I use my DFP wheel for the ailerons, the shifter for the elevators, and the pedals for the rudder. It is alot better then mouse, that's for sure. I haven't successfully landed yet. Although I did fly the 777 upside down.
Er..... you shouldn't do that..... unless you have the add-on FSPassengers (payware). FSPassengers gives you a manifest of passengers, you have to play music for them, feed them, get them safely to their arrivals, and are rated on your flight in the end. Fly them upside down and you hear them in the back screaming!
I love FS9 and more recently FSX, I've been using a free addon called Tileproxy that allows you to stream Textures from google Earth and yahoo etc.. in real time, the results when used with a high resolution mesh can be stunning. I love it. Heres some videos I made.
Intel Duo e4300
ATI x1950 pro
2gb Ballistix 667 memory
The performance when using tileproxy is superb as you don't need the autogen and trees switched on so they're not there bogging the game engine down. It has its down sides though, up close most buildings are flat unless they're main buildings and the trees are flat up close too but the textures do a very good job of maintaining the illusion and you can manually add autogen if you fly the same areas a lot. You also can't use it with jets of fast planes otherwise you get texture lag (blurries) but for VFR you cannot beat this.
I tried FSX demo a while ago, was getting horrible performance and i got the impression that my CPU was bottlenecking. Ive got an X1900XTX, but only an athlon 4000+. I just stick to FS9, but it looks nowhere near like that at all. I was just fascinated with the canary islands though, as i just randomly fly round there randomly, and if i ever take a jet anywhere, its usually to or from tenerife.
Dont let the demo's performance put you off Deko, it's pre sp1.
I'm running FSX with payware VFR on :-
Athlon 2600+
FX5500
512 RAM
Getting consistant 10-20 fps which is easily enough to fly with. Admittedly thats with no weather/traffic etc, and i have to strip winXP down as far as it'll go and still run, so i cant use Tile Proxy, but honestly its worth it There's a software company (whose name i cant quite remember at the mo) has just released a couple of islands in Hawaii and it looks stunning, just like Bramski's vid.
What i'd like to see is Tile Proxy used with MS Virtual Earth, imagine flying over the cities with that 3D photo effect thing it's got !!
So.. are you the kind of guy that went to multiplayer as the first thing and asked ho i move, wich buton i press. And then spam the ATC channel, I'm taking off, yeehaa, ohno, I'm stalling, weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, oh yeah, I crashed.
Well I play YSFlight 2000 and I just jump right in a Concorde or DC-10 or an Airbus A-400M... Not a really realistic flight sim but it's still quite good sinc eit's from a pilot... One-man team YSFlight pwns FSX in this way
Flaps on landing are purely optional and at discretion of the pilot. 0 Flaps landings are always more fun, you come in much lower and much faster, quite exciting really. Flaps are only needed if you want to steepen your decent and maintain a slow airspeed. Nothing is more fun then a good x-wind landing though, especially when you mix in a forward slip with a side-slip and bring it down.
You do go slower but like I said it's at the discretion of the pilot. It depends on how you do the approach and what type of landing you are doing. I'm speaking general aviation side of it, not the heavies.
I rode in a Cessna in 1978ish or so. I was quite young, so I don't really remember it much.
I took my first (and only) commercial flight on September 11, 2002. It was nice being the 1st aniversary of 9/11 because I was one of 3 in the entire airport (KPIT) that day . It is quite cool when you hear the engines throttle up, and that huge hunk of steel catapaults down the runway pushing you back in the seat.