Comment by qdotme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qdotme | Hacker News Reader

I'm loving it. As a private pilot working (slowly) towards my CFI rating - this is also such an opportunity to integrate it into training devices.

Bulk of the instrument flight training is "mindgames" anyways - you see nothing other than instruments, your "seat in the pants" is likely to cheat you..

Possibly going a step further, the state of teaching aids available to CFIs is pretty sad, with online quizzes and pre-recorded videos being the pinnacle of what I have experienced... this would be an awesome opportunity to try and build "automatic CFI" - not counting for AATD time under current rules but better than chair-flying (the process of imagining a flight and one's reactions).

The teaching tools nowadays available to CFIs are fantastic. Get yourself X-Plane 12, Honeycomb yoke, throttles and rudders and a decent aircraft like the Challenger 650 and you are good to go. All of this can be had for around 1000 bucks and is the best investment anyone can make to stay current. I used to be a CFII a long time ago (1995) when sims where expensive and only the best flight schools had them. Back then, instrument training was flying long and boring hours under the hood and if you were lucky, one or two hours actual IFR. Most people were afraid to fly real IFR after the rating, since they were aware that the training was so bad, myself included. A couple of hours flying a PC sim fixed this problem once and forever and made a huge difference in real world flying.

I have a bit of an ax to grind with the state of pilot training tools. There's some interesting new work being done here, but agreed lots to do in this realm. What does a compelling "automatic CFI" look like to you?

> Bulk of the instrument flight training is "mindgames" anyways - you see nothing other than instruments, your "seat in the pants" is likely to cheat you..

Eh, I guess I can flex a little. Living in the Pacific North West, I do not have to play mind games. I can almost get IMC delivered on demand. :P

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