Prospective new user with a bunch of questions
Posted: Sat Mar 17, 2018 4:03 am
Hello PE community,
This might be a slightly long post, but like the title says, I'm considering joining this network and currently deciding if I'm ready for it or not, and I had a bunch of questions I thought I could get clarified from you guys here
Background: Been in love with aviation since 5. I have absolute zero real world flying experience, would be joining an airline cadet pilot program in a few months time. Was introduced to flight simulators at age 14 by a friend and started off as the "default FSX 747 barrel roll kid", you know what I mean. Fast forward 6 years, I've come a long way getting serious about the entire thing. Been flying all sorts of tubeliners and turboprops on VATSIM for two years now, with okay enough skills to pretty much be able to do everything on that network. It's been a while since I've been doing the same things essentially to the point that it is not feeling challenging enough. Yes there was some learning curve to start with but after a while, you realize it's FMC and your planning software doing most of the things for you, along with VATSIM's other limitations like people spawning on runways, limited ATC availability outside of busy hours and airports, almost 2nd-class citizen treatment of VFR traffic by ATC. The lack of challenge has started to bore me now.
Some time back I bought the A2A C182 in a sale and I thought I'll go VFR and that is when it struck me that even though I can easily fly complex aircraft between city pairs, I did not know anything about VFR flights and I could barely do anything without a GPS. I also realized my instrument skills are not particularly good without electronic glass displays. I thought I'll learn about this and I came across pilotedge workshops on youtube. I went through all the VFR ones (planning to go through IFR ones in some time), and I learned a lot from it. I've turned GPS off from my GA planes now. I tried replicating those VFR flights on VATSIM but again it was not challenging enough as most of the time I was speaking to LAX_CTR for everything and it did not feel all that "realistic", if you may.
This is when I started exploring pilotedge last week, and from what I see it seems to have a lot of people with actual PPL and flying experiences. I'm a little nervous about joining this network as I'm still learning VFR basics and I don't know yet how well some "VFR rookie" errors that I might make would be received by ATC and pilots flying here, and maybe you guys can let me know more about this, and if this is the right place for me to come and learn. I do not plan to use a GPS as I've noticed I end up depending too much on it, and plan to hit the CAT ratings program first.
For my preparation, I've set up my P3D with ORBX Southern California scenery (I'm only interested in ZLA at the moment to start with). Is there anything else I can do for this?
From what I understand, you can run your own weather for PilotEdge. Does this not cause issues if two guys are running different weather conditions, when they want to land at an airport coming in from different directions on the same runway? Or the ATC assigning me a runway with high tailwinds for my weather?
Also I went through some FAA VFR Navigation material earlier this week and it mentioned about accounting for wind deviation enroute with some calculations using an E6B flight computer. I do not have an E6B and I don't know how to use one either, how do I go about my flight planning? Do I just ignore the compass and wind deviations?
Thanks and I hope to look forward to see you guys on the network when I'm ready for it.
This might be a slightly long post, but like the title says, I'm considering joining this network and currently deciding if I'm ready for it or not, and I had a bunch of questions I thought I could get clarified from you guys here
Background: Been in love with aviation since 5. I have absolute zero real world flying experience, would be joining an airline cadet pilot program in a few months time. Was introduced to flight simulators at age 14 by a friend and started off as the "default FSX 747 barrel roll kid", you know what I mean. Fast forward 6 years, I've come a long way getting serious about the entire thing. Been flying all sorts of tubeliners and turboprops on VATSIM for two years now, with okay enough skills to pretty much be able to do everything on that network. It's been a while since I've been doing the same things essentially to the point that it is not feeling challenging enough. Yes there was some learning curve to start with but after a while, you realize it's FMC and your planning software doing most of the things for you, along with VATSIM's other limitations like people spawning on runways, limited ATC availability outside of busy hours and airports, almost 2nd-class citizen treatment of VFR traffic by ATC. The lack of challenge has started to bore me now.
Some time back I bought the A2A C182 in a sale and I thought I'll go VFR and that is when it struck me that even though I can easily fly complex aircraft between city pairs, I did not know anything about VFR flights and I could barely do anything without a GPS. I also realized my instrument skills are not particularly good without electronic glass displays. I thought I'll learn about this and I came across pilotedge workshops on youtube. I went through all the VFR ones (planning to go through IFR ones in some time), and I learned a lot from it. I've turned GPS off from my GA planes now. I tried replicating those VFR flights on VATSIM but again it was not challenging enough as most of the time I was speaking to LAX_CTR for everything and it did not feel all that "realistic", if you may.
This is when I started exploring pilotedge last week, and from what I see it seems to have a lot of people with actual PPL and flying experiences. I'm a little nervous about joining this network as I'm still learning VFR basics and I don't know yet how well some "VFR rookie" errors that I might make would be received by ATC and pilots flying here, and maybe you guys can let me know more about this, and if this is the right place for me to come and learn. I do not plan to use a GPS as I've noticed I end up depending too much on it, and plan to hit the CAT ratings program first.
For my preparation, I've set up my P3D with ORBX Southern California scenery (I'm only interested in ZLA at the moment to start with). Is there anything else I can do for this?
From what I understand, you can run your own weather for PilotEdge. Does this not cause issues if two guys are running different weather conditions, when they want to land at an airport coming in from different directions on the same runway? Or the ATC assigning me a runway with high tailwinds for my weather?
Also I went through some FAA VFR Navigation material earlier this week and it mentioned about accounting for wind deviation enroute with some calculations using an E6B flight computer. I do not have an E6B and I don't know how to use one either, how do I go about my flight planning? Do I just ignore the compass and wind deviations?
Thanks and I hope to look forward to see you guys on the network when I'm ready for it.