What I constantly teach in my stream is that the sim is really good at a lot of things, and good enough in others to be a very passable analog to real-world flying.
However, we see some major divergence from reality in the following:
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Control force feedback - this is the one that affects the inexperienced more than anything. The only games/sims that emulate real-world, non-fantasy equipment that also have fairly technically accurate controls are car/truck/airplane sims. Unfortunately, we also have a wide array of controllers with different styles, sensitivities, throw ranges, and most of all, almost none of them have force feedback. So while I’m struggling against my yoke springs to get full elevator deflection, somebody else is doing it with easily their thumbs on a gamepad. And the fun part is, while one is decisively closer than the other, neither is truly realistic because we don’t feel how varying dynamic pressure feeds back against our inputs. Which leads into…
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Kinesthetics - seat of the pants/inner ear perception of motion. This is a little more insidious because without proper acceleration in every direction fighting against your spatial proprioception, it’s actually harder to fly VFR, but much, much easier to fly IFR. But again, pulling full elevator deflection in a 172 doing 90 knots will give you all sorts of sensations, from the initial firmness of the controls, to the visual of nothing but blue sky out the window, being first pressed down and back into our seats, the changing pressure on our ears as we climb, followed by the sinking gut feeling as we run out of energy, the lack of efficacy of the the the controls as we slow down, the vibrations of the airflow separation as we begin to stall. And even if we don’t spin, the recovery does everything pretty much in reverse. Very little of that is noticeable in the sim and it certainly doesn’t elicit the response (and avoidance of the situation) it does in real-life.
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And lastly, without risk of personal injury and property, even financial (fuel, insurance, inspections, training, etc) we take more chances and do a lot of things we wouldn’t do in the real world. The real dangers associated with flying, once you understand them, will give most pilots pause, even on a good day, which requires a ton of due diligence and decision-making to overcome. Something as simple as a 50nm cross-country to an unfamiliar airport, or pattern work in a light twin, or flight in mountainous areas, or over water, or over large stretches of unsuitable off-airport landing areas in a single-engine plane, are something easily taken for granted in the sim. Most pilots simply just don’t go near that stuff without a lot of training/experience, or powerful, reliable, redundant equipment. And even if you have the equipment and training, you’re not doing that stuff without a hard look at the planning.
So on one hand we have the ideal ease of flight, and on the other we have the reality that feeds into all the engineering, training, rules, and preparation/planning we do.