Flight simulator

Complement your Instrument flight training or challenge yourself as a digital pilot with the Instrument Rating Flight Sim Training Guide from Sporty's Pilot Shop. This guide includes an introduction covering how best to use this guide with an at home simulator as well as keyboard shortcuts to help make you a Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 power user. It includes 22 lessons featuring clickable links directing the user to Sporty's Instrument Rating Course to view how a maneuver or approach is executed before digitally flying.

Ever wanted to pilot an eVTOL aircraft that has the capability to transition to a pusher propeller? Well now you can with X-Plane 12 and the digital ALIA eVTOL from BETA Technologies. With the latest version of X-Plane 12 the ALIA is included in the fleet of digital aircraft bringin the total to 23. Rated for a 250 nautical mile range and the ability to take off and land on a helipad, you'll quickly find yourself touring areas of your hometown that wouldn't necessarily be approachable from an airplane.

The Honeycomb Bravo is one of the most popular flight sim pieces on the market. The challenge is making sure that our hardware configuration is understood by X-Plane 12, which can be a tedious task each time we make a lever change. For that reason, Sporty’s provides preconfigured airplane profiles for X-Plane 12 that will make the transition between different aircraft seamless.

The team at Laminar Research has long been working on improving the X-Plane platform and just recently the newest version debuted, X-Plane 12. Everything from wake turbulence produced by wide body aircraft to supersonic flight has been critiqued and fiddled with until it was ready for the community. But what good is a flight simulator if you don’t have great aircraft to fly? Enjoy a quick review of the aircraft changes from X-Plane 11 to X-Plane 12.

The Honeycomb Bravo throttle is an amazingly capable hardware piece that, once configured correctly, leads the pack in flight sim throttle options. The downside of all these options is that it can be intimidating to program all the commands and levers to operate as we would like. For that reason, the flight simulation department at Sporty’s put together a configuration map for running the Honeycomb Bravo with X-Plane 11. We cover how to configure the throttle for single engine GA, single engine GA complex, multi-engine GA, two-engine jet, and four-engine jet aircraft.

Submit your highest score from the Aircraft Carrier challenge within Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and the top five scores as of July 14^th will win a Logitech Simulator Flight Stick! Please submit screen grabs of your score to : flightsim@sportys.com with the subject line Carrier Challenge. Good luck aviators and don’t forget to call the ball.

As Jack Nicholson taught us 40 years ago, all work and no play makes for an unhappy situation. For that reason the flight sim department at Sporty’s wanted to rate the current Logitech brand of flight simulator sticks available to the community and give our feedback on how best to complement today’s digital fighter aircraft with hardware. 

Since being reintroduced in 2020, Microsoft Flight Simulator has reinvented the flight simulator world. With stunning graphics, live weather, and incredibly life-like cockpits, the latest generation of this storied franchise is winning thousands of new fans every week. To make it more than a game, though, you'll need the right hardware. Here are our top picks for yokes and rudder pedals, any of which can transform MSFS into a valuable training tool. All of these work with X-Plane as well as Micorsoft, and they can be mixed and matched to create the perfect system.

The purpose of this three part blog is to grade Microsoft Flight Simulator versus X-Plane on a wide range of features. Each program has its strengths as well as its weaknesses and it’s worth researching those before financially committing to a software trainer. Edition two covers your first five minutes in both programs, weight and balance, failures, and designing a flight plan.

Assuming you've got the simulator up and running, and you're proficient in planning a flight, the question naturally comes up: what do you do with it? In this article, we'll cover some scenarios to try, from fun flights to VFR maneuvers to instrument procedures and even emergencies.