It feels to me like the training stuff needs to be thrown out and redone. Like no actual people who know anything about anything had anything to do with it. Today I tried to get a better score on the flight training Take off and Landing “Downwind” pattern task.
Here are the frustrating aspects of it:
The scenario seems to have been coded with narration assuming the plane will, in its current configuration start the scenario around 90-100 kts, but it actually starts out closer to 70 kts.
The Cessna 152 is not leaned to a state that can hold 8000 or 8500 feet and turn, and so, you have to lean the engine while trying to follow the tutor’s steps.
A leaned engine will be able to provide enough performance to complete the exercise if you can find it and then, adjust your throttle, all while holding the required altitude, and heading.
Some sort of guide for how wide the turns should be, your turn angle (maximum bank angle) and so on should be provided, I think.
The problem of power management, and airplane attitude is nearly impossible with a 2d representation of a flight, I think, and so I think some kind of heads up display while in the cockpit would help with seeing what the aircraft is doing. This task is easier to do from the chase plane than it is from the cockpit.
It’s super easy to fail, and super hard to succeed. Out of 80 attempts I have completed this five times, and I have no problem flying around in MSFS, and no problem landing. This is not my first rodeo.
The scenario starts out with the computer flying and managing the airplane, and when the flight yoke’s inputs are first taken into effect, the plane is probably very likely to dive, or stall, even if the control axis are 2 percent away from neutral. There seems to be some horrible problem with the flight yoke (CH Products) and MSFS, that ONLY affects these tutorials.
This training mission, and most of them, frankly, are badly constructed, badly done.
The training missions are very bad. It starts with the simple stuff, like the decision to do flight training at 8,000 feet in a Cessna 152 in the middle of hot and high Arizona. I suspect it had more to do with the aesthetic of Arizona than any practical purpose.
I don’t think you need a visual guide for turns or a heads-up display to see what the aircraft is doing. You can easily do this stuff from inside the aircraft, as it is intended to be done, if only you had someone to teach you that stuff properly. Teaching someone how to do standard rate turns is super easy, if only they had consulted an actual flight instructor.
Obviously one of the first things you learn when flying are dead stick landings, how could this not be realistic?
A bit of an edit here: I went ahead and tried them and got A on all the take-off and landing “training” courses and 100% mastered, but you have to ignore almost everything she says.
FWIW IRL learning how to fly is challenging, difficult, and often frustrating. Checkrides are even more challenging.
One thing missing in MSFS is ground school. Good ground school lessons would provide the foundation for the in-air lessons.
Another omission is pilot step progression from Private to Instrument to Commercial. But many if not most don’t want to be bothered with lessons or training. Just kick the tires and light the fires and start flying the 747 or the F18.
Why are you slamming most of the training missions based on one training mission?
I think you are taking the tutorials a little too seriously. This is a 100 bucks computer game and I think the tutorials are meant as a bit of fun to help newer flight simmers get an idea of how to fly. I doubt they really designed them to be comparable to real world training.
To people who are spending $5000 or more for hardware and addons, it’s not a $100 “game” anymore and it should meet some certain standards, which we’ve already seen before in similar computer game-sims.
Before spending $5000 it would be wise to first check if a $100 game meets your expectations.
On another note, for a $100 game a little bit more quality control would be cool.
I skipped most of the lessons as I already knew most of the basic stuff.
I tried a few out of curiosity but I will agree they are poorly implemented or just don’t work as intended.
I haven’t done any IFR flying and decided it was finally time to learn, unfortunately the first IFR lesson fails to complete for me.
It has you flying along over the Scilly isles and asks you to climb to 4500 feet into the clouds on a 270 Heading
That bit works fine, I reach 4500 feet and fly for a few seconds and it then asks me to decend to 4000 feet which I do, that’s where the lesson ends, it never sees me at 4000 feet and I don’t get any more instructions.
Am I doing somehting wrong or does it just not work?
I actually uninstalled all the training lessons as they take up storage space in my PC. As a matter of fact, I completely uninstalled ALL contents that can be uninstalled, leaving only the contents that are mandatory and cannot be removed.
Then I just install addons I want to use.
Most of the things I learned is actually doing them straightaway, and with some contextual learning from other sources like 320SimPilot on YouTube.
Suffice to say, MSFS 2020 is actually the first sim that I ever flown with the A320. And I managed to learn the aircraft without actually have any instructor led lessons.
But different people have different learning styles, I guess.
The idea of the Training sessions is Good, but the implementation is very poor, and a big step backwards from what we had even back in FSX.
To me, as a RW Pilot, its very much like the Blind, trying to lead the Blind.
For the 1st year of MSFS , I did not even bother to load them onto my PC, but a few weeks ago, I tried one of the IFR Test lessons, and found it to be “very weak” and misleading (to put it nicely)
I can’t comment on the quality of the training sessions as I deleted every download, livery, landing challenge that I don’t need, in order to free up hard disc space. There are a multitude of extremely interesting and professional u tube videos covering flight training. This is another example of MSFS adding content, and hard disc space, unnecessarily. If only they would concentrate on making sure that everything worked properly instead of adding more stuff. I see we now have a folder labelled ‘Aircrafts’. Isn’t anything checked before release?
