If you are new to flying, an advanced simulator such as FlightGear can seem daunting: You are presented with a cockpit of an aircraft with little information on how to fly it.
In reality, when learning to fly you would have an instructor sitting next to you to teach you how to fly and keep you safe. While we cannot provide a personal instructor for every virtual pilot, there are a number of tutorials available that you can follow to become a proficient virtual pilot.
FlightGear contains an in-flight tutorial system, where a simulated instructor provides a virtual lesson. These vary between aircraft, from simple tutorials teaching you how to start the engines on the aircraft, to full lessons teaching you how to fly for the first time. To access tutorials, Select Help → Tutorials from the menu and click Start Tutorial.
The tutorial system works particularly well with the Festival TTS (Text To Speech) system (6.7, Text to Speech with Festival).
For simplicity, run tutorials with AI aircraft disabled. Otherwise, ATC (Air Traffic Control) messages may make it difficult to hear your instructor. Via AI → Traffic and Scenario Settings, uncheck option Enable AI traffic.
Each tutorial consists of a number of discrete steps which you must complete. Your instructor will provide instruction on how to complete each step, observe you perform them, and provide you with additional guidance when required.
Within a tutorial, you may request your instructor to repeat any instructions, by tapping + . You may pause the tutorial at any time using the p key. To stop the tutorial, select Stop Tutorial from the Help → Tutorials menu.
If this is your first time flying, a number of tutorials exist for the Cessna 172P designed to teach you the basics of flight, in a similar way to a real flight school.
The tutorials are based around Hilo International Airport (PHTO), Hawaii and Daniel K Inouye International Airport (PHNL), Honolulu, Hawaii. Both these airports are provided in the base package. To start the tutorials, select the Cessna 172P aircraft, and a starting airport of PHTO or PHNL, using the Launcher, or the command line:
fgfs --aircraft=c172p --airport=PHTO
When the simulator has loaded, select Help → Tutorials from the menu. You will then be presented with a list of the available tutorials. Select a tutorial. A description of the tutorial is displayed. Press Start Tutorial to begin.
The following chapters provide FlightGear specific tutorials to take the budding aviator from their first time in an aircraft to flying in the clouds, relying on their instruments for navigation. If you have never flown a small aircraft before, following the tutorials provides an excellent introduction to flight.
Outside of this manual, there is an excellent tutorial written by David Megginson – being one of the main developers of FlightGear – on flying a basic airport circuit specifically using FlightGear. This document includes a lot of screen shots, numerical material etc., and is available from:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070403233149/http://www.flightgear.org:80/Docs/Tutorials/circuit/
There are many non-FlightGear specific tutorials, many of which are applicable. First, a quite comprehensive manual of this type is the Aeronautical Information Manual, published by the FAA, and available at:
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/
This is the Official Guide to Basic Flight Information and ATC Procedures by the FAA. It contains a lot of information on flight rules, flight safety, navigation, and more. If you find this a bit too difficult, you may prefer the FAA Training Book,
http://avstop.com/AC/FlightTraingHandbook/,
which covers all aspects of flight, beginning with the theory of flight and the working of airplanes, via procedures like takeoff and landing up to emergency situations. This is an ideal reading for those who want to learn some basics on flight but don’t want to spend bucks on getting a published pilot handbook.
While the handbook mentioned above is an excellent introduction on VFR (Visual Flight Rules), it does not include flying according to IFR (Instrument Flight Rules). However, an excellent introduction into navigation and flight according to Instrument Flight Rules written by Charles Wood can be found at:
Flight Simulator Navigation (PDF)1.
Another comprehensive but yet readable text is John Denker’s “See how it flies”, available at:
This is a real online text book, beginning with Bernoulli’s principle, drag and power, and the like, with the later chapters covering even advanced aspects of VFR as well as IFR flying.