at risk of sounding like a shill for @coma24 's service, personally my understanding of airspace, ATC services, and communication expanded exponentially because I got to "fly" online in the complex SoCal airspace with tangible consequences if I busted airspace or taxied without a clearance or any number of other scenarios. When I finally climbed back into the cockpit after a 17 year hiatus, my instructor couldn't believe how prepared I was with knowledge and procedures. My stick and rudder skills were definitely rusty but the speed and ease of transition back shocked my instructor. Yes, I studied my tail off in preparation, but It was all the rehearsal in the sim that made it stick.

I must say, though, that as I now prepare to become a CFI, I see the majority instructors I have been observing lately pushing students almost exclusively toward online ground schools rather than spending their time with the student at the white board going over that material in any depth. I don't know how I feel about that. I've done both my instrument and commercial ground online so I know it is a system that can work, but for primary instruction, I plan to spend more time on ground school with my students than I got during my initial training.
 
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The full motion Redbirds have no correspondence to reality. In fact, even the non-motion parts of the flight dynamics (at least at the time I tried it) sucked badly. This is not what you want for stick-and-rudder learning which is most of what private training is about.

Sims work well for learning complex procedures such as IFR which are more about button mashing and navigation than how the aircraft actually flies.
 
@denverpilot my point is that a student can use the sim at home, without an instructor (either prior initial training or after training commences) to practice all of those things. Many people write the sim off because they perceive that it's not good for stick & rudder, I'm just saying it can be used for a lot more than stick and rudder.

I also stand by my point that a crap ton of instructors resist the use of simulation (either at home or at the school), and yet I see people who use it who end way, way ahead of the curve.

Essentially, it takes a lot of exposure to flying in the system to become confident when flying in the NAS. Not all of that time has to be done in an airplane or with an instructor watching you for every second. Instructors tend to be the last people who are likely to subscribe to the point of view or relay the idea to their clients, though, for a variety of reasons. I realize it's a generalization and that there will be exceptions, but I've seen it play out hundreds of times just like that. I've also seen countless instances of people who self-studied (before and during formal training) who came out ahead of the national average.
 
coma24 said:
@denverpilot my point is that a student can use the sim at home, without an instructor (either prior initial training or after training commences) to practice all of those things. Many people write the sim off because they perceive that it's not good for stick & rudder, I'm just saying it can be used for a lot more than stick and rudder.

I also stand by my point that a crap ton of instructors resist the use of simulation (either at home or at the school), and yet I see people who use it who end way, way ahead of the curve.

Essentially, it takes a lot of exposure to flying in the system to become confident when flying in the NAS. Not all of that time has to be done in an airplane or with an instructor watching you for every second. Instructors tend to be the last people who are likely to subscribe to the point of view or relay the idea to their clients, though, for a variety of reasons. I realize it's a generalization and that there will be exceptions, but I've seen it play out hundreds of times just like that. I've also seen countless instances of people who self-studied (before and during formal training) who came out ahead of the national average.
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A student using a sim at home for primary instruction isn’t learning anything deeply significant. Maybe how to tune a radio or buttonology of a particular GPS model. Which is way down the initial training syllabus.

They also are fairly likely to learn something wrong and then have to break a bad habit.

But that really applies mostly to instrument.

You’re not learning much about aircraft control or basic airmanship from a desktop sim and that’s the vast majority of the Private certificate.

There’s certainly worth in self study. All sorts of students don’t do enough of it.

I don’t know a single instructor who is against sim training when used to meet a specific requirement or goal.

You never answered the question. What specific tasks in the ACS are helped by an instructor using a sim and how exactly would they use it?

I’m asking because I know which ones would.

You haven’t answered yet because you haven’t thought about how teaching is actually accomplished.

Are we teaching concepts? Motor skills? Integration of concepts and motor skills?

Which of those does a sim actually help with? Which does it teach the wrong way?

Think hard. Then answer. Make the answer fit the ACS tasks. There’re the minimum standard.

Wasting someone’s time and money teaching them something the wrong way, isn’t appreciated by students paying in cash. A sim at the primary level can waste a lot of time and money. They’re paying for instruction by the hour.

Now if you’re saying a student wants to spend a bunch of money on a sim as a play toy at home with no syllabus or written goals and it’ll keep them entertained when they should be cracking the books for the written and oral... sure.

It’ll easily be a great video game and aviation toy.

Are you talking about training to a plan, or just farting around with a sim? :)

I love farting around with sims. It’s not what my customers would be paying me to accomplish, however.

An example. Someone might say showing a student the instrument panel is possible on a nice sim. Sure. No argument. But if you’re paying me by the hour I can just as easily do that in a real airplane, sitting on the ramp or in a hangar, engine off, no rental cost... and why wouldn’t I? You didn’t hire me to teach you to fly a sim.

Benefits include a more immersive real world experience, knobs and levers that actually are connected to real mechanisms and in the correct locations, a chance to start building your walk around and inspection habits and senses, etc.

And you didn’t have to buy a sim. Or pay to rent one.

Just a simple example. But either you’re learning to fly airplanes or you’re learning to fly a desktop computer.

Since you hired me to teach you to do the former...

There’s great uses for a sim at the instrument rating. Not so much in primary instruction.

A little. But not worth you buying one unless you just wanted one for entertainment value.
 
snglecoil said:
@denverpilot, like you said, a sim is a tool. I can tell you from experience, though, that they do provide a huge opportunity to rehearse that theoretical white board knowledge. I stopped flying not long after I got my PPL when I got married and started a family. I actually got bitten by the flying bug again after getting back into home sims around 2014. A home sim with real-time weather, paper charts, a plotter, and an e6b and you can realistically practice old school dead reckoning and compare your calculations to performance in the sim to your heart's content...for a lot less than $180/hour. ....


I must say, though, that as I now prepare to become a CFI, I see the majority instructors I have been observing lately pushing students almost exclusively toward online ground schools rather than spending their time with the student at the white board going over that material in any depth. I don't know how I feel about that. I've done both my instrument and commercial ground online so I know it is a system that can work, but for primary instruction, I plan to spend more time on ground school with my students than I got during my initial training.
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No argument at all about using one to knock dust off of things already learned. It’s the learning itself that doesn’t gain much from them.

Online ground school is great for students who learn best from that format. As you have mentioned, it doesn’t remove the requirement to teach the concepts one on one, or at least evaluate the student’s understanding of them. It’s your signature that you provided the required training, and John and Martha won’t be signing their logbook... :)

Not something an examiner will typically allow during your evaluation but in the real world if a student says that they know something cold, toss THEM the dry erase marker and tell them to see if they can teach you. :)

“Show me what you know about cold fronts.”

It’ll be really obvious if they actually know the topic in about 30 seconds. :) :) :)

We did this all the time in tech courses where students had big egos about what they knew and said their boss never should have sent them to the class... they’d been doing it for twenty years... blah blah blah. ;)
 
@denverpilot this is actually a great discussion. I will comb through the ACS as you requested and will compile a list of specific tasks that can be meaningfully practiced/honed in the sim. Don't get me wrong, there is absolutely still value in having an instructor sit down with a student with a whiteboard to convey their acquired wisdom on every area of the ACS. Similarly, many stick and rudder concepts are best initially demonstrated in the airplane...no argument to either of those. However, to imply that a student practicing those things at home after the fact is essentially "farting around on the sim" is where I disagree with you.

This is not theoretical...I improved as a student during primary training by practicing in the sim what my instructor has introduced to me during our face to face lessons. Slow flight, stalls, steep turns, pattern work, emergency procedures, etc....are not all mastered with a single brief and demo from the instructor. It takes repetition. Hell, I never really put xwind landings together until it clicked during a session on the home sim, and yes, I absolutely was struggling in the airplane prior with that task prior to that point.

A sim that doesn't totally suck (I will avoid mentioning brand names, but some are better than others in the FAA-certified market, and as for 'full motion', yikes...) should allow for meaningful practice of MANY (not all, but a significant number) of the ACS tasks in a way that outshines a casual whiteboard session. As a student, I can learn from a whiteboard, but the sim (or airplane) lets me apply it and improve.
 
coma24 said:
@denverpilot this is actually a great discussion. I will comb through the ACS as you requested and will compile a list of specific tasks that can be meaningfully practiced/honed in the sim. Don't get me wrong, there is absolutely still value in having an instructor sit down with a student with a whiteboard to convey their acquired wisdom on every area of the ACS. Similarly, many stick and rudder concepts are best initially demonstrated in the airplane...no argument to either of those. However, to imply that a student practicing those things at home after the fact is essentially "farting around on the sim" is where I disagree with you.

This is not theoretical...I improved as a student during primary training by practicing in the sim what my instructor has introduced to me during our face to face lessons. Slow flight, stalls, steep turns, pattern work, emergency procedures, etc....are not all mastered with a single brief and demo from the instructor. It takes repetition. Hell, I never really put xwind landings together until it clicked during a session on the home sim, and yes, I absolutely was struggling in the airplane prior with that task prior to that point.

A sim that doesn't totally suck (I will avoid mentioning brand names, but some are better than others in the FAA-certified market, and as for 'full motion', yikes...) should allow for meaningful practice of MANY (not all, but a significant number) of the ACS tasks in a way that outshines a casual whiteboard session. As a student, I can learn from a whiteboard, but the sim (or airplane) lets me apply it and improve.
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It is! And yeah, I was just makin’ you think. I also can see you know the difference between my joke of “farting around” and using a sim to integrate things you’re learning.

There’s definitely ways to use a sim to reinforce learning. No doubt. On the other hand, there’s a lot of stuff in primary training that it just doesn’t help with.

I wasn’t really kidding at all about the interest level stuff. People who are totally immersed and thinking aviation stuff all the time, certainly do better overall.

Some people however have really busy lives and don’t go home and sim, and barely have time to sturdy the textbook, but they pass and get that handshake and the “Congratulations Pilot!” from the examiner, just fine.

If you have a sim setup and it helps you absorb and immerse yourself in aviation, great! You can still be a great pilot without it.

Bob Hoover probably didn’t have a sim during his initial training. :)
 
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