Learning to Fly Airplanes with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020

This summer my fiancé offered me a flight experience for my birthday. It was an amazing surprise which I thoroughly enjoyed, but left me wanting more. I don’t think I necessarily wanted to go through proper flight training and get a license, but I wanted to know the ins and outs of flying an airplane to a degree that I would know what to do if I had to fly the real thing.

Flight Simulators

There are a bunch of flight sims out there, but in terms of graphics, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is the best one hands down. I remember watching YouTube videos from E3 2019 while it was still in development and being fascinated by the life-like graphics the game presented, so I immediately went on Steam to check it out. The graphics were even better than I remembered, stunning visuals throughout. Thanks to the use of photogrammetry and Bing Maps imagery, the game simulates the entire planet from topographical data. The world around you looks incredible, the ground has huge amounts of detail, so much so that you can actually fly around your hometown and recognize it from above.

PC Requirements / Build Specs

I wanted to take advantage of this new game engine and everything the graphics had to offer. The game requirements were reasonable, but if you wanted to run the game in Ultra settings with everything maxed out and still have smooth FPS, you really had to step it up with your build specs. So the next big step, which was quite fun, was planning my new gaming PC. I’ve been a Mac user for the last decade and my last gaming PC was maybe an Intel Celeron 266MHz, so a really long time ago. I’d been itching to get back into gaming and up until this point, I was only gaming on my Nintendo Switch, so I went all out. After a lot of research and lurking around r/pcmasterrace for way too long, watching endless hours of Gamernexus and Hardware Unboxed on YouTube, this was the build I settled on.

Specs

Build Pictures

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Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020

After a massive download and update (90GB+), I finally launched the game and went straight to Flight Training to learn the basics. I didn’t want to play with only mouse and keyboard so I got a cheap Xbox controller for smoother movements, but even with that, Flight Training was a bit disappointing. I mean, it showed you the basics, but the lessons were compact and you had to do things on the go while listening to your instructor, which was quite demanding and high pressure. It was easy to get overwhelmed. Flight Training was structured in 8 lessons:

  1. Basic Controls & Cameras
  2. Attitudes & Instruments
  3. Take-off & Level Flight
  4. Landing
  5. Traffic Pattern
  6. First Solo Flight
  7. Navigation
  8. First Solo Navigation

None of them were really well detailed. I was expecting to be taught all the basics and what to do at every point, but that wasn’t the case. The whole thing felt a bit arcadey, but I think it would be too much to do proper training in-game. There are some addons you can buy that give you more. Since then Microsoft and Asobo have released new updates to the Flight Training program and it’s a bit better now.

After getting the basics on how to get the plane started and flying off, I spent a few weeks just cruising around places I knew, like my hometown and various dropzones I used to skydive from. I was amazed at the level of detail you could see from the sky. It really looked like the real thing and the satellite imagery was spot on.

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Flight Experience

As a birthday present, my fiancé (having watched me play the game for hours) decided to offer me a Virgin Experience Day for a flight lesson, the real deal! Best present ever, I must say! The experience included ground school and a technical briefing, two flying sectors of 30 minutes each, one as the pilot and the other as an observer. I ended up booking it at Clifton Aviation in the Gloucestershire Airport EGBJ / GLO near Cheltenham. The flight was done in a Piper Warrior (PA28-161) with the registration G-CDMX . The instructor gave me the controls after take-off and controlling the plane was a lot easier than expected. I flew around the airfield at around 1,400ft and followed his instructions all the way out and back to lining up the airplane for landing. He took back control on the approach to final. It was a really fun experience and I thoroughly enjoyed watching the pilot going through the checklist to get the plane started. My next goal for Flight Simulator was to learn the checklists for the Piper Warrior and try to fly the same route I had just done.

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PA-28-161 Warrior II

Microsoft Simulator didn’t have a Piper Warrior in their default list of airplanes, so I searched around and found a third-party addon by JustFlight for it.

This addon was incredible. The plane looked amazing, with a lot of cool liveries including one from a flight school here in the UK. The sounds were spot on from what I could remember and the interior was exactly the same. The cockpit textures were nicely designed, showing some real wear and tear that gave another sense of realism. The addon also included an in-game manual checklist that followed real-life procedures, a different choice of navigation systems, and a really cool and detailed Operations Manual for the airplane.

I spent the next couple of days learning the checklists of the Piper, starting it up and flying the same flight path I did on the experience day. It was a lot of fun, but I recognized that I could fly the plane in the game, but not to a real or safe standard in real life. I had a lot more to learn other than the checklists, but I was motivated and having a blast so I decided to upgrade my setup and get some flight controllers. This way I could learn to do things properly and immerse myself a bit more in the realism.

Controllers

When I bought the peripherals for my computer, I went with a Logitech keyboard, mouse and headset. While I was browsing their website at the time, I remember seeing they had flight simulation controls. It seems Logitech had acquired Saitek, a known brand for simulation game controllers, and was now selling them under their own brand. Reading online, the reviews were okay. The controllers were good value for money, at least for an entry-level position, so I decided to get them. I went with the basics.

Flight Sim Controllers

I would just say that these are not PRO at all. I was quite disappointed when I received them. The quality is not great, cheap plastics everywhere. They feel flimsy and the actual controls are not great. I mean they are better than a joystick or a game controller for playing, but I was expecting more from it. They are good value for money from what’s available out there. Simulation controllers tend to be a niche thing and high-quality ones are really expensive, so in perspective, these are good enough.

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Issues and Mods

The rudder pedals and the throttle quadrant were pretty good, but the flight yoke had some serious issues with its dead zones. The pitch axis would get stuck with friction when having some roll applied. For the dead zones, there were some ways to mitigate it by doing software calibrations within Windows and Logitech. This helped a bit, but it continued to be annoying because the problem wasn’t really a software issue, but mainly a hardware one. So I resorted to voiding the warranty and making some community mods that solved all these issues. I don’t have any pictures of these mods, but I just followed these videos and it was pretty straightforward.

Rubber Band Mod

Leo Bodnar Mod

Flight School

Now with the new setup I wanted to take some time to learn how to fly properly. This meant learning all checklists and procedures. Up until this point, I was flying the Piper Warrior but decided to switch to the Cessna 152, because I found an amazing YouTube channel (which I’m still following) that explained everything in great detail.

Learning Sequence

Checklists Cessna 152

From the videos, I put together this short reference guide: Cessna 152 - Checklists that covers:

Upgrading the Setup (Once Again)

The current setup was great, but there were some small things that could be improved, especially in regards to checklists and normal flight operations. Checklists for the most part involve turning on and off a lot of buttons or switches in the airplane. I was currently doing all that with mouse and keyboard and some buttons on the new controllers, but it wasn’t really realistic. So I decided to get some flight panels from Logitech that improved the immersion and got me one step closer to the real thing.

New Panels

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The panels are super helpful when conducting the checklists (magnetos, lights, carb-heat, battery, alternator, etc), but also for flight with the auto-pilot panel that includes flaps and pitch trim. This one is a godsend. Doing trim on the yoke was really difficult and now it’s really easy.

Portugal Cross-Country Flight

With all the training and practice, I felt I was ready to try something more than the casual flight around the airfield, so I planned a cross-country flight around Portugal. This was quite ambitious but I wanted to travel around my home country and see it from a new perspective up above. The whole flight took a week to complete. I was playing maybe one to two hours a day after work and found myself taking some detours to explore a bit more. Overall the stops played nicely to refuel and rest and actually enjoy the flight.

Below is a picture of the flight plan. At the end of it I was getting a bit bored so took a more direct approach to the final stop. The Cessna 152 is not a fast plane and doesn’t have an auto-pilot so I had to focus and fly all the time, which was a bit tiring at times.

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Issues with the Cross-Country

The main issue I had was if I wanted to enjoy the view from the cockpit I had to use the yoke buttons for the left and right pan. That was okay to some degree but didn’t really allow for more precise movements, so I knew that was something I wanted to address. The other pain point was the slow cruise speed and not having auto-pilot on the Cessna 152. There were times it would have been fun to just turn auto-pilot on and relax and enjoy the views.

The good thing is I could solve both issues. To pan the camera around the cockpit more naturally I got a Tobii Eye Tracker 5. This allowed me to turn my head left and right and actually pan the camera inside the cockpit. Huge improvement and super cool! About the cruise speed and auto-pilot, the solution was to make a jump and start learning to fly the Cessna 172. It has auto-pilot and a higher cruise speed and I already have 130 hours on the 152, so that’s the next step!

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A word of notice on the Tobii Eye Tracker 5: it only works on a single display, which is a shame since I was using the simulator across two displays. So now I have the simulator on one display and use the other one for Flight Navigation with LittleNavMap. The Tobii Eye tracker sticks on the bottom of the display and it has quite a good range since I’m quite far from it when playing.

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Next Steps

I’m now starting my journey with the Cessna 172. So far it’s pretty similar to the 152. The checklists are a bit different and also different speeds for procedures, but it’s been easy to pick it up. MSFS 2020 only has the G1000 model, which was a bit too technical for me at this point, so I got the Deluxe Package which includes the 172 with regular avionics.

Cessna 172 - Regular Avionics (Deluxe Package)

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Cessna 172 - G1000 (Default Model)

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For now, this is it. My journey with Flight Simulator!