Comparison of the simulator and the real flight

[Denis]

Today I was lucky to perform a flight to Cessna 172 with an instructor. I do not have a flight certificate and am not a professional pilot. All my flight practice is an aircraft simulator, with which I spent many years with the A2A Cessna 182. 182 and 172 and are similar in control and performance, so I will allow myself to post a review in this section. The instructor let me fly the plane in the pilot's left seat. This is my second flight to Cessna 172. This time the flight was in winter conditions. It was windy, which added a bit of shaking. What I want to say. Undoubtedly, training on a flight simulator gives a great idea of ​​flying on a real aircraft, and an excellent experience. What a simulator cannot give is a feeling of overload and an idea of ​​what real effort is required on the steering wheel and pedals. Surprisingly, it turned out that the effort is still quite tangible. To make a turn, you need to force the pedal in the direction of a turn to keep the ball in the center and follow that the plane does not fall down, pushing the steering wheel towards you. Awesome experience! After returning home, I checked how Cessna behaves in the simulator under the same conditions. It behaves just like in real flight! I am very glad that I have the opportunity to compare the A2A and the real aircraft. I would say that the guys from A2A made a plane very close to the actual conditions! I am very grateful to the developers and I hope that the project will be developed further! Thank you!

[Nick - A2A]

Hi Denis - welcome to the A2A forums and thanks for the post.

Yes, unfortunately the lack of realistic control forces is one of the biggest problems with the 'affordable' hardware that most of us use. This can't really be overcome without investment in high end controllers, and even then, I suspect the control forces would still feel a bit alien to anyone used to flying the real thing.

Anyway, thanks again for the kind words. Although I'm not sure that there are any further development plans for the 182 at this time, we've recently added some updates to the P3Dv4 version of the product.

Cheers,
Nick

[Lewis - A2A]

Thanks for the kind words Dennis. If you leave a review on the A2A Store you get some extra points on your account to use as a discount towards your next purchase

For the hardware, Nick is spot on you gotta be spending some serious casharoo to get close, however using standard Saitek stuff you can get quite close on the yoke by making sure sensitivity is high and finger flying as you do in the real aircraft. Pedal wise it a little more difficult, I hear good things of the higher end pedals though from the custom made Xwind to the VFlight ruddo's.

thanks,
Lewis - A2A