I liked this early comment from @SuperSixBravo:
After doing some deeper checking of things and asking a few friends and co workers who fly jets to GA, I have come to this conclusion.
The flight model is actually very good, The planes are the problem. The actual modelling of the planes is not taking advantage of the flight model. Its almost like the planes are using 50% of what the sim can potentially do and some of the flight models are seem to be baked as in “Just get it to fly” we will fix how it fly’s later on. Again the systems in most cases are basic, but is not to do with the Flight model, but obviously will be influenced by it once fixed.
So this means that there obviously are a lot of factors into play which makes pointing toward the quality, or lack of, the flight model problematic. To name a few:
- the modeling of the plane
- the actual conditions
- the controller settings
- mass and balance considerations
What you are saying about flying in standard conditions and comparing performance to the POH seems indeed the best way to objectively test this. We should standardize on controller settings also, I would think.
But, if the planes don’t exploit all possibilities that the flight model exposes, we are left with half baked products. This means that we really can’t know if the flight model is realistic or not, until some vendor sells us a study level c172 that blows the default out of the air. Then we’ll know what the flight model is capable of. I would gladly slap €40-€50 on the counter for such a plane.