Can a simmer land a plane IRL

How did it go?

Owning a few Garmin products, I’ll say they just don’t make anything that’s simple and straight forward!

Autoland buttons are kind of a rare thing still but will probably be in many GA airplanes made in the near future.

DJI drones can do it, but new GA airplanes are pushing multi-millions in price.

It was amazing. So much so that I signed up for three more lessons (one of which was a couple days ago).

My experience with sims undoubtedly helped. On the first real lesson, we did turns, low speed maneuvers, and stalls. My instructor said it usually takes two or three lessons to do what we successfully accomplished that lesson. Because of how much time I’ve spent in Cessna cockpits virtually, I was extremely comfortable with using the sight picture along with the instruments to recognize what the plane was doing and what was likely to happen due to inputs and external factors.

When performing the stalls, especially, I was surprised at how calm I was. Because I’ve done similar maneuvers a million times in sims (much in VR), I guess my brain had already acclimated itself to what was happening. I can only believe that this would have been much more of an alien experience if I had gone in with no previous knowledge or practice with software.

Back to the topic of the thread, unfortunately I haven’t landed it yet, and by the time I do I will have more hours of real-life instruction under my belt, so likely won’t apply to the topic any longer.

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Here ya go, now can we get over this already ROFL!!!

I think VR does help considerably. The first time I flew the sim in VR I actually felt a little bit of fear and exhilaration 2D never gave me. You also have to rely more on the cockpit layout and less on bindings.

I also found landing and taxing much easier in VR. In 2D it’s just disconnected from your spatial awareness.

The Garmin Autoland and a couple of other manufactiurers alrady have the product in airplanes.
It works well !
Here is a demo of the Garmin Autoland System: Garmin Emergency Autoland Flight Trial - YouTube

Congratulations ! You will NEVER regret this. Do not stop. You will never forgive yourself if you stop.
I got my PPL, CPL and then my Instrument rating back in the 90’s.
Oh how I wish the flight sims were as good then as they are now.
I am super happy for you ! Be safe and happy flying !

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Did you play it cool and not say you have used a sim? :grin:

I plan to not say anything if I do, lol. At least until a couple lessons. I just don’t want to come off as sounding arrogant. The instructor might be thinking, “oh here is another MSFS/xplane simmer that thinks he knows everything.”

But it probably depends on the instructor’s personality.

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It did come up early - I was nervous about being motion sick and told the CFI that I had progressed from being nauseated after a slight roll in VR to being able to do rolling scissors dogfights with no issue now, so I was hopeful about being able to improve if I had issues when actually flying. But I brought it up because I wanted to be up front about my fear of nausea.

It ended up not being an issue at all. And I think he figured that I knew the basics because he didn’t even go over the basic instruments. Maybe after he noticed me entering the barometric pressure on the altimeter as he was listening to ATIS :laughing:

Too funny!

Talk about nausea, I got an Xbox controller to use for the drone camera in VR. Wow does it work nice for that, but I had to lay down afterwards as using the drone camera on the ground can make you really dizzy.

I just want to say, live your dreams if you have a very high insurance😂

I believe there was even a mythbusters episode on can anyone land a plane

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I can certainly say it’s not one of my wishes. Sure I might know better what I’m looking at in a plane (all those little round dials won’t confuse me) but I wouldn’t rate my chances more than about 0. Maybe if I had experts on the other end of the radio but it’d be ■■■■ stressful.

My first experience of it was how much better perception you have of your surroundings. Landing I also find a lot easier with VR. It was easier to judge height and distances, turns especially much easier.

First time I tried the F18 I felt very queasy for a while after that… :rofl: 737 and A320 on the other hand are no problem.

I’ll let you know Friday. Long time simmer going for my first lesson IRL. :+1:

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It helps to keep you off the instruments too for VFR.

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Now that sounds interesting.
This will probably become my favorite episode together with the episode with the Mythbusters testing how two pigs decay in a Corvette - to proof that an air refresher is in some cases not enough to sell a suicider´s car :smiley:

(But I´ll take it anyway for free! Funny how they all would ask me “wow such an awesome ´67 Stingray, but has someone died in there?” - “Ah I am glad that you ask, yes someone has died in here and that makes it more exciting driving at night during thunderstorms while listening to horror audiobooks and Creepy Pastas!”)

Do you have a link with this everyone can land a plane Mythbusters episode? I would love to see some aircraft myths getting busted this evening!

Edit:
Found it.

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They did the golf simulator episode too. I forget the outcome of that one.

A hole in one?

And of course could any passenger land an airliner, but the landing might be not be as smooth as usual.

The probability of success is likely with ATC and FMS and autopilot. If these are not available than the probability of success is unlikely.

Was this autobreak on ultra?

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