Simming La Vida Loca

Microsoft Flight Simulator for Pilots: Real World Training
by by Jeff Van West and Kevin Lane-Cummings
Wiley, Paperback, 726 pages

The back cover of this book says, referring to FSX: “it’s the next best thing to being up there”. If that is so, then this book is the next best thing to having two seasoned, good-humoured Certified Flight Instructors by your side, whenever you’re up to it, guiding you and building your confidence all the way through a lazy VFR with the Piper Cub up to becoming an ATP on a Boeing 737.

With everything in between.

I am an avid reader, both of literature and (I confess it) technical manuals. Being experienced in technical writing, I can always find joy in a moderately functional user manual. Therefore, I simply cannot understand how can this book have 726 pages and not a single superfluous one; it’s just not possible. There’s always fat in any book! There should be boring tables, diagrams, statistics to be safely skipped! Not on this one, there aren’t. It’s miraculous from an editorial point of view. Skip one single page at the risk of missing an important caveat, hint, real-world procedure, tip, enlightening anecdote, eye-opening concept, adage, and more. As an example, trying to dispel many doubts I have spent literally months requesting aviation books from the library and browsing the web for the elusive knowledge. The first two hours with this book have taken care of that. I doubt no longer.

The style is always playful, but never clownish. These fellows don’t have time nor ink to waste, they are attempting to take you all the way from your armchair up to the ‘pit of a heavy metal bird, trying to squeeze in every ounce of aviation lore you could ever need. In fact, they have so much material to offer that it wouldn’t fit in the printed version! You download TWO more chapters and FIVE appendixes from their website, and many other components: charts, videos, situations… And whenever they feel the subject is worthy of further investigation (let us be honest, you cannot possibly offer everything there is to know about aviation in a single book, or can you?) they will happily offer directions to external resources, be them online or in print.

Should you own FSX in order to read this book? Not at all. You will benefit all the same whether you run FSX, FS9, X-Plane, or even if you don’t own a simulator, because the beauty of this book is such that it doesn’t read like a technical book. More like a page-turner from Tom Clancy, or a Harry Potter. The fact that you understand so easily propels you into ravenously finding what will come next. In fact, you’ll have to exert some self-discipline and practice what the lessons command before you move on in haste. I am now itching to reach chunky chapters called “IFR Flight”, “Instrument Approaches”, “GPS Approaches” and “Additional Instrument Approaches”. Who wouldn’t?

If you are into flight simulation because you have the urge to really, really learn to do it as close as real aviation as you can, then let me tell you, it’s Christmas for you and me, friend! I keep this book on visual at all times, as it’s destined to become a classic, THE book to read about serious flight-simulation with vistas to real aviation. $30 US for a kilo of 24-carat GOLD?