My instructor told me early on in this process that he didn't really think simulators were all that valuable as a teaching tool for private pilots. For more advanced training, definitely, but for the basics of flight, he felt those lessons were best taught in the air. Alas, my scheduled plane got grounded for maintenance, and the school bumped me to the simulator for the day. At this stage in the game, we're focusing very hard on me learning how to land the plane. Last time was rough, but we're getting there. This lesson would focus on procedures. Making the radio calls, calling out the specific steps in the process, and just getting a firm handle on the flow and process. And toss in an emergency or three to see how I deal with that.
Let me start by saying it's a simulator, and despite it being a pretty darned expensive piece of technology, it's not the same as flying the real thing. There's a near complete difference in feel. The controls mimic the real ones, but the tactile feedback is different. The rudder pedals don't move cables and springs, they move potentiometers. And that took some getting used to. Trying to just steer the plane with the rudder pedals brought me back to my first time ever trying to taxi the real thing--I was all over the place, with no real tactile feel for when I was centered. "In the air," the response was much closer to what I've experienced in the plane. The throttle and yoke controls combined to give a pretty good simulation of what really happens.
Despite the differences in control, I thought the lesson was very productive. Not necessarily where I was hoping it would be (timing the flare at landing, for example) but we worked through some other things that until we could just pause "mid flight" and discuss what was happening, hadn't quite clicked. Landing is all about proper application of pitch and power, but that also applies to cruising speeds and correcting errant elevation changes, etc. These are things I never thought I was necessarily struggling with, but in hindsight wasn't doing correctly, either. (If you want to lose elevation, point the nose down. Don't just rely on a reduction in power.)
Other benefits included emergency procedures. A few times in the process, my instructor all of a sudden threw a cloud right in front of me so all I had to go by was my instruments. A bit unnerving at first, but once I had my bearings straight, it was easy to keep things under control. That will undoubtedly help when it comes to learning instrument flying down the road. My engine "died" on approach, and my only goof there was continuing to fly the pattern as opposed to immediately turning to the runway. I landed just short and to the right of the runway, but I did land safely. And I caught the inoperative airspeed indicator on take-off, and successfully aborted the take-off. Taxiing back to the end of the runway was a disaster (rudder pedals) but overall, I thought my emergency procedure work went fairly well.
As far as it being a good tool to teach landings? Not so much. I could fly the patterns and stay lined up with the runway easy enough, but the response to changes in pitch and power weren't as predictable as they are in the airplane, and without the 3D depth, it's very hard to judge where you are in relationship to the ground to know when to start your roundout to land. I had a few go-arounds, and I was able to set the plane down on the runway in all the other cases, but really hard to say how well I did it. There's no "you just crushed your nose wheel" error message that comes up.
I think there's a reason the FAA only allows 2.5 hours of simulator time to count towards your requisite hours for PPL. It's not the best tool for the job. To borrow a line, "ain't nothing like the real thing, baby."
