Flying Lessons Discovered

Aha! There are flying lessons in FSX. On the missions screen there's a tab on the right for training. I noticed it just recently and checked it out. At first I thought they were just written tutorials staring with the basics of flight and going from there, but they actually have missions you can click on after reading through the ground school lessons.

Today I pretty much started my flight training over again with the lesson and straight and level flight. This is surprisingly difficult. On my earlier flights I thought I was doing OK, but really I was constantly gaining or losing altitude. In a simulator, that's no big deal as long as you don't hit the ground (which is still not a big deal, really), but in the real world other pilots, ground controllers, and of course the FAA kind of expect you to maintain a constant altitude.

Without fully understanding the concept of trim, you spend your time making manual adjustments which tend to be over-corrections resulting in a wobbly, parabolic sort of flight path. I've spent about two hours just trying to fly around at either a constant altitude or at a constant speed with a steady rate of accent or descent. I'm getting better at it, but I'm not there yet.

I just had my worst landing so far. I've still go the reality level set at easy, so it didn't count as a crash, but in the real world that's what it would have been. I was wobbling all over the place and banking left and right trying to hit the runway. I finally came down on the left side of the runway, angling towards the right side, and landed with a slight bank to the right and at a pretty fair clip. Ouch!

I've learned that, counter to what you'd think, you don't really use the yoke or joystick to climb or descend. You use them to change the aircraft's pitch, but you really use the throttle to climb and descend. For climbing, especially on take-off, you use full throttle (on the Cessna Skyhawk anyway), and after climbing gradually off the runway until you reach 80 knots, you pull back on the stick to maintain that 80 knots. Actually, I think the ideal climb-out speed for the Skyhawk is 74 knots, but 80 is a bit safer and provides better visibility out the front since the climb angle is not so steep.

For descents, instead of nosing down, you reduce throttle, and actually nose up to hold a set descent speed, so 90 knots for descent from altitude, but more like 65 knots for final landing approach (with flaps). You then use the throttle to increase or decrease your descent rate.

I'm still having a lot of fun with this, but I've clearly got a lot to learn about flying.