I’ve just been considering getting my private pilots license and was curious how much using MSFS helps with preparing for it… any thoughts?
2 Likes
MSFS can help you with a lot of stuff, especially if you have good hardware like a yoke and rudder pedals, and are learning on a plane that is available in MSFS with a realistic flight model it is close to the real thing in many respects
In addition you can train terrestrial navigation, flight planning and a lot of other stuff.
Always keep in mind though that there still are flaws. Density altitude, weather, wind, turbulence, air traffic, radio communication are all far from realistic and - while there are very realistic aircraft (specifically 3rd party) - of course many flight models in MSFS are rather simplistic.
3 Likes
Its known to teach you bad habits which instructors do not like. I used it for years before I learnt to fly. But I only flew VFR in small planes. I would take a few lessons first and then use it to learn what the instructor taught you. It has its uses if used correctly. Good luck with learning to fly. Its the best thing ever.
5 Likes
Thanks!.. this is much appreciated.
1 Like
I would think it would help. The Sim would certainly teach what all of these gauges/glass do.
1 Like
TLDR flight sims help with familiarity, jargon, and understanding how planes fly. there are 1000 things that you need to worry about which are non-issues most times in the sim. Not just bad habits but tactile feedback of the plane, wind etc, even with the nicest motion and force feedback setups.
Not to mention we play flight sims without consequence. We can knock out a heavy crosswind landing into ORD in game like pros but if we tried that IRL in a 152 at our local airfield, we might be white-knuckling it all the way down adrenaline pumping full bore.
4 Likes
Buying a suitable computer, other hardware, and addons for MSFS, certainly does not help your Real World Flying lessons, when you have to find the money to pay for those RL lessons .
1 Like
Certainly helped me a lot and saved me a lot of money. Certainly helped with practicing procedures, say when doing stall practice or practice pattern work. The aircraft may not handle exactly as in real life (depending a lot on the peripherals you have), but you can practice the various steps and checks that are involved with various maneuvers. And flying on VATsim is very valuable experience when dealing with real life ATC traffic.
2 Likes
FSX helped immensely when I got my private, and Flight Simulator also helped a lot for my flight review. My advice: after a lesson, do it over and over again in the sim fixing your mistakes, becoming fluent in the procedures and maneuvers until its perfect. Then you’ve mastered that and are ready for your next lesson.
Another tip: The simulator Cessna 172 and a real Cessna 172 are different aircraft. Recognizing and embracing the differences, rather than resisting them or forcing one to act like the other, can help make you a better pilot too though.
If you need work on your radio communication, PilotEdge will also help immensely.
3 Likes
FS98, 2000, and 2002 all helped me immensely when I got my PPL in 2003, and they were a pale shadow of what MSFS offers for realism.
I was able to skip the first 10 flying lessons pretty much outright after years of sim flying, and moderately abbreviate the next 10. It was very helpful, in combination with real sectional and terminal charts, for familarizing myself with all of the local airspace, airports and procedures… and especially for the IFR portions.
My instructor said I was more stable and precise in IFR than VFR, which he had never seen before, and that was simply because it felt more like the sim to me, more familiar.
I’d say it saved me roughly $2-3k off getting my license, and allowed me to solo quickly and spend more hours flying solo (significantly cheaper). Granted most of that savings went into the sim hardware, but it pays even bigger dividends after you get your license.
I use the sim to fly a planned route the night before flying anywhere new in the real thing, religiously. It’s an awesome safety feature, having that 3D and temporal picture in the mind ahead of time, especially when things don’t go quite to plan.
Everything everyone has said above is spot on. The sim can teach you some bad habits, but only if you use that as your only training aid. The sim plus traditional manuals and textbooks and ground school makes a great combination. You just have to be open to being corrected and re-learning all the time. That’s an attitude you want to keep throughout your whole flying career if you can.
Instructors can teach bad habits now and then as well, nobody has all of the answers, and they’re constantly learning, too.
A PPL is a huge accomplishment and something you will be rightfully proud of once achieved. It’s also a “minimum viable product” in a way, you will learn things in the first 100 hours after getting it that will really surprise you.
Best of luck. It’s worth it!
5 Likes
Thank you very much for taking the time to tell me all of this… Its all very helpful.
1 Like
Careful if you want to learn flying outside of the US, US phraseology works different than in other parts of the world.
E.g. climb and maintain vs. climb, point vs. decimal and others.
Don‘t use PilotEdge or listen to KJFK Live ATC too much if you‘re located e.g. in Europe 
Other than that: I use flight sims for many many years (20?). Now that I started PPL training, I use MSFS to familiarize myself with traffic patterns of other airports (and for flying Airbus and Boeing 
) and see how scenery will look like, I use X-Plane 12 especially to train landings and repeat airwork.
1 Like
Real world flying involves a lot of ‘feel’. Banking, decent, landing, air pressure on control surfaces. Flightsim doesn’t do that so I never found it to be a big help. But it’s good for practicing navigation.
2 Likes
It helped me a lot when I did my IMC rating. It saved me loads of money by allowing me to do simulated instrument approaches and holds in bad weather rather than paying for real flights. That was one of the earliest versions of Flight Simulator.
1 Like
Lot of good stuff said here …
But basically, use the Sim to back up what you have learnt in your real flying …not the other way round!
5 Likes
Of course it will help a lot! But it comes down to how you use the sim. If you just randomly fly around, like most people do, it won’t help you at all to get your PPL.
Use the literature, Internet, Youtube, handbooks etc. to acquire the knowledge and theory. Practice what you learn in the sim and then when you take the flying lessons you do the same things in the sim for repetition. And if you live in the US, subscribe to Pilotedge in order to make communicating with ATC so much easier. Outside of the US you can use VATSIM even if it is less good than Pilotedge for VFR.
Flight sims won’t replace flying lessons but of course it will help. That’s been said by numerous flight instructors I have talked to. The big drawback with flightsimming is that you don’t get the feel of the forces that you do in a real plane, even with expensive hardware. I’m sure it will be even more helpful if you want to earn your instrument rating where it’s mostly about tuning radios and needles.
Considering how expensive it is to buy the things you need in order to have a nice flight sim experience I don’t think it’s going to make your PPL much cheaper.
2 Likes
I don’t know where you took your flying lessons, but when I did my PPL last year, the first 10 lessons included things like takeoffs, landings, spins, spiral dive recovery, power on and off stalls, etc. The second 10 lessons were in the pattern preparing for solo and the actual solo. Nobody would have let me skip or abbreviate any of those lessons because of my sim experience.
Where the sim came in handy for me was practicing stuff once I had learned how to fly. As @DGJ622 said above, the sim is great for backing up what you learn in the real airplane, not the other way around.
1 Like
Well said! That is what I always iterate when this question comes up. You’re not training to be a 172 pilot, you’re training to be an airplane, single-engine land pilot. Each plane, whether sim or real, should be treated differently.
However, the problem is most students don’t know what they don’t know, and DIY without an instructor who can evaluate and give feedback will lead to bad habits. These may or may not have a detrimental effect on your first few lessons, leading your instructor to have to untrain and retrain you. For student pilots, this just adds to the whirlwind, fire-hose effect that is flight training, when you should be reducing and managing interference so you can focus on the tasks for which you’ve received instruction.
Thus, I find the sim-to-irl pipeline works best for those who have already been taught how to fly a plane - who know the realities and how to silo them from some of the sim nonsense.
I would not recommend it beyond going through cockpit familiarization, systems, and checklists/flows for those intending to get into real flying soon or for students in their first block of instruction. Outside of that, put it down for a while. Once you get to the student cross-countries block, in the lead up to the checkride, it can be somewhat beneficial, especially for flight planning and navigation.
After that, you’re technically authorized to fly hundreds of different types (insurance and club policies may not agree, haha), so you can push your boundaries a bit. But the key is you completed lessons, were signed off to take the checkride, and passed by a DPE, so you should understand and be able to discern by then.
That said, it’s for certain getting better in many areas and I see genuine opportunity to use it for actual flight training down the road, if they can get a handle on a few things and get certification from governing bodies.
3 Likes
Of course every student is different, and I knew other students who reflexively did the wrong thing repeatedly, and correcting that behavior was a real challenge. I never had that problem, and used Microsoft Flight Simulator extensively for years before and all through my private pilot training. The plane’s controls and feel can be markedly different, but it was something I just recognized and quickly adapted to. And I would say the use of Flight Simulator took hours off my training as others have pointed out in this thread. That’s why I usually speak up when I hear folks say that using Flight Simulator can lead to bad habits or conflict with training, and suggest that students shouldn’t use it. It’s entirely subjective, dependent on the student, and may have the opposite effect like it did in my case, helping me correct my mistakes and cement what I learned.
If your instructor says something, like you’re picking up bad habits, then listen and put it down. I never encountered that though. I would go months without flying and return for the next lesson, and my instructors always commented that it seemed as if I had just picked it up right where we left off like it was yesterday. It was because I flew the lesson in the sim right afterwards, lots in between, and right before we went up again.
I do agree that the feel of the plane is something you can’t get out of the simulator. There are people on this forum who claimed, after years of simming, they could just get in a Cessna for the first time and land it no probem. That might be true, but I’m definitely not one of those people. If I let my currency lapse, my landings start to get really, really bad, and no amount of pattern work in the simulator can completely fix it because the sim plane and the real plane are different, and each require their own muscle memory. It’s probably much worse if you’re learning to fly in a tail dragger, where the ground handling in Flight Simulator can be really bad.
But for the other 70-90% of what you’re doing: checklist flows, learning the instruments, airspace, navigation, communication, getting a picture for what things should look like, and just being more familiar with everything in general, the sim can really really help. Then you don’t have to worry about that stuff so much and can really focus on the feel of flying.
I’d argue the opposite, that learning communication in two different regions concurrently may actually make you a better student and pilot, just as multilingual students often do better in school, and just as using the sim C172 and real C172 concurrently can make you recognize and appreciate the differences in how the aircraft feel.
And that working with a controller who doesn’t talk just like you do is also extremely valuable experience, as you’re going to encounter this inevitably no matter where you fly. The PilotEdge controllers are used to working with folks from Europe, and your correct ICAO phraseology won’t be a problem with them.
2 Likes
As did I. Whether it really helped is debatable. I definitely understood the major concepts and had good stick skills, but I severely lacked rudder skills and I used trim incorrectly.
I soloed at 11 hours and got my PP at 40.9 hours (in just under 4 months), but I attribute that way more to my CFI and ground instructor, and a laser-like, almost singular focus on aviation at that time. Heck, I spent my 21st birthday studying for next morning’s flight! Attributing that to the sim may be partially correct, but that’d involve a lot of confirmation bias, especially given the nature of the sim back then. However, it 100% prepped me for knocking the rust off and prepping for subsequent IPCs and (B)FRs. It even allowed me to conquer a few bad habits I’d had all the way through initial CFI training. The key is, again, identifying the issue - turning the unknowns into knowns.
But you are correct - this should be a discussion with the student and CFI, as it will affect everybody differently, and differently than it would have for you and I back in the day. Again, most of the negative effects I would presume to be in the first block of instruction. As you said, once you know how to proficiently aviate and communicate, the sim really shines.
2 Likes