Oddbean

Go for it! The knowledge that you will acquire about weather, engines, map navigation, radio navigation, radio communications and principles of flight have broad applications in life in general. And you will meet some of the coolest “switched on” people in the process. With a little bit of natural ability and the requisite ground school hours, you can be soloing after a dozen hours of dual instruction and take a shot at your ministry PPL flight test inside 100hrs of solo time. The thing I love about fixed wing aviation is that like many interesting pursuits, it is a “feel” activity. Knowing the critical speeds and performance characteristics of your airframe, but then becoming part of the air mass and making almost subconscious adjustments for your takeoffs and landings. One thing that I found super helpful when I was getting my student pilot permit was that I already had a decent simulator set up on my PC. I had MS Flight, and then later X-Plane, with the actual aerodromes and airstrips on it that I was flying into and out of in live training. After a dual instruction session, I could go home and drill the exact same flight 20 times, saving a lot of dual instruction and aircraft rental time and fuel cost. In preparation for upcoming new lessons, I could do the same. When I did my first simulated forced approach with my instructor, I had already done it many times at home on the sim. In the exact plane, from the same airstrip. I did my first solo flight after only 12 hours of dual instruction. Was I nervous? Hell yeah. But I felt prepared. Activities surrounding aviation and parachuting have been the best parts of my life.

X-Plane is amazing. I haven’t used it since version 9 but they actually license a commercial version to industry. It is that good. Just make sure you have lots of drive space for world scenery modules. My wife’s cousin was stationed at the naval air station in Corpus training to be a naval aviator, and he let me hop in one of their simulators, not knowing that I already had hundreds of hours on a sim at home. He was actually a bit salty when I took off, flew a perfectly rectangular circuit, and landed with almost no input from him lol. I fessed up later haha

There’s a good community around it too for custom content, like additional scenery, airports and aircraft. And the flight modeling and instruments are amazingly real. It’s a professional sim. You can even get into advanced things like ILS approaches and landings if the aircraft you are using is so equipped. I learned how to do hands-off ILS approaches and landings which was pretty cool. Near the end of my sim days, my favourite plane was an F-22. It taught me more about my local area than I would have ever imagined. My fav route was south from Kelowna YLW to the Columbia River, west to the Pacific Ocean along the river, then north along the Oregon and Washington coast to YVR in Vancouver. If you select a plane in the sim that is similar to your trainer aircraft in terms of instrument layout, get a decent stick, and rudder pedals (optional but cool), and set up your keyboard so that the location of the controls is pretty close to the physical layout on your screen, it’s pretty immersive. I started noticing that in real life flight I was starting to develop some muscle memory for where to reach for flap and throttle and radio nav settings. One word of caution about this sim is that it is really deep. And if you want to, you can easily spend a lot of money on hardware peripherals and time messing around with settings. Some guys I talked with on forums had complete cockpits built in their garages with all the bells and whistles. If you just keep it simple and get a basic stick and keyboard setup, you can really enhance your training without burning a bunch of time. In this regard I am kind of glad I started with MS Flight. X-Plane is a beast of a program used for real pilot training. MS Flight is a little less technical. In the sim, go to the airport you call home, and actually go through your preflight checklist and fuel check in your mind. Call ATIS for your airport’s current met report and active runway info. Set the wind, cloud and visibility in the sim to match. Pretend to speak to the tower for permission to taxi, take off (and re-enter the circuit later) using your real life aircraft ID. Just like you will in real life training flights. Then drill your flights while looking at the same scenery and geographic landmarks you will be using in RL. Don’t let the sim take you away from real life flying. But find the sweet spot where it is saving you on dual instruction time and buying fuel. Most of all, enjoy your new found skills. Fly. Keep your eyes outside of the cockpit. Always be scanning for aircraft while regularly doing your instrument scans. Maintain awareness of your fuel selector switch and remaining fuel. And don’t fly into clouds. (You will get into instrument flying later). I’m excited for you! I hope you find a great instructor.