Pilot Brad’s Flying Blog

With my Stage 2 check scheduled for the following day I decided to start up Microsoft Flight Simulator X (FSX) and practice a few of the skills I knew I would be required to demonstrate.  It’s been a while since I’ve used FSX for practice, so I was curious what I could do (in FSX) with all my new IFR skills. 

I got out my low altitude enroute chart and several IAPs for Stockton, Tracy and Livermore and strapped on my kneeboard.  I set the weather to foggy and departed Livermore eastbound towards Stockton, practicing several Holds and DME Arcs, all with great success and accuracy, along the way.

Once I was satisfied with my holding and arcing abilities, I flew several NDB and VOR approaches into Stockton, before turning westward for the ILS into Livermore.

During my simulated flight, two things amazed me.  First was that all of the navaids in FSX used the correct frequency.  That is to say, when I set the NAV radio to the actual ILS frequency for Livermore (as listed on the IAP), FSX responded correctly and I could hear the identifier for I-LVK when NAV1 was selected on the on-screen audio panel.  It’s not that I thought it wouldn’t be correct, but I was just sort of amazed that I could use all the real Charts and IAPs and have FSX respond correctly.   I may have said this before, but I’ve never been a big fan of flight sims simply because I’ve found them to be unrealistic for VFR flying.  However, now that I can use it to practice IFR procedures my opinion has changed, and I find that FSX is indeed a very useful tool.

The second thing that suprized me was just how much I’ve learned in the past few months.  When I bought FSX a few months ago, I really had no IFR or instrument approach experience, but today I am tuning radios and turning, or in this case clicking, OBSs like a pro.  As I mentioned I had the weather set to foggy, and I was amazed to see the rabits (strobes of the approach lighting system) appear ahead through the virtual fog as I approached DA.   Regardless of whether or not this was real, I was able to navigate between several airports just by instruments when just months ago I had no clue how to do any of this.  Pretty cool if you ask me!

After my so-so NDB performance the other day, I knew I needed some practice.  So I started up FSX and got to work.  I put in about an hour of practice tonight and it seemed to help drill the NDB intercept procedures through my thick skull, so I would consider it time (and money) well spent. 

You might recall that in an earlier blog entry I mentioned that I had bought and read Bruce Williams’ book, MS Flight Simulator as a training aid.  The great thing about Bruce’s book is the companion CD that comes with it, which contains many VFR and IFR practice flights, several of which are aimed at NDB procedures.  The practice flights make it easy as everything is set-up for you which in this case means you are in the air and in the proximity of an NDB, without the need to takeoff from an airport and fly to an NDB.  This is a huge time saver, and really allows you to get right to practicing only what you want to practice.  Sure, I could set-up my own flights in FSX, but I don’t have time for that.

While nothing replaces flying the real airplane, a sim (FSX) is perfect for things like practicing IFR procedures like VOR or NDB intercepts.  And at today prices, it’s certainly a lot cheaper that burning avgas.  The only downside to practicing at home, is the interruptions.  The wife, the dog, the kid, all seem to want me to do something else the moment I sit down at the desk and launch FSX.  Oh well, that’s what the pause button is for.

After many years away from flight simulation software, I recently purchased Microsoft’s Flight Simulator X (FSX) and I have to say I’ve been pleasantly surprised. In my opinion, the graphics and the flight models are surprising accurate for a simulator, especially when you consider it’s meant to be run on a home PC. I’ve read stories about FSX taxing fairly powerful computers, and perhaps that’s why I’ve stayed away, but since I purchased a new computer last year I figured I had the computing power to make it work. As it turns out, it works pretty darn good. I am still tweaking all the settings to come up with the best compromise between image quality and performance, but here is an example of what I’ve been able to get so far.

For the record, my computer has the following hardware.

• CPU: Intel E6600 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo (dual core)
• Graphics Card : Nvidia 7900GS with 256MB RAM
• RAM: 4GB SDRAM*
• OS: Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit
• HDD:  320GB

* While I have 4GB of RAM installed, Windows Vista 32-bit recognizes it as only 3GB. I won’t go into why here, but you can read the official Microsoft explanation or perhaps a more down to earth explanation on Chris Pirillo’s site.