If you are new to flying, an advanced simulator such as FlightGear can seem daunting: You are presented with a cockpit of an aircraft with little information on how to fly it.
In real life, you would have an instructor sitting next to you to teach you how to fly and keep you safe.
While we cannot provide a personal instructor for every virtual pilot, there are a number of tutorials available that you can follow to become a proficient virtual pilot.
FlightGear contains an in-flight tutorial system, where a simulated instructor provides a virtual ‘lesson’. To access tutorials, Select Start Tutorial from the Help menu. Tutorials are only available on some aircraft.
The tutorial system works particularly well with the Festival TTS system (described above).
For simplicity, run tutorials with AI aircraft turned off from the Options item on the AI/ATC menu. Otherwise, ATC messages may make it difficult to hear your instructor.
Each tutorial consists of your instructor giving you a number of directions and observing how you perform them. If you fail to follow the directions, the instructor will provide information on how to correct your deviation. At the end of the tutorial, the number of deviations is shown. The fewer deviations you make, the better you have performed in the tutotial.
Within a tutorial, to ask your instructor to repeat any instructions, press ‘+’. You can pause the tutorial at any time using the ‘p’ key. To stop the tutorial select Stop Tutorial from the Help menu.
A number of flight tutorials exist for the Cessna 172p, based around Half-Moon Bay airport (KHAF) near San Francisco, provided in the base package. To start the tutorials, select the Cessna 172P aircraft, and a starting airport of KHAF, using the wizard, or the command line:
$ fgfs --aircraft=c172p --airport=KHAF
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When the simulator has loaded, select Start Tutorial from the Help menu. You will then be presented with a list of the tutorials available. Select a tutorial and press Next. A description of the tutorial is displayed. Press Start to start the tutorial.
The following chapters provide FlightGear specific tutorials to take the budding aviator from their first time in an aircraft to flying in the clouds, relying on their instruments for navigation. If you have never flown a small aircraft before, following the tutorials provides an excellent introduction to flight.
Outside of this manual, there is an excellent tutorial written by David Megginson – being one of the main developers of FlightGear – on flying a basic airport circuit specifically using FlightGear. This document includes a lot of screen shots, numerical material etc., and is available from
http://www.flightgear.org/Docs/Tutorials/circuit.
There are many non-FlightGear specific tutorials, many of which are applicable. First, a quite comprehensive manual of this type is the Aeronautical Information Manual, published by the FAA, and available at
http://www.faa.gov/ATPubs/AIM/.
This is the Official Guide to Basic Flight Information and ATC Procedures by the FAA. It contains a lot of information on flight rules, flight safety, navigation, and more. If you find this a bit too hard work, you may prefer the FAA Training Book,
http://avstop.com/AC/FlightTraingHandbook/,
which covers all aspects of flight, beginning with the theory of flight and the working of airplanes, via procedures like takeoff and landing up to emergency situations. This is an ideal reading for those who want to learn some basics on flight but don’t (yet) want to spend bucks on getting a costly paper pilot’s handbook.
While the handbook mentioned above is an excellent introduction on VFR (Visual Flight Rules), it does not include flying according to IFR (Instrument Flight Rules). However, an excellent introduction into navigation and flight according to Instrument Flight Rules written by Charles Wood can be found at
http://www.navfltsm.addr.com/.
Another comprehensive but yet readable text is John Denker’s ”See how it flies”, available at
http://www.monmouth.com/ jsd/how/htm/title.html.
This is a real online text book, beginning with Bernoulli’s principle, drag and power, and the like, with the later chapters covering even advanced aspects of VFR as well as IFR flying