Schweiks Sim vs. Real Flying Debate Thread

Well, as an ex virtual WW2 pilot i have to say that, at least for rookies, the statement of title is true.
I mean: i have not experience in real flight, nor in real aerial combat and my hours flying in a simulator worth 100% nothing because real life is complete different.
But i can say that the Situational Awerness is really complicated in a simulator, and i cannot figure out how complicate was in RL, when those poor guys risked their lives every moment.

Every 4-5 flying minutes, in relatively safe zone i had to check my position in the formation, plus check the onboard navigatonal intruments, plus checking around me, in every directions any sign of enemy. In combat zone you have to do always all those checks, everytime and faster.
If you have already 2 (real) hours flying to reach the combat zone, you are little tired and can happen you don't see the enemy coming.

I understand those poor guys in RL: i was shot down some times by someone i honestly didn't see while i had too many things to do at the same time, and i was in my confortable home; i cannot figure out those guys that had real combat...

Elmas said:

an unpressurized cockpit at 30k' with gas in the intestines that expands as the atmospheric pressure decreases...

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That bloated feeling got you down? Relief is at hand! Simply roll into a 70 degree 3G turn, select enough afterburner to keep energy constant, and let your G suit fight the "battle of the bulge" for you!
Cheers,
Wes

pbehn said:

I raced motorcycles at all major UK circuits and have run a sim for motorcycle racing...…..nothing like the same, the sport is all about the feel under power and braking which just isn't there on a PC, strangely I didn't get tired on the PC while 7 laps of Donnington was hard work for a very fit 22 yr old.

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One Sim <> all Sims, & motorcycles <> aircraft.

Most aircraft Sims are pretty useless. Not all of them.

Schweik said:

One Sim <> all Sims, & motorcycles <> aircraft.

Most aircraft Sims are pretty useless. Not all of them.

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Schweik,

Are you lumping in desk top PCs into the sim category? The FAA allows for Type Rides in sims, and rightfully so as they are awesome trainers. I actually look forward to sim training as you get to practice V1 cuts, single engine approaches, low vis instruments, etc. All the stuff that keeps you confident in your skills and aircraft and the pax safe.

The USAF uses domed sims quite a bit now so you can practice some combat related tactics, equipment useage, etc that you are either learning new, or don't always get to use in real life. An example is protecting an AWACS from a MiG-25/31. We could do it in real life using a Viper / Eagle but it's a waste of gas and more a mental math exercise than a flying one (you sometimes have to run the intercept via GCI with your nose / radar pointed no where near the threat). Once again better use of gas and hours aloft can be found elsewhere.

Cheers,
Biff

BiffF15 said:

Schweik,

Are you lumping in desk top PCs into the sim category? The FAA allows for Type Rides in sims, and rightfully so as they are awesome trainers. I actually look forward to sim training as you get to practice V1 cuts, single engine approaches, low vis instruments, etc. All the stuff that keeps you confident in your skills and aircraft and the pax safe.

The USAF uses domed sims quite a bit now so you can practice some combat related tactics, equipment useage, etc that you are either learning new, or don't always get to use in real life. An example is protecting an AWACS from a MiG-25/31. We could do it in real life using a Viper / Eagle but it's a waste of gas and more a mental math exercise than a flying one (you sometimes have to run the intercept via GCI with your nose / radar pointed no where near the threat). Once again better use of gas and hours aloft can be found elsewhere.

Cheers,
Biff

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The real full motion sims are great for training. I just had an hour in a 737 sim. Got to fly under the Golden Gate Bridge and shoot an approach into the old Hong Kong Airport. Good times.

BiffF15 said:

Schweik,

Are you lumping in desk top PCs into the sim category? The FAA allows for Type Rides in sims, and rightfully so as they are awesome trainers. I actually look forward to sim training as you get to practice V1 cuts, single engine approaches, low vis instruments, etc. All the stuff that keeps you confident in your skills and aircraft and the pax safe.

The USAF uses domed sims quite a bit now so you can practice some combat related tactics, equipment useage, etc that you are either learning new, or don't always get to use in real life. An example is protecting an AWACS from a MiG-25/31. We could do it in real life using a Viper / Eagle but it's a waste of gas and more a mental math exercise than a flying one (you sometimes have to run the intercept via GCI with your nose / radar pointed no where near the threat). Once again better use of gas and hours aloft can be found elsewhere.

Cheers,
Biff

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(PLEASE NOTE - I don't have anything like this - just a cheap twisty joystick rudder and two monitors)

I'm specifically only referring to desktop PC games, because that is all I have experience with. Certain ones in particular which Graugreist also mentioned upthread. These days people use them with VR or at least software that tracks your head (track-IR - typically combined with multiple monitors) and many use special stick, rudder pedals, separate throttle and mixture controls etc., so it's a bit like a poor mans version of the dome. But not in the same ballpark as a true training Sim or military Sim. Just a humble computer game made by some nut in Russia.

I have in another distant part of my life done some work on military Sims and got to try / test them, not flight Sims but other stuff. Very interesting experience even back then, and that was 20 years ago.

Sims today - PC Sim games - have graphics which are surprisingly good (look at the video clip I linked upthread). In fact they are so good to some extent they drove the development of graphics cards now used for all kinds of advanced computer tasks on the hardware level.

But that doesn't really matter. What makes the Sim is really just how 'clean' the data is and whether it enforces realistic conditions or not. In the last (not current) generation of Il2, the graphics are a generation behind, but the flight models match reasonably well what you can look up and read in any detailed book or aircraft manual for each type depicted, in terms of rates of climb and dive, acceleration, roll, bank turn, pull through etc. You can set it to where you can only see from inside the cockpit, the engine behaves (cranky) more or less like a real one - subject to overheating, detonation, carb flooding, poor fuel quality and all sorts of other issues. The aircraft experiences stalls, snap-rolls, spins, ground loops and other typical problems. Enemy aircraft are very hard to spot (nothing like real life, I understand - but still very hard for me and I think most people)

It's not a game you can just jump into, there is a steep learning curve. Just learning how to "fly" in that game is probably about as hard as learning to drive a motorcycle, in my experience. New people can't takeoff and can barely stay in the air without going into a Spin and crashing.

The popular ones today like WarThunder don't do anything like any of that so far as I know.

Il2 (Forgotten Battles and Pacific War) has limitations - it doesn't model the high altitude fighting very well, probably because it's a Russian game and they didn't fight at high altitude very much, and the flight models are most accurate for the planes the Soviets used in the war (including a lot of American and UK types) but not so much aircraft they didn't deal with. Again, I think because they relied to some extent on Soviet records and data. Just "flying" the later-war planes (i.e. not even considering combat) with the larger engines can be quite a challenge. About the first 15 times i tried to takeoff in a Corsair I ground-looped it. This was after I had already pretty experienced with the older types.

But what you described in your last paragraph is a fairly good example of the kind of things you can gain insight in, arguably, even in a game. Nothing like a military Sim but the emphasis for this game was more on realism than on convenience, so to speak.

One of the things I like to do in the Sim, is not even fight sometimes but just pick an interesting and nice handling plane and fly it through one of the various mountainous landscapes. It's worth the $10 for that alone.

S

DerAdlerIstGelandet said:

The real full motion sims are great for training. I just had an hour in a 737 sim. Got to fly under the Golden Gate Bridge and shoot an approach into the old Hong Kong Airport. Good times.

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Looks like a blast!

DerAdlerIstGelandet said:

The real full motion sims are great for training. I just had an hour in a 737 sim. Got to fly under the Golden Gate Bridge and shoot an approach into the old Hong Kong Airport. Good times.

View attachment 501680
View attachment 501681 View attachment 501682

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Nice! I'm sooo jealous, looks like a good time.

One question though, who's the funny looking git in the left seat?

Peter Gunn said:

Nice! I'm sooo jealous, looks like a good time.

One question though, who's the funny looking git in the left seat?

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I resemble and resent that remark...

Well, if you have stones enough to post that photo you're certainly back on my Christmas card list...

DerAdlerIstGelandet said:

The real full motion sims are great for training. I just had an hour in a 737 sim. Got to fly under the Golden Gate Bridge and shoot an approach into the old Hong Kong Airport. Good times.

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Hello Adler,
I have had some time in a "Full Motion" simulator like that. It was an interesting experience.
I put "Full Motion" in quotes because it is fairly obvious from the photographs that you aren't really able to go inverted.
I was invited to try out the simulator after a student pilot.
After doing the more mundane things (forget communications procedures which I never learned), I decided to try rolls and low passes around the local airports. This would be the kind of stuff that would lose a pilot's license if I actually had one. The host saw what I was doing and decided to try a few things during the next take-off run. He simulated various emergency situations and failures which I survived. Eventually I crashed because I was still trying low level aerobatics with all the failures.

The observations to be taken from this experience were the following:
My general aircraft / simulator handling was much better than the student pilot and I believe I surprised the host a bit as well.
The reactions that I had gained from playing with desktop simulators was just about all applicable to this full motion simulator.
The feeling even of the full motion simulator wasn't the same as actual aerobatics.
It is pretty hard to simulate negative G or the feeling of heading straight down at the ground. Spins are cool though!

For those of you that disparage aerobatics in a Cessna, it may not be the same as pulling 8G in a Spitfire, but in performance, the Cessna Aerobats aren't all that different from a hot fighter from the Great War. So, instead of thinking of yourself as a Spitfire pilot, pretend you are flying a Fokker for the Kaiser!

My own belief is that PC simulators aren't all that realistic but for us in the modern world, it is as close as we are likely to get to flying an actual WW2 fighter. Unless you have a time machine, you simply will never experience WW2 combat flying.
The great thing about the common PC simulators is that anyone can learn a bit about general aircraft controls and handling and because there is obviously no danger except for possibly spraining a finger, you can try relatively stupid things like flying under bridges, between buildings and trees and such. There is quite a lot to be learned if one is observant.
Getting killed is of no consequence.
Along the same lines, when flying "missions" in a Combat Flight Simulator, one has plenty of time to get past the learning curve.
Sure, I got killed every single time in my first 75 missions, but unless I am a total idiot, I probably would have learned a few things over the week or so it took for those games. Eventually we get smarter by getting killed enough times. Real flying doesn't offer that kind of option.

I believe that trying to determine relative performance between historical aircraft in a simulator is pretty much worthless.
All of that depends on the author and research often leaves a lot of room for improvement. Even when there is proper research, sometimes one sees the authors' bias. Sometimes the simulator itself is not capable of representing differences.
Even with many limitations, I still see them as useful tools.

- Ivan.

Some of you guys are spending more on your sim equipment than I spend on a real race car, and all my racing expense.

And believe me, I'm sure I have more fun.

tyrodtom said:

Some of you guys are spending more on your sim equipment than I spend on a real race car, and all my racing expense.

And believe me, I'm sure I have more fun.

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I'll spend it on real flying...

DerAdlerIstGelandet said:

I'll spend it on real flying...

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I did both for awhile, but at 71, my options are limited.
I would if I could.

The RAF/RN pilots at present involved in the commissioning of the F35-B for UK forces have been working on flight simulators for the aircraft for at least two years. The simulators are not what you get in a computer shop, the simulator programme cost as with many civilian airliners is on par with the cost of some other smaller aircraft.

tyrodtom said:

Some of you guys are spending more on your sim equipment than I spend on a real race car, and all my racing expense.

And believe me, I'm sure I have more fun.

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Some of us really don't spend that much. I believe that all I have spent this year on Computer equipment related to Flight Simulators is $25 to replace a failed Hard Disk, about $20 on a couple Graphics Cards that I am keeping mostly as test equipment and $10 on a SCSI cable.
Relatively speaking, this has been a pretty expensive year because I had a failed Motherboard and a failed Hard Drive. I don't think I have actually spent ANYTHING on Desktop Computers in about 5 years before the failures this year. If you can race a car for about $11 a year, then I am amazed!

We have actually spent several thousand on Laptop Computers for the Children for School, but that has absolutely nothing to do with Flight Simulators. What is amusing is that the Laptop that we bought for my Son is actually a Gaming Laptop. We were not looking specifically for one but that is what you get when the requirement is fast CPU with a lot of memory and storage.

tyrodtom said:

Some of you guys are spending more on your sim equipment than I spend on a real race car, and all my racing expense.

And believe me, I'm sure I have more fun.

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I was young when I started racing motorcycles, if there wasn't a chance of being hurt or killed why would anyone do it? The whole thing is about wining in a sport that can kill, video games were in bars before I was legally old enough to drink in 1978.

pbehn said:

I was young when I started racing motorcycles, if there wasn't a chance of being hurt or killed why would anyone do it? The whole thing is about wining in a sport that can kill, video games were in bars before I was legally old enough to drink in 1978.

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I don't agree on that. I never raced because I thought I was cheating the grim reaper.
But I have been a bit of a thrill junkie all my life, and I found a way to satisfy that need relatively safely, and legally.
Since I competed, or competed, ( I haven't raced in 2 years) in a class of racing that paid me to race, some years I earned more than I spent. That's if I don't count the time I spent working on the car as unearned income.
There is a form of racing called IR Racing, those guys spend more for their memberships, and computer set ups than I do on my car. I not completely familiar with their set ups, but I don't think they earn any money no matter how well they do.

That's where I am familiar with sim racing verses real racing. Just no comparison.
No real road feel, no discomfort, no side pull in the hard turns. No jolt when you hit or get hit.
I've been hit so hard in real racing, it turned my helmet down almost over my eyes, but continued racing.
You can't get that in sim racing.
I doubt I've ever been over 2 Gs in a car in the turn, but even that begins to wear on you in a long race.

I once, just once, was in a A-37 that pulled a little over 5 Gs, ( according to the pilot).
I think some don't realize how much pulling Gs, or being way off from horizontal can effect a persons perception of whats going on.
You can't get that from a PC, no matter how advanced the program is.
Just blacking out the screen when you pull high Gs is hardly like going partially unconscious like you do when you do it for real.