Does anyone actually fly their sim?

[Trevor Hale]

Not at all. Most airports in Europe have RNAV procedures as well as FMC/GPS.

Of course RNAV..  Doh!  I must have my helmet on too tight again.

[AndyT]

Trev,  That kind of helmet you only wear to the mall.

I only built the sim so I could have a more realistic experience flying the thing.  If I can't fly it then it serves no purpose.  If I sold it all, I could buy another guitar! LOL

[Trevor Hale]

LOL..  I know what you mean..  what the heck was I thinking..    It was a long day.  ha ha ha.

By the way..  it would be one very shiny guitar too

[Boeing Skunk Works]

Anyone else?

Surely there are more flyers than the half a dozen or so regulars here out of 225 members.

Do you have manuals for your aircraft as Eric and I do, or do you have to wing it with whatever FS supplies?

How about you Tim, where are you hiding? For a ten year veteran of this hobby I know you must have more than an hour under your belt. 

[Rob65]

Well,

Anyone else?

Surely there are more flyers than the half a dozen or so regulars here out of 225 members.

this is an older post but your cry for more active users seems urgent enough 
To be honest, up to a few month ago I had no idea that flightsim could do the full automatic stuff, all I ever did was a full manual flight from take off to landing a plane.
I never worried about the procedures, I don't even know if my old FS3.1 bothered ..., which may explain my very short flights and a lot of repair and maintenance by the FS technical maintenance dept. 
Or to put it in more human terms: I love to fly, used to fly a few model aeroplanes, but never really managed to do some real stuff in FlightSim. Part of this was due to the lack of a proper sim environment, if mouse and keyboard were proper instruments for flying a plane these would have been in the 737s instead of all these indicators, knobs, yokes and throttles.

Flying is something you start doing as a kid: Starting with paper planes then model planes, dreaming of your flying license, getting it (or not) and flying a real plane (or a sim). I finished the first four steps in this approach - and in case you wonder, it is not getting it - so I am doomed to fly a sim.
But I would not be here if this site was not called cockpitbuilders.com. I first need to replace my mouse and keyboard with the proper instruments. Now somehow this building is becoming a hobby on itself. Buying stuff is not an option, I am an engineer and engineers don't buy stuff - they build.

The conclusion is simple: I don't fly a sim (yet) but I am building instruments. Of course I will need to fly in the end to test all my instruments and by then I will love to fly a plane.

Have to go now. I need to finish my first instrument.

Regards,

Rob

[Boeing Skunk Works]

Welcome to the site Rob. That's nice work you have there.

I too went through the four steps you describe, but it every expensive to fly in todays economy so I take that to the sim. I'd have to be independently wealthy to actually buy and fly a real 727 or any other airliner for that matter. Don't think the thought hasn't crossed my mind!

My whole point of the thread was that we spend thousands on these simulators and I think it only fitting that we learn how to fly them as they were designed to be flown instead of haphazardly jumping in and tooling around without a clue as to the real operation of the aircraft.

If we weren't building these things we wouldn't be worried about realism and that should extend to operations.

But that's just one man's opinion.

[Sean]

I started to answer this question a bit like Rob, but it was getting a bit long and not quite on topic, so I started a new thread.

Back to this topic, I don't have much to fly at the moment, so can't make my flights too realistic. But the plan is for a full size dual seat 737NG (what else  ) that can be 'flown' by two people in as realistic conditions as possible.

My flying at the moment is largely re-aquainting myself with FS9 and learning the 737 (using PMDG), but I nearly always start cold and dark, on stand 3 at Newcastle and do a domestic flight to LHR or LGW. I have all the charts for those places close to hand (the UK AIP is an excellent resource for flying in the UK). My first bits of hardware that I've only just aquired is the MCP/EFIS and COMM/NAV/ADF/ATC equipment, so suffice to say I'm using that fully at the moment. Selected mode only at the moment. I haven't moved on to LNAV & VNAV yet.

Sean