With a wonderful sim setup at home, my friend is working on his instrument rating. Unfortunately, he doesn’t use it that often—maybe a few hours a month if he’s lucky. The reason? He claims it takes him a little under an hour, maybe more, before he gets to fly it. He must turn on his computer, check the weather, plan a flight, preflight the plane, sump fuel, do all the checklists … you get the idea.
The problem here is he’s trying to fly instead of sim. He’s treating the sim as if it were his real plane, which it clearly isn’t. I see this a lot, particularly with real pilots just starting out their instrument training or non-pilot simmers trying to feel like real pilots.
