I’m an airline pilot and have flown Dash 8 Q400, Embraer E-175/E/195 and latterly Airbus A319/320/321 over the past 16 years. I have flown PC flight-sims since 1986 including every variant of Microsoft Flight simulator since FS2, although my interest in home flight simulation waned in recent years (because frankly I was spending too long in cockpits in the day job!)
I think the question of whether simulations are ‘realistic’ is a complex one and involves many factors such as handling, scenery accuracy, graphical fidelity, systems modelling, seating position, sound effects, VR/flat screen/projection and peripherals.
What drew me back in over the past 18 months was a desire to keep my flying skills up during an enforced period of reduced flying which coincided with the release of FS2020. I use a Thrustmaster Warthog and their pendular rudder system because I like the fact it feels heavier than most domestic sim peripherals and it’s metal (which real world aircraft controls are). I also have a PFC column yoke and throttle quadrant but rarely use those nowadays - again they’re beautifully made but my home cockpit is an old Akers Barnes design I knocked up myself and the PFC yoke is a bit tall for the seating position. Those heavy feeling flight controls though go a long way to making any sim feel more realistic. Real aircraft yokes, joysticks and pedals are usually pretty heavy and so I certainly wouldn’t underestimate the importance of this to handling - especially in VR where the HOTAS and pedals are probably the only thing you are touching anymore. Pre-VR I had Go-Flight panels and other peripherals to add to immersion, but these are rendered obsolete by VR.
My impression of the Microsoft FS series through the years has been that aircraft lacked momentum and felt overly twitchy. This can be evidenced by how hard it can be to trim an aircraft in FS for level flight, whereas in real life trimming an aircraft like this is quick and easy once the basics are mastered. I do think that FS2020 made a significant leap though in terms of how general aviation aircraft ‘feel’ and they’re much better than they used to be. In short they no longer feel like they have no inertia. I’ve never been an X-Plane fan until this year largely because the graphics were so poor compared to MSFS unless you downloaded fortunes of payware and spent ages configuring it.
Given my desire to get some practice in over the past year or so to keep my flying skills current I jumped into the default MSFS A320 and put on the VR headset. My main aim was to keep up my knowledge of scans and flows, get my head into the MCDU/FMS and to just fly around a bit in the UK. Frankly it became quickly apparent that the default Airbus was a nice looking rendition, but lacks authenticity and cannot be considered a ‘study level’ aircraft - but the ‘feel’ of the aircraft in the air to me still suffered from that same old lack of inertia - and that is disappointing. I understand the lack of systems authenticity - it’s there to give everybody a taste of handling a big jet and there probably aren’t too many people who really want to get deep into the nuts and bolts of how our friends in Toulouse design things! After realising there are not currently any really accurate Airbus available for FS2020 I discovered there are a couple available for X-Plane.
I checked out some reviews, decided to purchase X-Plane 11 (£50) and the Toliss A319 (£70) and fired it up. My instant reaction (in VR) was ‘wow!’ The systems accuracy is 99% true to the real aircraft and in my HP Reverb G2 I can confirm that the sensation really is of sitting in the real thing. What really struck me though was the incredible accuracy of the sounds too. There’s a huge amount of avionics cooling fans in the Airbus flight deck and they completely nailed that sound as well as the various bleeps, clicks and voice effects like TCAS instructions. Moreover the sounds of gear going down are just so ‘right’. In terms of flight modelling I would say that this aircraft reproduces extremely accurately the stability and sense of inertia of a real Airbus A319. It gives you that feedback that you are flying a 65 tonne aircraft not a balsa wood glider! I have found myself flying along in VR and actually reaching out to put my hand on the cockpit glareshield instinctively just as I do in the real aircraft when looking at stuff out of the window or reaching out with my hand to flick switches or press buttons which of course simply aren’t there!! That to me says a lot about the immersion possible in PC flight simulation today.
What is truly awful about X-Plane 11 though is the dreadful default scenery out of the box and FS2020 utterly destroys it in this respect! The fix for this isn’t cheap though! In the end I bought the Orbx True Earth Great Britain sceneries for the whole of the UK (around £70). Those are incredibly impressive (and fairly expensive) but as my main interest is in UK flying they add greatly to immersion. It should be noted though that FS2020 gives you scenery almost this good right out of the box.
So where does this leave us? Personally something like FS2020 out of the box with the cheapest joystick imaginable would have been beyond my wildest dreams in 1985 when I was 16 years of age. Flight simulation has come an incredibly long way since then! I think the key points though are:
- Solid joysticks/throttles/rudders are massive game-changers in terms of aircraft handling, don’t skimp there!
- FS2020 now has good flight models for GA aircraft, XP-11 are better still.
- FS2020 still has poor feeling flight models for airliners, XP-11 (payware) are very close to the real thing.
- VR is the single biggest leap forward in home flight simulation since FS1. It is quite literally the next best thing to an airline full flight simulator and at times comes so close this old dog forgets it’s not a real Airbus. It creates scale, 3d perspective and makes things like flying accurate circuits and knowing when to turn base as instinctive as they are in a real aircraft.
Sorry for the long rambling post but that’s my take on the state of flight sim in 2021.
Birdseed007