X-Plane 11

Sweet.

Hopefully all of this helps with my IR, I start that in 2 months :)

I remember a story many years ago about a pilot who was a simmer going to I believe the Air Force or some other branch to do his training and they remarked how much ahead of training this guy was just due to his use of the FSX sim. I think not too long after that they started issuing a copy of FSX to the students. So it definitely helps. Just because it isn't an 'authorized' sim doesn't make a difference.
 
Placed an order for a new computer last night - Ryzen 5 1600 AMD processor, 16GB of memory and I'm going to try to reuse a GeForce 750 card that I already have and a CH Yoke, throttle quadrant and pedals. The last part should be here on Friday. It is a pretty beefy system with no graphics card, monitor or peripherals, just under $650. As I figure it, that's about 6 flight hours and I should be able to save at least that much in training.

Really like the large monitor set up with the side window...will have to try that. My monitors are not quite that large, but hopefully I can make something work. I know I'm also going to need to play around with tweaking the CH yoke sensitivity, it's just way too jittery.
 
I remember a story many years ago about a pilot who was a simmer going to I believe the Air Force or some other branch to do his training and they remarked how much ahead of training this guy was just due to his use of the FSX sim. I think not too long after that they started issuing a copy of FSX to the students. So it definitely helps. Just because it isn't an 'authorized' sim doesn't make a difference.

I think it all depends on how its used. I used it like "chair flying", instead of pretend flying in a chair I would pretend fly FSX to run through check list, getting used to what I should be seeing when doing turns (what points on the plan does the horizon pass through for 30 and 60 degree turns), practicing emergencies, and flying my cross country. I even had the plane at my home field with it turned off when the sim started so I could practice everything from start up to shutdown. Only thing I haven't done is to have a friend get on there and give the actual tower responses, but usually I would say what I was supposed to when I pushed the buttons to talk to the tower on the sim. I would do all the preflight planning (W&B, etc.) that I would normally do before a real flight. I think it made a lot of training easier, but it does fall short in some areas like my stomach dropping through the seat when a stall would cause the nose to pitch down and with my controls I could not feel the increase control pressure when trying to step on the rudder pedals during a slip.
 
I use Plane 11 to practice flights when I can't get to the airport, and to practice flying to areas i've not been to before. It's pretty darned good, but of course, no match for actually flying. But it's (in my opinion) one of the best simulations out there right now. I downloaded terrain from Open Maps (I think) and that really added more realism to my simulation. I also love that it pairs with Foreflight, so I get simulated practice with Foreflight as well.

Could you tell us more about the terrain that you downloaded? I looked for "Open Maps" but didn't find anything with that exact name, and what I did find didn't appear to be terrain for flight sims. Thanks.
 
Here's a pic of my set-up with the default 172SP loaded in XP11. You can move the perspective up, down, and around to suit yourself. In our 182 I have to duck down to look out a wing-tip, so it comes kind of natural for me in the sim.

Jim

View attachment 58051
that's awesome!
 
I need to get a proper rig setup for flight simming! I just need to complete my PPL first.. I play a lot of video games, and I love flying- so I am sure I will be obsessed.

Try Warthunder if you haven't already. I no **** probably have 1000 hours playing that game over the last 5 years. Might help your emergency situation skills, I have a lot of off airport landings... usually due to bullet damage.
 
Could you tell us more about the terrain that you downloaded? I looked for "Open Maps" but didn't find anything with that exact name, and what I did find didn't appear to be terrain for flight sims. Thanks.

Sure! I used the video below as a guide as I downloaded and used a tool called "Ortho4XP" to download Open Street Maps terrain images. The YouTube video suggests using "OSM" as the downloaded image type, but that didn't work for me (extremely slow and the server timed out.) Instead, I downloaded the images as "BI" and a texture of 16 (wish I had done 17) and I had good success with those images.

Note: Be sure to copy your aircraft (especially custom or add-on aircraft) to another folder as backup in case you have to delete and reinstall Xplane. And be sure to have enough disk space. The terrain files will be sizable. (I think my downloaded terrain was about 92GB for all of California, Arizona and parts of Nevada, though you don't really need to download all that much terrain.)

 
Hi.
If one of you can set a 12 kts xwind in the C172 and remove the brakes / start your take off roll.
Have they fixed the tumble weed behavior, where the plane has a tendency to be pushed off runway, with the loud tire noise scraping the runway?
I see that the the wing tips and the cowl in not in the picture at the same time, even with that low eye point view, can that be adjusted?
Thanks.
 
Sure! I used the video below as a guide as I downloaded and used a tool called "Ortho4XP" to download Open Street Maps terrain images. The YouTube video suggests using "OSM" as the downloaded image type, but that didn't work for me (extremely slow and the server timed out.) Instead, I downloaded the images as "BI" and a texture of 16 (wish I had done 17) and I had good success with those images.

Note: Be sure to copy your aircraft (especially custom or add-on aircraft) to another folder as backup in case you have to delete and reinstall Xplane. And be sure to have enough disk space. The terrain files will be sizable. (I think my downloaded terrain was about 92GB for all of California, Arizona and parts of Nevada, though you don't really need to download all that much terrain.)

Thanks for this. I'm going to give Ortho4XP a try. It looks worth the effort.
 
Thanks for this. I'm going to give Ortho4XP a try. It looks worth the effort.

Sorry for the poor images (photo from my iPhone of the monitor), but the Ortho4XP download really helps to bring a lot more realism to the Xplane simulator. Here is a series of photos after takeoff from KSMO with the payware Alabeo Piper Sport (aka Sportcruiser). The bottom set of images shows the golf course and the coastline and mountains which look pretty good... at least to my eyes. What can't be seen from these photos (but can be seen on the monitor, but is a bit obscured due to haze) is Catalina Island.


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I have had X Plane 10 for quite some time, but never set it up. I have the Cessna yoke and throttle quadrant, but never got any rudder pedals (the ones I was waiting for were on backorder for like a year - probably still are).

You can spend some serious money on a simulator, guess I just always preferred to go out to the airport and fly my own airplane. I think it would be fun if you had multiple monitors, a mock panel in front of you, etc.

I guess I should pick up some rudder pedals and give it another try.
 
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