I've searched the forum and haven't found any debates on this. I have never flown in a smaller plane much less flown one. It looks like it will be a year or two before I can start training for my private. My question is in the meantime should I get a simulator with a yoke and pedals and practice on it til I can start training or should I just wait so I'm not picking up any bad habits? Thanks for the input.
There are only so many bad habits one can pick up. It's a pretty short list: over-reliance on instruments, poor rudder control or none at all, and poor or non-existing use of trim. There may be others, but beats me what they might be.
The only one that is not so easy to correct with current inexpensive hardware is trim. Nobody does that right (without paying thousands.)
I used Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 (also known as FS9 among simmers) a little both before and during my flight training. I used CH Products yoke and rudders. I later added a Track IR system. All this on a computer that is about 5 years old, though I did modify it with a newer graphics card and power supply to power it.
It is not needed, but if you can afford it, buying a couple hours of flight lessons in a real airplane will give you enough experience to know what the important differences are. Focus on how trim works and forces needed at different speeds (these two are related.)
I strongly recommend using a simulator. Please ignore those who say not to; they either don't know how to integrate it into training, are too lazy to learn how to, or draw bogus conclusions from anecdotes. Once they are identified, it is easy to avoid or mitigate the problems with simulators. For example, there are modes to limit or remove instruments from the screen (and 3D mode with Track IR makes it a bit harder to read the instrument panel anyway. Also nice to turn your head a little and check the runway position on downwind and base.) A set of rudder pedals helps (though note how, like the yoke, you'll have to imagine the forces needed.)
Spend a few bucks on add-on aircraft similar to whatever you think you may eventually train in; the built-in aircraft are not always that great. I bought Flight One's C-152 model since that was the plane I used in my real training; it did a pretty good job of simulating things - even stalls (though they were pretty aggressive, which was a good thing.)
During my real training I was getting into the bad habit of trying to pick up a dropping wing on stalls with the yoke. I hadn't tried stalls in the simulator. So to see if the simulator could help, I set myself up in scenario on final just a few hundred feel from landing. Then I'd do one power-off stall after another; during the stall the simulator would punish me severely by spinning me in if I used any non-trivial amount of aileron to pick up the dropping wing. If I used rudder only to pick the wing up and good yoke control I could avoid the crashes. Kept doing it till I was consistent. Next day the practice paid off in the real thing.
I also did use the simulator to practice radio work - you don't need anything fancy for doing this for nontowered fields.
All in all though, I think that - in my case anyway - it helped me more than it hurt. I just didn't realize where it hurt until I actually started flying.
