Certified Sim vs. DIY

Okay, weve likely just established that your proficiency needs more than an IPC twice a year. Now, what if you flew those same procedures every month, all the way to real minimums in no guano, Batman, I cant see the runway weather? Do that every month and after a few months youd be much more proficient for that exercise. If you do it in a sim, you dont have to arrange for a safety pilot or an instructor, and you can do it whenever its convenient to your schedule.

Frank Bowlin

Tuesday, September 03, 2019 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

Many pilots struggle to maintain true proficiency, even when legally current, making regular simulator practice essential for sustaining skills beyond periodic IPCs.
Certified simulators, while allowing logged flight time, are typically generic and often cannot replicate a pilot's specific, often customized, aircraft panel, which can limit the effectiveness of proficiency training.
Building a custom simulator allows for precise replication of an aircraft's actual panel configuration, offering highly relevant and effective proficiency training, though it means sacrificing the ability to log flight hours.
The primary trade-off is between logging simulator time (with a generic certified device) and achieving deep, panel-specific proficiency (with a custom-built simulator that cannot log hours).

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Let me start by referring you to my Remarks on page 2 of this issue. To summarize, I thought I had a certified sim coming, but that hasn’t materialized. So, I’ve begun to consider building my own simulator. “But,” you might argue. “You can’t log your time in that so you can’t maintain currency.” You’d be right, but there’s more to the discussion than that.

Do You Need Those Hours?

Let’s dig into the legality-versus-proficiency discussion. Say you fly an older high-performance single, like a Mooney or a Bonanza. You log perhaps 100 or so hours a year. You try to file IFR for most of your flying, but you really don’t get much actual IMC. Chances are you’re neither legal nor proficient six months after your last IPC. You’d like to fix that.