Did I waste Time And Money?

[MOAB]

I’ve been flying for 12 years and have been using flight sims for about 15 years if not more. I found it helped my hands and feet greatly when I was at flight school and was told just that as well.

I routinely use flight sims to stay sharp at Instrument flying (I fly mostly VFR) and so long as you don’t allow yourself to develop bad habits using the sim you should be fine.

[laminar]

I got into flight sims at around 9-10 years old. I was HEAVY into any and every flight sim I could get my hands on through my teenage years. I had joined a virtual airline at the time as the internet was developing and I was doing various assigned routes and figured out VOR tracking etc on the early MS flight sims. I was that nerd gleaming about building my "hours" up to get to jets in my little virtual job haha. It slowed down around 16/17 as I started working a lot and I tucked them away fully when I was around 20 and sims developed beyond the computer I had at that time. When I started my flight training at 26 my instructor asked me "ok, where have you done this before?". I didn't tell him anything about my flight sim years as a kid until that point but it clearly helped.

[Posthumane]

I'm firmly in the camp that home flight sims definitely CAN be helpful, as long as the right attitude is applied. First off, it's important to realize that it is a training aide with limited fidelity and is definitely not flying. You can add fidelity to it through accurate controls, VR, etc. but it will never be quite the same as the real thing. However, that does not make it useless. It is, in my opinion, a step higher than sitting in front of a cockpit layout board "chair flying", and like chair flying the big advantage that it provides is it gets you thinking about flying, and about the procedures that are required to do it correctly (just with a bit of feedback and eye candy to boot). The caveat to this is that you need to know what the procedures are first, otherwise you're just practicing blindly.

I didn't do much flight simming at the time that I did my aeroplane training, but when I did my helicopter training I found that having a good flight sim with an accurate flight model and realistic controls helped cement muscle memory (such as the relationship between collective, pedal, and cyclic movements) and things like engine start procedures after I learned the basics in a real aircraft with an instructor.

[sjatana]

Flight sim helped me immensely during my training when it came to procedural items. There are great addons that are pretty much bang on in visuals to what students would train on at a local flying club.

Your typical at home based simulator will never be the "real" thing, but it is great for hammering down procedures and not so much for practicing technique and aircraft handling.

[TG]

I thought that I was being productive!

Flying is expensive so I thought if I purchased Flight Simulation Yoke, Pedals, throttle and Played Flight sims while doing an ONLINE ground school from an accredited online school that I would be ahead of the game when starting my real life lessons and in return more productive and with a better understanding.

I have now went to two schools to inquire about full time lessons and when i mention i have already completed ground school and I have been using flight simulators I get a look of disgust and in one case they started belittling me saying well if you aren't going to take are ground school i am not going to train you and that flight simulators aren't real life and that now he has to deal with all my bad habits.

Now id like to say I planned on taking the schools ground school anyways I just feel now i would understand and grasp things easier.
I also didn't and do not claim to know what I am doing because of a flight sim game, I mentioned these things casually while the potential instructors were telling me about the min requirements and what the actual average is and to expect to spend more then the numbers written down.
I mentioned I was aware of that and i have been trying to be productive by self learning on the flight sim and i told them about the online ground school.

Anyways I was felt very unwelcome at both schools and I am fairly shy so i don't think it was my attitude hah I was actually very confused and felt stupid for bringing those things up.

So did i waste my time and money or where they just hoping to soak up all my money?

So!? Did it work out at the end?

(Initial post is almost 3 years old)