Flight Sims are they really as real as actually flying?

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Wind shear is easily modeled. Nothing sophisticated about it.

Although, you do bring up an interesting point. In WW2, I wonder how many aircraft coming in for a landing in bad weather encountered wind shear, causing it to crash. The ground crews would have chalked up the crash to probable failure of the airframe due to damage or pilot injury.
 

While you are right about wind shear killing pilots, how do you model something that cannot be predicted in location, intensity and duration???
 
evangilder said:
Sounds like it was beating you up pretty bad up there, Joe!
Click to expand...

Yep! The up and down drafts weren't too bad (about 100-200 fpm) it was the continual side-to-side pounding that sucked, a few times I had full yoke to the left to stay level, another time just about got turned 90 degrees.

On final I lost 10 knots, fell about 200 feet (I came in high to compensate for that) and had a hard time getting stabilized. Over the numbers everything settled down and landed uneventful, although one windsock showed about 25 knots, the other one at the far end of the field was limp!

Again, this scenario is dynamic and unless you fly in it you cannot understand that no sim could model all these elements. When you apply these conditions in a sim, they aren't close to the real thing.....
 
The dynamics of wind shear and turbulence is understood well enough to be modeled. Its nothing but some equations. Whats still being learned is the conditions that create it.

But that means the flight simulator can be programmed to randomly select what parameters of turbulence and wind shear to simulate. All it needs to know is how much intensity and what duration you want to simulate. If you want it to be random, then no problem. Just another option to select on bootup.

Remember, the absence of a wind shear simulation on your PC is not proof that it cannot be simulated.
 
Its just air flow over the airframe and through the engines.

Pushs the frame around a bit and changes the lift on the wings.

It could also change the amount of air going into the engines, thus changing thrust.

Again, nothing complicated about modeling. Just parameter selections.
 
You can have a stick shaker to simulate turbulence.

A three axis sim can give you the accelerations in those axis's as detemrined by the computer.

And of course, the simulator has the lines of code to determine what these wind forces do to lift and stability so you know what the aircraft will do under any scenario.

You can even simulate the airplane flying through a tornado if you desire.
Nothing sophisticated to program. Just a series of equations.

Its just like how the nuke weapons scientists figure out what happens when a weapon is exploded. Just breakdown the events into trillionth of a second "slices" and watch the simulator model the detonation.
 
Thats why the best flight sim is hooked up to a 3 axis "cockpit" mockup.

You can also include movement in the vert and horizontal if required.

Nothing complicated about it. Just simple mechanics.
 
Sys,

The very high end simulators (35million to 65million plus) are good and they simulate movement, shear, turbulance ect these items well enough to

A. Train pilots (fedex requires two weeks a year just for refreshing emergency procedures)
B. Scare the hell out of the pilot.
C. To recreate the cockpit experiance to a high degree

However according to a pilot I know (with Fedex), who should be finishing this years sim stint now, they still don't quite get it like it really is. The physical experiance flying adds so much and can't be recreated on any simulator completly, and certainly not on a PC.

I have a few hours flying time and the feel of the aircraft responding and letting you know just what is happening is a total experiance. It can't be recreated in a fixed chair or a feedback stick or anywhere your periferal vision might spot an inconsistency your brain and senses are so much better than that.

wmaxt
 
As computing power increases, so does the simulation.

As with anything, 99% accuracy is good enough for nearly all people. The last 1% can be done, but at a high cost. So we just wait untill things get cheap enough so it can be done without going bankrupt.
 
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