Hi Folks:

I've logged pretty close to 1000 hours now on G3 with various planes (particularly with the P-51 and a series of imported warbirds from rcwarbirds.com). I just finished the Horizon P-51 PTS. I am lining up some time with an instructor but am looking for some helpful input as to what to generally expect when I first take this thing up on my own. I've heard the ground handling will feel completely different. What else should I expect to be typically different (assuming that my P-51 is properly trimmed etc)? Where do people think G3 differs from real life in the flight physics area? (I heard stalls + spins were poorly done in G3). How far would 1000 sim hours - with lots of variance in wind/crosswind/airports - take me towards being able to solo?

An thoughts would be appreciated.

thanks

Chickenhawk

By spending 1000 hours on the sim you will have a huge leg up on orientation learning. Meaning that you will be able to fly in all directions and not have to worry about which way to push the stick. You should also be able to progress very rapidly towards solo'ing with an instructor because most of the training time is learning about orientation and flying safely.

Now, what will be different? First off reality is a lot different than the game. I did the exact same as you and spent a ton of hours on the sim & felt extremely confident in my flying abilities. BUT, when I got my first glow plane (a nexstar trainer) I was a nervous wreck even watching the instructor maiden it. It was badly out of trim & shot to the right & almost nosed in on takeoff. I would have surely crashed it had I tried it myself.
When the instructor got it way up & handed control over to me I was still very nervous & the closer I got to the ground my heart started beating & my thumbs start shaking... I would fly inverted dragging the tail in the sim, but I could barely fly flat & level in reality due to nervous thumbs for the first couple flights...

Once you get a few flights under your belt the nervousness goes away, you'll notice that your real plane gets tossed around in the wind quite a bit. Even with heavy wind gusts on the sim it still flies nice and smooth where in reality it's more like a flying pinball at times.

You mentioned the stalls are different and that is very true. In the game the plane has "perfect" flight characteristics and they always tend to stall very cleanly so that you just need to give it a little throttle and your out of trouble. In the real world the very same stall can often times point you straight at the ground and have you carying a garbage bag to go pick up your plane. [:@]
Ground handling is kind of the same way. A buddy of mine had me maiden his PTS for him and there was an ever so slight crosswind. As soon as the tail lifted off the ground the plane weather vaned straight into the wind (sideways to the runway) & I was heading for a grove of trees that I barely missed. yikes!!
It also pretty much spun in a circle every time I landed it.

landings are also way too forgiving in the sim. You will find the landings are a lot more challenging in real life. You can catch a wing & cartwheel, you can smack a touch too hard & you'll be pogo sticking down the runway with chunks of your propeller flying everywhere.

OK, before I make this post any longer... There are differences, but it's still a great tool and will help you progress very quickly in learning to fly. Your doing the right thing by using an instructor and you'll learn the differences yourself real quick.

Tony's response mirrors my experience exactly. I've spent hundreds of hours on the sim ( AFPD and G3) before flying my parkflyer. The sim training help tremendously as you know instinctively which way to move your thumbs to correct the plane's attitude. However for that first flight - your hands are trembling like jello so its quite a handful just keeping your plane flying straight and doing the standard pattern. The nervousness goes away on subsequent flights.

G3 is better than AFPD in that their planes are less forgiving - the Tower Extra, for example, drops a wing abruptly and practicing on this plane helps you stay nimble on the sticks. This has helped quite a bit as I got close to tip stalling my real plane. On G3, you can bump up the wind, shear and turbulence quite a bit - but it still different from the wild conditions I see at the field. If you can help it, wait for a calm day for the first lesson.

Thanks folks - this was enormously helpful. Going in cold turkey and being surprised really didn't sound like fun. I'm hoping I've got my PTS in enough working order to avoid a stupid mechanical disaster on the way up .

Thanks Again!

Chris

Before you take off, keep reminding yourself to fly the plane because once it takes off, you may be so amazed that it flys that it you just stand there and stare at it while it does its thing.

One other word of advice. Make sure your engine is running reliably before you ever try flying. My buddy's PTS wouldn't idle at all and it took a lot of tinkering with the low speed needle to get it running properly before we flew. Nothing worse than a dead stick right after you lift off on the maiden flight.

And don't embarass yourself by looking for the red button on your TX if you nose in your plane

As far as "normal" planes, I found G3 to help most with "training your fingers" type stuff, so you're not intentionally focusing on single items, learnin g to do multiple things simultaneously. When I sterted getting aggressive with my XE2 combatwing, I modified the Slinger for a bit more elevon deflection - helped me a lot. For my warbirds, flying the various G3 warbirds taught me that high angle banks at slow speeds are NOT my friend.

I too learned to fly on the simulator. You will find that once you get over the nervousness, flying the real plane is much like the simulator. Try cranking up the wind and gustiness in G3 for more difficult practice.

Don't forget about the things the sim does not teach .... tuning your engine, frequency control, range checking before a flight, checking control surface movement etc.

You'll be way ahead once you are in the air, but get help with the other things too.

Good luck with your maiden flight!

Carl

I am thinking on the G3, I have hundreds of flying hours. But I want it for 3ding on cold wet days.
We have a dell with pentium 4 3.0 ghz, 1 gb of ram, and 128 mb radeon x 300 vid card.
will this be sufficient for g3 exp pack? I have flown the cap 580 on g3 and it is awesome but i think
they had a better vid card.

3DAP

I have about the same computer set up, and the same video card. It is "adequate" for G3 but not great. I have to turn off clouds, turn down quality of grahics etc. and it runs much better on the photfields than the 3D terrain fields.

Bottom line, you can run G3 but it is not a great video card for this program.

Carl

THANKX FOR INPUT, WHICH CARD SHOULD I BUY AND HOW MUCH?

3DAP

I'd look for an X1600, they're around $100 these days. They're an excellent bargain with plenty of performance without spending money on cutting edge stuff.
I use one in my main system and just ran the demo of G3 without a hiccup, looked great. I'd look at the Asus silent one, which is what I got. No fan, just a BIG heatsink/pipe setup to keep it cool. For serious gamers planning to overclock it isn't a good choice but for out of the box use it's great. It also works quite nicely with 64bit windows systems, which is what I'm running on that system. That's nice for when you upgrade, since it will probably still be an upgrade for a standard 64 bit system.

Remy

Well - I did it. The advice here helped dispel the unknowns well enough to flush out the shakes.
I managed to take-off, fly several orbits around the field and land on my first flight with the instructor. I also practiced snap rolls, barrel rolls and some loops just like what I regularly did in the sim.

Folks were dead-on about the ground handling- and of course the engine tuning exercises.

The pinnacle of the experience was, of course, after the instructor left and I was soloing: the club's president and some other active pilot were sitting back waiting for the inevitable :-). An engine-out situation hit when one of the blades on the 3-bladed prop broke away. I suspect the ensuing vibration separated the firewall and engine mount from the rest of the plane (unless perhaps the sequence of events was the other way around - firewall then prop blade)... It was still viable enough for fleight that I dead sticked the plane into some weeds and light brush. The only real damage was the firewall which was glued back on that evening. I was a little disappointed by the weak glue-job that the hangar 9 folks did on the firewall: I added some reinforcing strips along the seams. The prop _was_ balanced: I had no previous flights on the thing - let alone blade strikes during the previous landings. I'm not sure why a blade would just fly off like that. Any good theories would be appreciated. My leading is that I perhaps over-tightened the prop nut.

Chickenhawk

Don't be disappointed with Hangar9, be unhappy with the mfg of the prop.

It's really not sensible to build an airplane, model or full scale, to strength specifications that would include the forces from such a massively unbalanced prop as you get when the prop sheds a blade.

The fact that you kept your head and got the wreckage down under control is something to be proud of. Excellent job.

HI,

I bought G3 a week ago to practice helicopters. I am already a ( good ) rc airplane pilot and fly regularly at a club field. I think that the sim is quite good at reflecting the different airplanes i tried so far. Anyone flying helicopter can tell me if the sim's helicopter ( got add on 3 to fly raptor 30 ) reflects the real machines and what are the differences ? So far i find it hard to hover with stability. The thing just wants to move around, espacially when it is nose in or sideways in front of me. Those airplanes reflexes are playing tricks on me !

Thank you very much.