Redbird Simulator

FloridaPilot

FloridaPilot

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I never been in a Redbird or taken an air safety course in a sim. Has anyone done so and then flown the real thing right after. Is the sim pretty accurate?
 
It's great training as it's actually harder to fly well than the real thing...


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For procedures and instruments it works great. For primary flying and landing it is pretty useless. Nothing against redbird but all of these types of simulators won't let you feel the actual plane flying. You don't get that increase in G's as you flare, the feeling of your butt sliding to the side when you are not coordinated in a turn, the acceleration/deceleration you feel as you try to land in a gusting wind, etc. If you want to go practice approaches they are much cheaper than actually flying them and can be re-set without having to take off again. They just don't do much for actual piloting skills.

Keith
 
Its much more difficult to fly than the real thing. For one, getting the plane trimmed is terrible since you don't have the usual force feedbacks you get in a real airplane.

It's good for learning instruments and practicing a few scenarios, but that's about it.

Personally I wasn't a huge fan. I could do my own sim work at home on flight simulator (albeit you can't log that) to practice with instruments and that helps but for actually flying one just needs to do the real thing.

The Redbirds (at least the one I used) are light years from the sorts of full motion sims the airlines use.
 
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We have one at our school. It's great for instrument procedures but pretty useless if you're trying to get a feel for how flying is.
 
The feel of the flight controls, especially the pedals, is poor. And all three times I've been in a Redbird, it went off on its own and stopped responding to control inputs. The twin engine mode would not enter a spin no matter what we tried.
 
Flight training devices are good for working on the scan and getting procedures down. I never worried about trying to hold altitude in one.
 
FloridaPilot said:
I never been in a Redbird or taken an air safety course in a sim. Has anyone done so and then flown the real thing right after. Is the sim pretty accurate?
Click to expand...

It's a very overpriced version of Microsoft Flight Simulator with about equivalent accuracy.
 
The basic Redbird single engine simulators are great for procedure training and general IFR work. They fly nothing like a real airplane since they don't have feedback in the yokes. Hand flying them requires a different skill set than hand flying a real single engine airplane.

I got the chance to fly a Redbird King Air simulator, and this one had real force feedback yokes, and flew much more like a real airplane.
 
I spent some time in an FMX this morning. It was fine for IFR and seemed to model the instruments and their failure modes reasonably well. Garmin buttonology was pretty close to the real thing, too.
 
It will take you some time to get used to it. And around here, what they're charging for them isn't much cheaper than flying a real airplane. I tried them out at Oshkosh, and found it odd to fly like everyone else. No feedback. I imagine it'd be fine for IFR training, but I'm not sure I'd spend the money on it.
 
I got xplane9 for $15 and a stick, throttle, and rudder pedals <$200. The panel of the 172 is just like mine if i ignore the garmin 430. Lots of practice ifr for just a few cents of electrons.

Agree they are near useless for learning the feel of takeoffs and landings.
 
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