One Student Pilot’s Flight Sim Setup.

Flight simulation can be a great addition to flight training. It’s NOT actual flying, but I can
practice checklists and procedures to try and burn them into my brain. Remember that you can build
bad habits if you keep “drilling” the wrong procedures, so ensure you’re verifying things with your CFI.

PC – Very happy with all the PC gear. I can run the graphics on MSFS in Ultra Mode with 30-40 FPS. It’s
about a year old, so I’m sure newer versions of all of the items below are are available.

Processor Intel Core i9-12900k 12th Gen Alder Lake 16 core 3.2 GHz LGA 1700

Motherboard ASUS ROG Strix Z690-A

Memory Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB DDR43 3200

Video Card GigaByte GeForce RTX 3080

Case Corsair iCue 4000X RGB Mid Tower ATX PC Case

Power Supply Corsair RMX Series, RMX850X

USB Hub Sabrent 60W 10 port USB 3.0 Hub

Monitors – These monitors are 2K. I bought them because 4K monitors were significantly more at the
time, but I don’t miss having 4K. 2K is MORE than enough on MSFS, and less of a strain on the video
card I would assume.

2 – Samsung S60A Series 32-inch WQHD monitor (used on left and right side of display)

1 – Samsung 32” Odyssey G5 Gaming Monitor, curved. (Used in the center)

Flight peripherals

Honeycomb Alpha Flight Yoke Pricy but worth every penny for the feel of the yoke. Switches are
modeled around a C-172 cockpit but can be mapped to any aircraft.
I started with a Turtle Beach Velocity One, but the yoke was “sticky.”
Honeycomb Bravo Throttle Pricey and worth it. It can be configured for a simple GA aircraft or a
Quadrant complex commercial airliner. Has a trim wheel, gear lever, buttons,
and switches.

Logitech Pro Flight Rudder There are better and more expensive options, but in my experience,
Pedals MSFS doesn’t do a great job of modeling adverse yaw or real rudder
 inputs. Until MS fixes that, I won’t invest in better pedals. These are
fine for MSFS

Xtouch Mini Midi Controller A button and dial box that can be mapped to any control that MSFS
offers. I use it to control Garmin equipment in the cockpit
LoupeDeck Live Another very flexible controller with touch screen style buttons and
knobs. I mostly use it to manage views in the cockpit, but I have also
used it to map radios, trim wheels, lights, etc…

Tobii Eye Tracker 5 This thing is amazing! It tracks the motion of my head and moves
the vierw in the cockpit to follow me. It will also track your eye
movement, but I found that my eyes were always chasing what I was
trying to look at, so I turned that feature off.

HP Reverb G2 VR Headset It was cool when I got it, but I lost a sense of realism because I was
fumbling around with my hands, looking for dials and controls on the
equipment listed above the head tracker is much better than this! I
still use this for other games

Software

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 Deluxe Version You can fly anywhere in the world to any airport.
Lots of 3rd party aircraft and add-ons are
available. Amazing graphics and decent flight
modeling.

XPlane 11Simulator Graphics aren’t near as good as MSFS 2020, but I

think the flight modeling is a little better. I picked
this up because the plane I use in real life is
available for it, but not for MSFS.

SPad.Next The magic sauce that lets me map all of those

controllers to functions within MSFS. You can do
some mapping directly with MSFS, but for $30,
you get much more flexibility. There’s a learning
curve on this one, but there’s good community
support.

ForeFlight Subscription Adds to the realism.

Fs2ff A free utility that links MSFS flight data

(essentially ADSB-Out data) to ForeFlight