Am I the only one who thinks the training stuff is insane?

Discussion Hub General Discussion
21

If I was young enough and decided to take real flight lessons, one of the things I would get as part of my purchase is a whole bunch of manuals, printed manuals, not a load of online stuff. There would be actual ground school, in a classroom, outlining the proper/correct way all this works. Manuals “for the value of reference” and to go back and read the information again, and as necessary to memory. SO, MSFS has all this great (I did not find it so) supposedly flight training in the sim, but it’s worthless, as there is NO, not one MANUAL describing what you are expected to accomplish.

I to this day, aint got a clue on the downwind leg, the up-wind leg, or for that matter any leg. That, those are recognized procedures, required, not one explanation in the training. The sadly lacking any online help/manuals is the greatest failing of this simulator, and why X-Plane (6-manuals in sim, and link to online product manual) and FSX (hundreds of help topics and a flight training manual + exercises) are superior. Lots of manuals, and instructions in those to help you figure out how to fly.
That Asobo/MS depended on its YouTube partners to provide that training is absolutely stupid. To this day, my only salvation is the experience I have with older sims, and the manuals contained therein. Aftermarket manuals are mostly advertising garbage, with very little real information contained, as I fell for the: Guide to Flight Simulator 1st generation manual, and about 10% of the information was valuable to me. Most of it is a rehash of other stuff.

That all the planes, every single one provided in sim, are not study level is another point of my dissatisfaction. ONE plane should be study level in all the “types” present, i.e., the C172; possibly the TBM-930; one of the BA and at least the airbus for those interested. NONE are, the best flying plane I have in hanger is the F-14, by DC Designs-not study level), and although not close to study level the free C-17 I have. Those are way more fun, than the ones in the sim. I have been doing this since FS-98. Sorry to be long winded. I was taught to navigate and do SIDS and STARS by a Delta Airlines Captain in the MD-11. So, in that he skipped basic flight training, and we went right to the big iron. The little planes no thank you. The TBM, I once in while take to local airports around who have ILS systems so I can practice my approaches. TO me it has not worked well since release. And thank you before you suggest, but I do not want a bunch of this addon or that addon to make things which should work, well work out of the box.
Every single person flying/owning this sim is different, we all “like what we like and fly the type of flights we like”. So my experience is not your experience. It’s been 17 months since release, and still the ATC/Navigation systems are still not fixed.

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22

The hardest one for me was the “look round” the cockpit one. At some point it asks you to bind shortcut keys to a custom view and gives you no prompts whatsoever on how to do that.

I was stuck of ages and had to google it. :roll_eyes::joy:

23

It’s not so much the lessons I dislike, but the utterly lame scoring.

Getting points knocked off per second for being 50’ off altitude when the control sensitivity is super twitchy and trim is 10x harder to use than IRL.

The score system rewards you for totally fixating inside the cockpit on your altitude - when you should be looking out the window.

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25

I will go as far as to say that for newbies who are serious about learning the basics - go out and buy FSX or FS2004. Forget the graphics, its the lessons that are the gold standard. Those games can be had for cheap.

Learn there and bring the skills into MSFS.

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26

Flight Training are considered to be separate packaged contents that gets downloaded together by default when you install the first time. But you can manually select them through the content manager and uninstall them.

Only the Mandatory Core content is non-removeable. But they only contain the sim engine and the world map and textures. Within it, only the Cessna 172 and Daher TBM 930 is part of the core content. Any other aircraft are separate content that you can just remove when you don’t need.

I actually removed every other aircraft, keeping only the Mandatory Core content and the Airbus A320 since that’s the only aircraft I fly. And also any other content that I’ll never use save for some handcrafted airports. I even removed photogrammetry content since they’re a huge FPS hit anyway.

I believe since SU7, there’s additional non-removeable contents and aircraft. So I’m keeping them too since I have no choice.

When you remove contents, you should see something like this in the content manager. You still have access to it, where you can reinstall them at anytime. But the status would show as “Not Installed” and it will stay that way because it’s synced to your cloud account. Even if you reinstall the whole sim at some point, they won’t get reinstalled unless you decide to do so.

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27

I will give two perspectives.

I owned the original flight simulator and then Microsoft combat simulator years later, but never spent the time learning to fly, so I only ever used both of those for a total of 30 minutes. So I came into this sim with no flying experience at all.

On the ascending and descending training mission, she asks you to put the dashboard a couple inches below the horizon when flying. I kept trying to do that, and kept failing due to putting the aircraft in a dangerous situation. Well I fly on an 85 inch screen in the living room. A couple inches on my screen is very different than a couple inches on a 27 inch monitor. The instructions were making me climb too high. Unfortunately, when you fail, there is NO feedback on what the dangerous situation was, so I kept doing it and doing it trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. When I decided to put the nose just a couple inches below the horizon, I passed. On my screen, the dashboard was about maybe 6 inches below the horizon, but it probably would be about 2 if I was on a smaller monitor. So giving directions using measurements relative to your display is bad, and failing without explainatiin is bad.

But on the other hand, I came in knowing nothing. Going through the training missions gives you the basics. Without those, I’m not sure I would even be able to do YouTube training, because even now on some of the plane reviews people talk about setting some things or what is missing, and I still don’t have a clue what they are talking about. So I would say at this point I am probably more VFR but can’t do IFR yet or know how to program the autopilot. But I’m progressing. The training gave me enough of an introduction that further training can make sense

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28

As mentioned above, get FSX, the two service packs are easily downloaded. The training in it is superb. The help screens are excellent, the glossary is top of the line. All that for an almost 20-year-old sim. I have it, MSFS and X-Plane loaded on my PC. I fly all three periodically, lately under weather, but slowly getting to feel better.

29

I’m not sure if they’ve changed/fixed them since the last time I attempted to use them (which was just after they dumped the entire initial series of lessons and introduced new ones), but, in those, I started to lose my patience when they started off by telling me we were at 5,000’ of altitude when it was clear from the instruments that we were at under 3,500’ (and, no, it wasn’t a matter of the pressure being set wrong – hitting the ‘B’ key did nothing). I had two choices: immediately try to climb to the supposed altitude (at which point I was failed because I had put the plane into a climb when I was supposed to stay level), or not touch anything and let the plane gradually climb by itself to the proper altitude (at which point I was failed because it had taken me too long to have it stable at 5,000’). A complete no-win situation.

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Well, an actual flight school does cost a few bucks more that this sim, doesn’t it?

31

Will have to try them again. I quit them after the takeoff and landing tutorials. For takeoff, turning the corner and lining up on the runway trying to use keyboard controls for the rudders, never could get straight. On the landing tutorials I could not stay lined up with the runway, it was like a gale-force wind from the right that kept pushing me left, and it got worse and worse on approach. I actually submitted it as a bug, because there was no way I could stay lined up in order to land no matter how much rudder or aileron I used. I decided the tutorials weren’t really tested on real people, so there must not be a lot of care to make them work.

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33

There are literally lines on the windshield the instructor says she put there for the attitude reference:

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34

No, this was the take off lesson. I lift off, she tells you that you should stay along the runway and maintain an accent rate, and tells you to place the top of your dashboard two inches below the horizon. Two inches on my TV is probably about 0.66 inch on a 27 inch, meaning my nose was ending up way too high.

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35

If you did the attitude lesson, then you should have the idea. These lessons build up on each other.

36

I got past it. I finally did what I thought was right, and passed. I’m just saying, when I tried to literally follow her instructions, two inches below the horizon varies the angle of ascent depending on the size of your display. Perhaps stating “nose just below the horizon” would have been better. That is a relative distance that would not change as display size changes. A fixed measurement between a reference point in the cockpit and the horizon will change angle as the display size changes.

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37

I agree about the lack of manuals/documentation. But, if you want manuals, the FAA is a treasure chest. Tho’ dry reading compared to some they have all the info you need. If you want hard copy you can purchase from Sporty’s, Pilot Mall etc. and they’re relatively cheap. Here’s a few links to get you going.

Airplane Flying Handbook
Pilots Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge
Aeronautical Information Manual
Master Index

If you’re really sadistic :grinning: here’s FAA Reg Part 91. A lot of it can be applicable to flight operations in the sim.

FAR Part 91 General Operating and Flight Rules

P.S. IRL I solo’d, got my private certificate and A&P certificates probably before most here were born. :grin:

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38

Vertical speed is a good one as well, 500ft/min and you are doing a nice climb.

39

Great link thanks! I actually enjoy the dryness of FAA literature. They just get right to point no faffing about!

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40

I think it’s probably meant to be “2 inches” in scale to the sim, not your monitor. It’s still bad instruction though, because it can easily be misinterpreted, and if you aren’t sitting in a real aeroplane it’s difficult to know what 2 inches looks like.

41

There are parts of it that are challenging because the simulator has become accurate enough to make flying in it as hard as flying in the real world.

Example: I increase power, and make many control surface adjustments, and more change happens to the speed or attitude of the plane, than I wanted, and I end up “feeling like I’m fighting the aircraft”.

That is a challenge that SHOULD be there. It is the point of this whole thing.

Example 2: Climb angle should be shown to the pilot on the instruments of the aircraft, but instead, lines are drawn over the actual windshield, but they are not drawn in any way that allows them to correspond to the actual desired climb or descent that the instructor wants you to take. If they had been shown as floating objects in the real world, they would have been fine. Instead they have them floating in the cockpit in a position that can only be incorrect, and which you as the student should not have to figure out was a stupid thing to do, and then complain about it.

Imagine I am a math teacher and a child complains that memorizing 8x8 is 64 is too hard. What should I say? But what if I am a math teacher who confuses his students by teaching them that 8x8 does not in fact have one true answer, but in fact, has many answers, all of which are both valid, and invalid.

Confusion caused by bad pedagogy is bad.