Whether you are an instrument rated pilot, an IR student, or a CFII candidate, having a well configured simulator setup at home can make an enormous difference in your instrument scan and your IFR proficiency.
The ability to practice, tonight, in the comfort of your home, the approaches you will be flying tomorrow in the plane, on faithfully simulated avionics, is an invaluable tool for your instrument skills.
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Email us today to start discuss a plan to build a home simulator setup tailored to your avionics and your type of flying.
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Email us at info@independentaviation.training — we’ll answer promptly.
ForeFlight integration
Did you know that most home simulation software (like X-Plane) can serve as a GPS source for ForeFlight running on your iPad?
This means that you can practice your approaches, at home, using
- the same iPad device
- the same flights and routes,
- the same plates – organized in the same folders,
- with the same annotations
… that you will use tomorrow, in the plane, to fly the actual route and the actual approach.
Correct mistakes today, so that you won’t make them tomorrow.
Develop muscle memory that you can transfer to real-world flying.
Take to the plane experience and insights that you develop, inexpensively, at home.
Unlimited, inexpensive practice in the comfort of your home.
Imagine hand flying a hold thirty times, changing wind direction and speed every time you want, till you are perfectly satisfied with your performance.
How impractical and expensive would that be in the real plane?
With a home simulator you can practice instrument scan and wind corrections in all wind conditions, without worrying about your fuel burn.
Unlimited, inexpensive practice
With the right home setup it becomes possible for you to fly tens of approaches, holds and missed procedures in one day, at arbitrarily high standards of accuracy, in all winds and weather conditions, basically for free, even around an irregular schedule.
By comparison, practicing the same tasks for an equivalent amount of time in the real plane can costs thousands of dollars, and would take multiple days.
Let a CFII configure your simulator
There are skills that you can practice effectively in a home simulator, and skills for which the simulator is not a good training aid.
Without guidance, you risk focusing on the wrong skills or, worse, develop the wrong habits that you’ll have to unlearn.
Let a CFII help you train, in the simulator, the skills that matter. Not only we can help you build your home simulator, but we can offer you instrument ground instruction on the simulator you have.
Affordable solutions
A very functional simulator can be built starting from a relatively old gaming PC, including one you might already have. Don’t take advice from gamers: pilots have different goals. Your dollars will go a lot further if you make the right choices. Why spend thousands on the latest GPU, when all you need to render is a wall of clouds from 200 AGL to infinity?
Did you know that you can own and operate, at home, fundamentally the same software that runs on much more expensive, FAA-certified simulators?
Recreate faithfully the avionics you have in your plane.
With software like AirManager by SimInnovations you can build custom instrument panels containing all the instruments that you see in these examples, minus the Garmin G5s and the GTN GPS.
The Garmin G5 is available separately. It is easy to create a dual G5 configuration.
The GTN simulator (illustrated below) is made available for free by Garmin, and it can be fully integrated into the simulation. This means that the plane position in the simulation is reflected faithfully in the GTN unit, and the simulated GFC500 autopilot is integrated with the GPS unit and behaves exactly as in the plane.
