You also had the instructor next to you to make sure you did not kill yourself on intro flight. Im sure he / her did not want to die ha ha.
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When the sum of all your flight sim experience happens to be GTA V, then things can get real interesting…
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This discussion comes up every now and then and I remember a comment made by a real world pilot and I paraphrase:
“If you’re a flight simmer and think you can really fly a plane without having real world experience, you’re in for a surprise”
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I remember doing an introductory flight years ago for my ‘sweet 16th…’ birthday and wow… I mean FSX was revolutionary but this… MSFS is revolutionary… But one thing that struck me was that spatial awareness or… lack of spatial awareness. That actual 3d feeling with actual wind, that sensation of movement… You get that feeling of vertigo…
WOW
All of those feelings and the like that you will never get through this game!!!
I could imagine a bit of adrenaline and the actual thought that (Oh gosh I won’t be able to pause and have a think about it and google something… or… Exit and try that again…) Yeah that’s when things get real very fast when one of us dreamers thinking… (I can’t wait to be on that plane when the flight attendant comes out asking for anyone with “flying experience…”)
When reality hits you so hard.. when it’s your life or a hundred others…
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A simmer who has never flown a real aircraft before could handle it better than someone with no flying experience at all. That doesn’t mean that I’d trust a summer with my life if I had the option; they’re likely to have developed bad habits, not know fundamentals of potentially risky situations, and possibly crash the plane while slowing down for landing.
Simply put, a simmer is more likely to stall, to enter a spin, or otherwise damage the aircraft.
This has been discussed previously.
Flight Simulators at the consumer level at most teach a random off the street cockpit familiarity and basic flight theory. In an Emergency Situation, you will likely be speaking with someone on the ground who is going to walk you through putting the plane down and they’re anticipating you crashing the plane. Not because you’re a bad pilot but because you’re not actually certified to fly it.
The odds of a flight simmer riding in Coach on a domestic from LA to NY being called upon to land the plane in Chicago due to an emergency is extremely small. Yknow that scene in Airplane! where the flight attendant asks from the cockpit all non-chalantly asking over the PA “By the way, does anyone know how to fly a plane?” and the cabin starts to absolutely panic? That’s probably what would happen iRL.
And you know in that situation, the one flight simmer on that flight will remain calm among the panic and say “my time has come”
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not always easy to fly a plane, even extremely experienced, when you only try it the first time 
HAHAHAHAHA!!! Right on point!!!
I’m a student pilot in a 172. Long time simmer. I was able to land without the instructor touching the controls on my first lesson. Calm winds, forgiving aircraft. I also believe my success stems from me treating the sim as a learning tool and not a game. Now I use the sim to help me plan xc flights and most recently my night flight training. The visuals in this sim are so good, I can recognize landmarks and helped me time my turns in the pattern. There are things that are not correct in the sim (stall characteristics and torque effect) but as a training aid, it absolutely has helped me with real world flying.
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Absolutely! I was well into simming before I had my first checkout ride. Flew the whole circuit by myself no problems. I recall asking my instructor for the stall speed as I was on final. 
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Haven’t using flight simmers for years did my instructor trust me on my first flight to land? Absolutely not. If even I managed to successfully land what are the odds of something going really wrong? Winds and other factors having no experience would end in a disaster. This guy was lucky the weather was on his side.
Mythbusters did an episode to see if a untrained pilot could land a plane. It was pretty funny to watch.
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FINALLY! Finally someone admits how easy and how much fun flying really is! Some people even say stepping in some Cessna 152 and take her for a ride is more easy than driving a car.
Thank you very much for your posting.
I never get used to people boasting “flying is so difficult that only 0,0000001% of superhumans can do so, one has to be a fully trained astronaut since 1960 to fly some Cessna, all simmers are idiots and nerds just pretending to be pilots who are in real-life not even capable to open the door of a C152 because everything is SOOOO DIFFICULT IRL…” 
Unfortunately I am in general very bad at all landings, my Boeings would become an inferno (and all Airbusses too) but hm… I am really confident to bring down a small GA prop - in one piece.
Airfoillab Cessna add-on for Flight Sim 20 where aaaaaaaaare you??
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I have experienced a real life situation where my flightsimming helped me a lot.
It was back in 1999 and I had just started my pilot training for the PPL. The weather was fine and all forecasts showed nice weather too. While doing some flying with a piper pa28 at the southern coast line of Norway I got a call from ATC. A massive snow blizzard just came out of nowhere.
I had no time to make a landing and stayed a head of the white wall as long as I could while maintaining visual with the ground. Eventually I was 1000 feet above the sea and it was impossible to escape.
Then I did what I had been doing in Microsoft flight simulator 1998. I flew on instruments. I climbed to MSA above the sea and flew a full procedure with an ILS. I got the runway aprox. 200 feet above minima and made a safe landing.
After they asked me how I was able to do instrument flying since I was still early on my PPL. I answered it was msfs 98 flightsimming
I graduated two years later and have been flying since. Last 15 years on the B737 series.
Attached is a picture I took before I flew onto the white wall.
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I’ve been flying since 1990, simming since, oh I think it was MSFS 4 or 5. Around 1993 anyway. Needless to say I haven’t had any major difficulty landing a real plane or I wouldn’t still be here. It feels as natural as parking a car to me. In daylight and decent weather at least. Night landings in rough weather close to minimums, not gonna lie, sometimes I clench the seat cushion a bit.
But it is much harder to make a good landing in a sim. For me I miss the view, the angles, the FOV, depth, and all the tiny little cues that are missing from the view on a screen. Recently this received a much needed improvement with VR. Some of what I’m missing on a screen I now have in my HMD. Still don’t get the inertial sensation but that’s a good thing for IFR. I can lean over to look out the window or over my shoulder to line up my landing point in a way that is intuitive.
TLDR; under the right conditions, I’m sure a good simmer could safely land a real plane.
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Don’t need to be a Simmer to land a plane.
Passenger Lands Cessna 208.
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If you don’t believe becoming proficient with a simulation would help if called upon to land, for example, a Cessna 172, then why are we doing this?
Because for now, electricity is significantly cheaper than 100LL 
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That is the most ridiculous thing I read this morning lol …
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Nice!
I used to love flying the C152 in FS2002/4 … then flying it in FSX had real meaning as I used to fly in the sim and then head over to the airport and flying a C150 for my PPL lessons - so much easier to practice in the sim than breaking a real one and me :¬)