AOPA Pilot Magazine - February 2013 - 83

I think the simulator is ideal for this
stuff: Practicing emergencies so if it happens in the real airplane you don’t think too
much. You just act. My best landings were
during these emergency maneuvers as well.
Now that I think about it, some of my best
landings in the real 172 were at the end of a
practice emergency maneuver. Maybe I’m
just over-thinking my landings, period.
Stalls and slow flight didn’t seem to have
as much left-turning tendency. But the rudder controls also seemed more sensitive at
slow speed than our club bird, so I’m not
sure how those two balanced each other out.
We didn’t try spins.
All flight maneuvers at speed, like steep
turns, felt spot on. I was pretty happy with
my performance there. Actually, all the
flight characteristics above very low speed
felt pretty good and had me getting lost in
the illusion that I was flying a real airplane.
There were several ways it was better
than a real airplane. I want one of those
“pause” buttons installed in our club 172 so

I can just freeze the flight and talk about it
with the instructor—or just get all the time
I want to puzzle out the mess I’ve gotten
myself into. The sim would be the first place
I’d go to study a new aircraft, or even just
a new aircraft panel, like a glass cockpit.
(We’re a working-man’s flight club, but hey,
a guy has to dream.) Nguyen said the sim
can be used for 50 hours of flight training
for my instrument rating and commercial
certificate. Its full-retail hourly rate is better than our super-reasonable club-member
rate for Hobbs time. And there’s no lost time
taxiing out or waiting for the regional jet on
a six-mile final to land.
Nguyen has signed me off for solo flight
and I will be back, although I might need
help getting everything reset after a simstopping crash. He’s already given me some
good tips, such as pausing the device prior
to a crash or adding power when repositioning from the ground to the air so it doesn’t
suddenly come alive with zero airspeed
(although the ensuing recovery is fun).

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This sim can’t replace flying in a real
Cessna 172—and I don’t care about that one
bit. My biggest realization walking away
from the simulator is that the machine is its
own aircraft, similar enough to our club 172
that I can use all the same procedures and
performance numbers but different enough
for me to think about it as a separate entity.
There is one critical thing it offers that
our club 172 does not: I can fly this one
whenever I want. While I don’t think it will
keep my landings in perfect shape, I think
it will force me to work on skills gone lax in
the real airplane and make me a better pilot
when I get back my medical certificate. And
who knows, I might just keep right on flying both.
You see, every cloud really can have a
silver lining.
AOPA
Sean Rabons is a private pilot who values
every flight and looks forward to proving
he can still fly left-hand patterns as well as
he can fly right-hand ones.

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AOPA Pilot Magazine - February 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine - February 2013